Wtitten By Emilia Salvanou (Hellenic Open University)

1. Introduction

In 2023–2024 mass protests erupted across Europe and North America not in the name of humanitarian neutrality, but in direct opposition to what thousands of demonstrators called a genocidal war waged by the Israeli state against Palestinians in Gaza.¹ The brutality of the images—hospitals bombed, families buried alive, bodies retrieved from rubble, and a relentlessly rising death toll—shattered long-standing taboos around how the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could be named, narrated, and historicized. At the same time, the charge of antisemitism re-emerged as a powerful instrument for disciplining this emergent discourse.² In the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, accusations of antisemitism have been increasingly deployed to delegitimize and suppress opposition to Israeli state violence. While antisemitism is a real and ongoing threat that demands attention, the current moment reveals a strategic instrumentalization of the term that transforms it from a category of historical and ethical urgency into a tool of silencing and disarticulation. Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe lies a deeper struggle: not just over competing narratives, but over the very politics of grief—over whose deaths are grievable, whose pain is legible, and whose history can be invoked in the present.³

Rather than seeking a diagnostic of antisemitism per se, I interrogate memory as a political form—both as a regime that disciplines public speech and as a site of contestation through which the ethics of grief may be reimagined. The essay asks what forms of memory and political responsibility are foreclosed when the accusation of antisemitism is deployed to silence critique of Israel’s war in Gaza. How did we arrive at a point where Jewish identity is conflated with state violence, and mourning Palestinian lives is cast as suspect—or even as hate speech? Can we imagine a reconfiguration of historical memory that does not pit the trauma of one people against the suffering of another?⁴

In the current situation we find ourselves not in front of an absence of memory, but rather in front of the formation of a certain kind of memory—what I propose to call a memory-shell: a hard, sealed structure that preserves traces of past suffering while rendering them politically intransigent and epistemically non-negotiable. Drawing on recent historical debates, memory studies, and social movement theory, this essay proposes to treat memory not as a container of facts, but as a shell—a political form that both preserves and protects, hardens and hollows, shaping what can be said, felt, and remembered in public space. Through this lens, I suggest that European discourse around antisemitism is not simply about historical truth or falsehood, but about managing moral authority in a time of colonial reckoning.

2. From “Never Again” to “Again and Again”: The Rhetorical Capture of Holocaust Memory

While Holocaust memory has served as a pillar of European post-war ethics, it has also, from the beginning, been marked by exclusions—chiefly, the exclusion of Europe’s own colonial crimes. Scholars such as Michael Rothberg and Enzo Traverso have argued that the promise “Never Again” has always been unstable. The transformation of Holocaust memory into a kind of civil religion of the West has often come at the expense of other histories of violence—particularly those that Europe itself perpetrated through colonial conquest, racial domination, and imperial war.⁵ As Peter Novick has argued, the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in the United States was not a continuous act of mourning, but a historically contingent process shaped by Cold War politics, American exceptionalism, and shifting geostrategic interests.⁶ In this sense, Holocaust memory became not only a site of moral instruction but also a symbolic resource—one increasingly detached from the material history of Jewish suffering and repurposed to frame Western identity as morally redemptive.⁷ The result has been what Levy and Sznaider call “cosmopolitan memory,” a moral lingua franca that can universalize particular trauma while eliding others.⁸ Building on such insights, Gil Z. Hochberg’s scholarship further illuminates how memory operates not only as a repository of past suffering but also as an active site of political contestation and embodied resistance in contexts of settler colonialism. Hochberg’s analysis foregrounds the lived experience of trauma and the ways in which Palestinian memory challenges dominant narratives that seek to contain or delegitimize their claims to justice.⁹

This tension is not new, but in recent years it has deepened. As the realities of Palestinian displacement, occupation, and death have become more visible—especially through digital media and transnational activism—new generations shaped by intersectional politics and postcolonial critique have begun to challenge the monopoly of Holocaust memory as the sole or supreme site of moral authority. Within this shifting field, Holocaust memory has in many official and public discourses been recast not as a warning against the dangers of state violence per se, but as a symbolic shield for a particular state—Israel—even when that state engages in what many describe as apartheid or colonial war.¹⁰

This rhetorical shift has deep implications. As Enzo Traverso has shown, the exceptionalization of the Holocaust risks producing a form of moral insulation: a past that is so singular it cannot illuminate present forms of domination.¹¹ This “de-historicized memory,” he argues, cuts the Holocaust off from other histories of political violence and thereby weakens its critical power. Similarly, Israeli philosopher Yehuda Elkana warned as early as 1988 that the obsessive institutionalization of Holocaust memory in Israel—and by extension in the West—risked turning a collective trauma into a permanent lens of victimhood, rendering others’ suffering invisible and undermining the process of building a peaceful future.¹²

The point is not to diminish the significance of the Holocaust or to relativize its horror. On the contrary: to preserve its ethical force, we must resist its rhetorical capture. When “Never Again” is invoked to shield acts of ethnic cleansing, occupation, or military terror from critique, it becomes a reversal of its own moral intention. As Rothberg argues in Multidirectional Memory, the memory of different traumas does not inherently compete; they become rivals only within political structures that impose a zero-sum logic. In the case of Gaza, this logic has become brutally evident: expressions of solidarity with Palestinians are framed as denials of Jewish suffering, while Jewish grief is selectively mobilized to legitimize violence against a stateless people.

This logic is not without precedent. Already in 1955, Aimé Césaire warned that European humanism had turned inward against itself. In Discourse on Colonialism, he argued that the crimes of fascism were not an aberration but the return of colonial violence to the metropole—what had been rehearsed abroad now enacted at home.¹³ Today, the colonial scaffolding of Holocaust memory in European discourse risks producing a similar effect: a historical rupture instrumentalized to disavow present forms of racialized domination, even as the language of anti-fascism is invoked to justify them.

In addition to the voices analyzed above, it is crucial to acknowledge Palestinian intellectuals such as Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, who have long emphasized the ethical imperative to remember trauma in ways that challenge dominant narratives and foster a politics of responsibility. Said’s reflections on exile and the role of the intellectual exemplify a memory that is at once disruptive and dialogical. In Representations of the Intellectual and elsewhere, he insists that the task of the intellectual is not to consolidate consensus but to “speak truth to power”—to inhabit a position of principled disobedience, even (or especially) when it entails marginality or estrangement. For Said, exile is not only a physical condition but an epistemological stance: to remember, from exile, is to contest the authorized versions of history and to reinsert the silenced, the excluded, and the ungrievable into the historical record. Memory here becomes a political force: it interrupts, unsettles, and demands reparation. It is not a duty to the past alone but a responsibility toward the future.¹⁴

Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and prose evoke the pain of loss and the disarticulation of homeland—but not as a static lament. Rather, his work affirms the necessity of bearing witness across boundaries of nation, confession, or language. In his hands, memory is both elegiac and insurgent: it recovers fragments of a shattered world not to restore them intact, but to expose the violence of their destruction and to imagine new forms of collective life. His verse performs the impossible simultaneity of love and rage, intimacy and defiance, absence and presence. As such, it marks a refusal to let historical trauma be domesticated by abstract humanism or geopolitical cynicism. Instead, it situates Palestinian grief within a broader, decolonial poetics of survival and historical reckoning. Darwish’s poetry resists the teleological loop of trauma that locks the subject into binary positions of either perpetrator or victim. As Ella Shohat observes, Darwish “provincializes” the Holocaust not by denying its magnitude, but by returning it to a historical and political terrain—a terrain marked by colonial displacements, Mediterranean crossings, and shared griefs. In this way, he breaks the singularity of Holocaust memory as the limit-case of suffering and repositions it within a relational field of loss.¹⁵

In State of Siege, written during the Israeli siege of Ramallah in 2002, Darwish writes:

“We do what prisoners do, // what the unemployed do: // we cultivate hope.”

Here, hope is not redemptive; it is neither messianic nor compensatory. It is a minor practice, a labor of dailiness that works against the suspended temporality of siege and trauma. As Ariella Azoulay and Gil Hochberg have argued, this kind of aesthetic labor—particularly in Palestinian poetics—reclaims futurity not as promise, but as unfinished inheritance: a way of inhabiting memory without enclosing it.¹⁶

Together, Said and Darwish articulate a form of memory that is unhomed yet generative, one that confronts power without mirroring its exclusions. Their interventions push us to imagine a politics of grief and recognition that is capacious enough to hold multiple histories of violence, without flattening their specificities or reinscribing new hierarchies of suffering.¹⁷ Against the backdrop of a Western memory regime that often instrumentalizes the Holocaust as a civil religion while obscuring the colonial and imperial violences in which Europe remains complicit, their work insists on the right to narrate and the imperative to remember otherwise. 

Alongside these perspectives, diasporic Jewish activist groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow, and the former Not In Our Name offer a critical intervention into the politics of Holocaust memory. Refusing the instrumentalization of Jewish suffering to justify the oppression of others, they reclaim a Jewish ethical tradition rooted in justice, solidarity, and anti-colonial resistance.¹⁸ Their actions and writings challenge both the ethno-nationalist appropriation of the Shoah and the silencing of Palestinian grief, asserting instead a memory that is relational and emancipatory. By organizing protests, issuing public statements, and engaging in civil disobedience—often at great personal and communal cost—these groups articulate a diasporic Jewishness not defined by state power or military force but by historical conscience and political refusal. In their hands, Holocaust memory becomes not a license for exceptionalism but a moral and historical imperative to stand against apartheid, occupation, and genocide in all their forms. Recent interventions—such as the mass protest at the U.S. Capitol on October 18, 2023,¹⁹ and the disruption of Grand Central Terminal in New York on October 27, 2023,²⁰ demonstrate how these activists seek to reclaim Jewish memory as a tool of decolonial solidarity. This refusal to be confined within the dominant “memory-shell” enables a different temporality and ethics: one in which Jewish and Palestinian histories of dispossession need not be mutually exclusive, but can become the basis for shared mourning and collective responsibility. Their activism thus disrupts hegemonic memory regimes and gestures toward a horizon of justice where grief is unbounded by ethnic, national, or religious divisions. The interventions examined above—Palestinian, diasporic Jewish, and decolonial—challenge this closure and reopen the possibility of a memory otherwise: one that is committed to justice, multiplicity, and shared vulnerability.²¹

3. Memory-Shells and the Floating Signifier: A Theoretical Framing

In this sense, the appropriation of Holocaust memory as a hegemonic moral grammar—mobilized to justify ongoing colonial violence while silencing other histories of grief—illustrates how memory regimes operate through exclusion as much as through commemoration. Rather than serving as a space of ethical confrontation, Holocaust memory increasingly functions as a memory shell. In what follows, I propose the concept of the memory-shell as a heuristic device to understand the transformation of memory from a site of historical and affective disturbance into a hardened vessel of moral authority. The memory shell should be understood as a political form that preserves the outer layer of historical trauma while hollowing out its disruptive, universalist potential. The notion refers to a dynamic formation in which memory does not function as a straightforward recollection of the past but as a flexible container for resemanticization. It is neither true nor false; rather, it is contingent — open to reactivation, ideological reframing, and symbolic contestation depending on the political conjuncture and the struggle for moral authority. As such, memory is not merely selective; it is actively negotiated and often antagonistic. A memory-shell preserves the symbolic imprint of past trauma while increasingly detaching it from the contexts that made it politically and ethically disruptive. In this sense, memory-shells resemble sealed containers: they protect, encapsulate, and abstract memory from lived histories and struggles, thus regulating what can be said, grieved, or imagined in public discourse.

The concept draws on Ernesto Laclau’s notion of the floating signifier, a signifier emptied of fixed meaning that becomes hegemonically rearticulated within different political contexts.²² In other words, a term that condenses historical trauma into a point of moral certainty, while allowing it to be rearticulated across divergent political projects. Like the floating signifier, the memory-shell is not bound to one content but gains force precisely through its ambiguity and moral overdetermination. We may approach shell-memory as a nodal point emptied of fixed referent but capable of being invested with divergent political meanings. It can stand for “never again,” for trauma, for justice, or for exceptionalism—depending on who invokes it, and when. Like “democracy” or “freedom,” memory — and particularly Holocaust memory — can be appropriated across ideological divides, charged with contradictory emotions, and mobilized for competing claims to victimhood. In this sense, the memory of the Holocaust has become a site of articulation, simultaneously enabling resistance to injustice and functioning as a tool for discrediting criticism of Israeli state violence. This is not a symptom of forgetting. On the contrary – memories that turn into memory shells are usually those that are so securely embedded in historical culture and identity, that is impossible to bypass. Therefore, resignification and even contestation is rather a symptom of political appropriation: memory as a vessel for hegemonic realignment. Memory shells are, in this sense, not merely a mode of historical recall but a technique of governance, echoing Michel Foucault’s insight that regimes of truth function through what is rendered sayable, thinkable, and grievable.²³ Memory here becomes a terrain of political struggle: a contested medium through which hierarchies are encoded, disrupted, or suppressed. 

Yet the memory-shell does not merely float; it shields. It becomes an ethical armor that protects hegemonic narratives while repelling interpretations that might link past and present forms of violence. Shell-memory thus reveals memory as a terrain of contestation rather than a stable referent. This is particularly evident in the case of Holocaust memory in the post-1945 West, which has undergone a transformation from traumatic rupture to moral consensus. The memory of Auschwitz, once disruptive and historically embedded, now circulates as a normative grammar of recognition and punishment, deployed to name and shame certain actors while exonerating others. Such deployments, while not new, have intensified in the wake of global protest against the genocide in Gaza. In the case of Gaza, the struggle for remembrance is not simply historiographical or humanitarian; it is a battle over who can legitimately invoke trauma, define victimhood, and occupy the moral register of History. The very act of linking Gaza to Auschwitz becomes unspeakable—not because of historical inaccuracy, but because the memory shell has become performative, disciplinary, and sacrosanct. What is at stake, then, is not the truth-value of memory, but its instrumental function: to govern grief, regulate dissent, and secure geopolitical alliances.

As Donatella della Porta argues, memory is never politically neutral. In moments of political contestation, memories of past violence can become central to the framing strategies of both protest movements and hegemonic actors. Memory does not merely recall the past; it reconfigures the present by legitimizing certain claims and delegitimizing others. In her work on social movements and contentious politics, she highlights how symbolic references to historical traumas—whether of war, fascism, or genocide—are mobilized to shape collective identities and to justify political action or repression.²⁴ The memory shell, then, is not only a metaphor for historical closure, but also a political instrument—a site where affect, legitimacy, and power intersect. 

In the current conjuncture, the sacralization of Holocaust memory often serves not to expand the democratic horizon of solidarity, but to shield specific state actors from critique, transforming memory into a disciplinary tool that regulates the limits of political imagination. Affectively, memory shells operate as technologies of emotional capture. They command reverence and impose silence; they channel sorrow into specific, allowable directions. This memory shell enshrines the Holocaust. But it does so by detaching it from the plural and contested terrains of historical remembrance and by repositioning it within a moral grammar that demands loyalty, not inquiry. Here, memory becomes a surface rather than a depth—a performative invocation rather than a space for reflexive engagement. As such, the memory of the Holocaust is reified: placed behind a transparent barrier through which it can be seen, reverently cited, but not recontextualized. In this context, “antisemitism” is increasingly unmoored from the specific genealogies of hate, exclusion, and extermination that gave rise to it, and becomes instead a floating moral charge: one that can be affixed to anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinian activists, human rights NGOs, and even ceasefire protesters.

The functionalization of antisemitism as a mode of accusation has a long genealogy, but it has intensified in the wake of 7 October 2023. In the months that followed, institutions across Europe and North America adopted punitive measures against individuals and groups opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza. Humanitarian workers were suspended or investigated for public expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. University presidents in the United States were summoned to Congressional hearings and forced to resign under the pressure of donor campaigns and orchestrated outrage. Protesters in cities from Berlin to Paris to London faced bans, arrests, or police violence, justified by the claim that any public dissent against the war amounted to an incitement to hatred or a threat to Jewish safety.²⁵ In such cases, the invocation of antisemitism operates not as a means of protecting Jewish communities, but as a mechanism of anticipatory repression—a form of delegitimization of actors, practices, and narratives before they can generate political traction.²⁶ Memory, in this schema, becomes the moral substrate for a new regime of securitized speech. One must not only avoid antisemitism; one must not appear to contest the state’s definition of what antisemitism is. 

4. Definitions and the Politics of Memory

This process is most evident in the strategic adoption and dissemination of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism, which blurs the line between anti-Jewish hatred and criticism of the Israeli state.²⁷ By contrast, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, authored by a group of Jewish scholars and public intellectuals, insists on the distinction between antisemitism as a form of racialized hatred and legitimate critique of Zionism or Israeli policies.²⁸ Yet in the institutional field, it is the IHRA definition that has prevailed—endorsed by governments, universities, and cultural organizations across the West, often as a condition for funding or partnership. Here, the memory-shell operates as a shield and a filter: it shields a particular narrative of Jewish victimhood from scrutiny and filters out alternative forms of remembrance—especially those that foreground Palestinian dispossession as part of the same historical arc. The memory-shell does not deny the Holocaust; it monopolizes its meaning. It demands that Holocaust memory serve as the ground for identification with Israeli state violence and casts any deviation from this moral script as a betrayal of Jewish suffering itself. As Sara Ahmed has argued, emotions are not private states but forms of contact and orientation: they stick to certain bodies and histories more than others. The memory shell ensures that grief over Jewish loss remains politically permissible, even compulsory, while grief over Palestinian death becomes suspect, antisemitic, or uncivil. This is not a failure of memory, but a political use of memory as moral governance. 

This logic of exclusive mourning produces a condition I describe as a memory impasse: a blockage in the field of public memory, where the imperative to remember is transformed into a prohibition on historical analogies. One cannot remember the Nakba alongside the Shoah. One cannot recall Gaza’s destruction in the same breath as Auschwitz. One cannot draw the analogies between antisemitism of the past and islamophobia of the present. The charge of antisemitism thus becomes not only a political weapon, but also an epistemic veto: it forbids certain associations, disqualifies certain comparisons, and discredits alternative genealogies of violence and resistance.²⁹ What is at stake here is not only the distortion of a term, but the foreclosure of a political horizon. The memory shell is not simply an inert object; it is a technology of governance. It shapes what can be said, who can speak, and which memories are allowed to co-exist in public discourse. It organizes affect, affiliation, and recognition. It institutes a hierarchy of grief—where some lives are legible as victims and others are not.³⁰ Thus, the memory-shell functions not merely as rhetorical armor, but as a form of mnemonic power—shaping not only discourse but the affective contours of grief itself.³¹

5. Toward a Decolonized Memory

The current regime of Holocaust memory, while deeply entrenched in Western political and cultural institutions, remains profoundly unstable. As with all hegemonic formations, it is continually contested from within and without, by diverse actors including Jewish and Palestinian intellectuals, activists, artists, and survivors. These contestations do not advocate for the rejection of Holocaust memory itself, but rather call for its decolonization—a reconfiguration that acknowledges Jewish historical suffering while simultaneously opening space for solidarities that refuse to erase or marginalize other histories of violence and dispossession. In the sense Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o articulated, decolonization entails not simply political realignment but a radical transformation of the epistemic and representational order—a refusal to let dominant narratives foreclose the complexity of human suffering.³²

Decolonizing memory means disrupting the monolithic narratives that function as what I have termed the “memory-shell”—a protective and restrictive framework that preserves a singular understanding of trauma, while foreclosing alternative or conflicting memories. This memory-shell often operates to shield a particular political agenda, conflating Jewish victimhood with uncritical support for the Israeli state, and thus excluding Palestinian experiences of displacement and ongoing violence from the collective mnemonic landscape.

In this context, we must imagine forms of memory that are porous, dissonant, and dialogical—memories that resist closure and instead keep the past open as a contested site of ethical struggle and political connection. Such memories defy attempts at monopolization or instrumentalization and refuse to allow trauma to become the exclusive property of any state or political entity.³³ A radical, decolonial ethics of memory must not only open to the possibility of plural and conflictual histories; it must refuse the confiscation of mourning, the closure of the past, and the foreclosure of the present. This gesture resonates with Ariella Azoulay’s call to treat the archive not as a repository of state-sanctioned facts, but as a site of violence, exclusion, and imperial governance. In her account, the logic of imperialism does not only destroy lives and lands—it destroys the very conditions of co-seeing and co-witnessing. Against this regime, Azoulay proposes a radical civil contract of photography and memory, one that decenters the sovereign gaze and instead reclaims the right to narrate, to mourn, and to remember without prior authorization. In this sense, a decolonial ethics of memory requires not only a critique of mnemonic violence but an insurgent stance toward the monopolization of memory, archival closure, and historical legitimization. This vision draws on decolonial thought, which insists on the necessity of unsettling hegemonic narratives and restoring multiplicity and relationality in historical consciousness.³⁴

To decolonize memory is not to deny or diminish the Holocaust’s significance but to reclaim its ethical force—its capacity to unsettle settled narratives, to challenge complicity, and to demand ongoing responsibility and justice. Memory might as well function as a rupture: a deliberate break in the circuits of power that govern public discourse, opening space for solidarity across difference and for political horizons beyond exclusion and erasure.³⁵ Such a reframing also aligns with Edward Said’s call for the intellectual to embrace a memory that resists closure and demands critical engagement beyond nationalist or sectarian frameworks.³⁶ Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic work exemplifies the necessity of bearing witness to multiple, intersecting histories of loss and displacement. In this way, decolonized memory becomes a transformative practice: one that reconfigures affect, recognition, and belonging in ways that resist closure and demand accountability.

6. Mourning, Solidarity, and the Ethical Risk of Historical Comparison

In the face of institutional repression and widespread political censorship, recent mass mobilizations across Europe and beyond have articulated new forms of political mourning. Led by coalitions of Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Black and brown communities, and younger generations of activists, these movements reject the binary logic of competing victimhoods and insist instead on entangled solidarities: a right to remember without erasure, and to grieve without state sanction.³⁷ This emerging counter-memory does not signify an erosion of Holocaust remembrance but rather a radical refusal to prioritize past trauma over present atrocity. To affirm that Palestinian life matters, to name apartheid or to mourn children killed in their beds is not antisemitic. What becomes antisemitic, however, is the conflation of all Jews with the actions of a state, instrumentalizing Jewish identity to shield state violence from accountability. This moment demands a reimagined Jewish voice—one that breaks with ethno-nationalist paradigms and reclaims diasporic, anti-colonial, and ethical traditions within Judaism.³⁸ Jewish scholars, artists, and activists have been among the most vocal critics of Israeli policies, not despite their Jewishness but precisely because of it.³⁹ To silence these voices under the guise of combating antisemitism risks erasing the very dissent crucial for a pluralistic political discourse.⁴⁰

In this context, mourning transcends affective expression to become a radical political act: a refusal to permit the state to monopolize death or history, and a form of remembering against the grain, across time, and through rupture. Where the memory-shell erects barriers around the past, preserving moral certainties, mourning fractures this enclosure, demanding that memory remain porous, responsive, and accountable. Far from being antithetical to politics, mourning becomes its very condition, transforming memory from weapon to threshold of justice.⁴¹

Yet mourning also opens the terrain of political risk, particularly the risk of historical comparison. The invocation of genocidal analogies in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza has sparked heated debate, with some perceiving such comparisons as a transgression against the singularity of the Holocaust and a moral affront to Jewish suffering. Others assert that naming the systematic targeting of civilian populations as genocide is not only justifiable but ethically necessary.⁴² The legal challenges brought before international bodies like the International Court of Justice have foregrounded the Genocide Convention as a critical framework for adjudicating contemporary crises.⁴³

Beyond juridical proceedings, the question remains epistemological and political: Are historical analogies inherently dangerous, or can they function as tools of ethical reckoning? Must the past be policed to safeguard singular traumas from appropriation, or can comparison open pathways for solidarity and critical reflection? Against the hegemonic logic of exceptionalism, comparison need not imply a flattening or erasure of difference; rather, it can serve as an ethical disruption that destabilizes hierarchies of suffering and exposes structural continuities of violence.⁴⁴ Thus, comparison can be a pedagogical and political act—not to equate atrocities but to reveal dangerous resonances that demand attention. To prohibit comparison is effectively to foreclose history as a contested and dynamic field. It treats memory as fixed and sacralized rather than as a site of ongoing negotiation and political struggle. For societies to confront contemporary crises without replicating past exclusions, they must permit historical analogies to circulate—not as incontestable truths but as critical provocations to be debated, contextualized, and when necessary, contested.⁴⁵ Criminalizing such discourse risks stifling political agency and ethical reflection.

In sum, the politics of memory today extends beyond what is remembered to encompass who is allowed to remember, under which conditions, and within what geopolitical and moral frameworks. It has turned into a truth regime. The concept of the memory shell exposes the instability and contestation inherent in memory as a field of signification and power. Recognizing this contingency does not imply relativism but calls for a responsible, situated, and politically engaged memory—one attuned to asymmetries of violence and receptive to emerging forms of suffering and injustice. At a historical moment when the genocide in Gaza is silenced beneath rhetoric of security and historical exceptionalism, insisting on a heterogeneous, critical, and emancipatory memory becomes not only an act of solidarity but one of historical justice.

This emergent politics of mourning and solidarity not only challenges dominant narratives of victimhood but also exposes the underlying structures of power that govern memory itself. The contemporary politics of memory thus encompasses not only the content of remembrance but also the power to define who may remember, under which terms, and within what geopolitical and moral frameworks. The recent genocidal violence in Gaza exposes the limits of Holocaust memory as a politically neutral foundation of Western moral order; instead, it necessitates a critical interrogation of memory as a contested and politicized instrument of power. 

Memory is inherently dynamic and pluralistic, a contested field where divergent narratives and claims to historical truth are negotiated, among others taking into account the political stakes of representation. The concept of “memory shell” captures this ambivalence: memory functions as a protective yet constraining form that preserves the outer shell of trauma while frequently neutralizing its disruptive ethical potential. Acknowledging this complexity is essential for advancing a more responsible, situated, and politically engaged memory—one attentive to structural asymmetries of violence and receptive to emerging forms of injustice. 

Historical comparisons, particularly analogies invoking genocide, remain among the most divisive and fraught dimensions of this politics. While many see such comparisons as a threat to the Holocaust’s uniqueness and a moral affront to Jewish suffering,⁴⁶ others argue that naming contemporary atrocities—such as the systematic violence against Palestinians—as genocide is both justified and ethically imperative.⁴⁷ These debates extend beyond public discourse into legal arenas, with international tribunals and courts grappling with the application of the Genocide Convention.⁴⁸ Yet the core question is epistemological and political: are comparisons inherently reductive and dangerous, or can they function as critical tools for ethical disruption and pedagogical engagement?⁴⁹

The prohibition of comparison risks freezing history into a sacralized and immutable domain, disconnected from present struggles. Conversely, ethical comparison can destabilize hierarchies of suffering, reveal the structural continuities of violence, and foster solidarities across social and political divides. As Enzo Traverso and Dirk Moses, among others, compellingly argue, the Holocaust’s significance lies not in its unique exceptionality but in its illumination of modernity’s violent rationalities.⁵⁰ In this frame, comparison serves not to equate atrocities but to provoke reflection, political responsibility, and a critical reconsideration of power.

This theoretical framework resonates with the emergence of counter-memories articulated by diverse coalitions who reject binary victimhood and the monopolization of suffering. Their political mourning demands the right to remember without erasure and to grieve without state sanction, challenging the instrumentalization of identity to shield violence. Mourning thus becomes a radical political act that ruptures the “memory shell,” opening memory to ethical porosity, responsiveness, and justice. In a moment when the genocide in Gaza is obscured by discourses of security and exceptionalism, advocating for a heterogeneous, critical, and emancipatory memory constitutes both an act of solidarity and a demand for historical justice.

Author Bio:

Emilia Salvanou is a historian working at the intersection of social and cultural history, with particular attention to migration, refugee movements, and historical culture. She currently teaches public history at the Hellenic Open University. Her research explores how cultural memory, historiography, and public debates about the past shape historical consciousness in the present. Email: emilia.salvanou@gmail.com

Published on July 17, 2025. 

SOURCE: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2025/07/15/haunted-pasts-and-the-politics-of-grief-memory-shells-and-the-struggle-for-ethical-grief-after-gaza/

Footnotes:

1. The term ‘genocidal’ is used here not as a legal determination but as a political charge articulated by numerous civil society organizations, scholars, and activists in reference to the scale, intent, and continuity of the assault on Gaza. See UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ (2024) https://www.un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-55/. ︎
2. For analyses of discursive constraints around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Western media and academia, see Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out. An everyday occupation (New York and London: W.W. Norton  2008); Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press 2012). ︎
3. On the entanglement of memory, mourning, and political legitimacy, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2004); and Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009). ︎
4. Antonis Liakos, “Βγάλτε τους νεκρούς από τη ζυγαριά” [Take the dead off the scale], Chronos 8, 2013 https://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/ls-gl-p-g.html (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
5. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Enzo Traverso,The End of Jewish Modernity (London: Pluto Press, 2016). ︎
6. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). ︎
7. Ibid., esp. pp. 13–14, 195–205. ︎
8. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider,The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), esp. ch. 2. ︎
9. Gil. Z. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). ︎
10. Butler, Parting Ways, esp. chs. 1 and 4. See also the analysis of performative memory in Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004).  ︎
11. Traverso,The End of Jewish Modernity, pp.186–190. ︎
12. Yehuda Elkana, “The Need to Forget,” Haaretz, March 1988; republished in Haaretz Magazine, 2004. For contextual discussion, see Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir,The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). ︎
13. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 35-49. ︎
14. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Also, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). ︎
15. Ella Shohat, “Rethinking Jews and Muslims,” Middle East Report 178 (September/October 1992). ︎
16. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, pp 140-180; Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. (London: Verso, 2019). ︎
17. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness. Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). Also, Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). ︎
18. See Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Our Principles” https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/our-vision/ and IfNotNow’s platform https://www.ifnotnowmovement.org/principles (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
19. JVP led a sit-in at the U.S. Capitol calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/jewish-activists-arrested-at-us-congress-sit-in-calling-for-gaza-ceasefire (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
20. Thousands of Jews and allies gathered inside Grand Central Station, staging one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in NYC since 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/world/middleeast/grand-central-protest-nyc-israel-hamas-gaza.html (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
21. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.  ︎
22. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 105–110.  ︎
23. Michel Foucault,The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). ︎
24. Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995).  ︎
25. See reports on the post-October 2023 crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists across the US and Europe, e.g., Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/israel-and-palestine (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
26. Donatella Della Porta, “Moral Panic and Repression: the contentious politics of anti-Semitism in Germany”,PArtecipazione e COnflitto * The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies PACO, Issue 17(2) 2024: 276-349.  ︎
27. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism was adopted in 2016 and has been widely institutionalized; see IHRA official website, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
28. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), available at https://jerusalemdeclaration.org, is an alternative framework developed by leading scholars to safeguard free speech and clarify legitimate criticism (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
29. Butler, Frames of War; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press 2004). David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Wiley-Blackwell 2002); Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London and New York: Verso, 2000). ︎
30. On the concept of hierarchy of grief, see James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero (University of Hawaii Press 2001), and Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (2002). ︎
31. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Yale: Yale University Press 1993). ︎
32. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (James Currey Ltd / Heinemann, 1986). ︎
33. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press 2017). ︎
34. Azoulay, Potential History; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Duke University Press 2011). ︎
35. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961). ︎
36. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994). ︎
37. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso 2004). ︎
38. Ella Shohat,Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), especially the introduction and Chapter 2.  ︎
39. Ella Shohat, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. Butler, Parting Ways. ︎
40. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005).  ︎
41. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.  ︎
42. Israel W. Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide.” In Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, edited by George J. Andreopoulos, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 64–94. ︎
43. International Court of Justice, Case Concerning Application of the Genocide Convention (South Africa v. Israel), 2025 (pending). https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192 (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
44. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York and London: New Press 2003). ︎
45. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press 2003); Antonis Liakos, Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία [How the Past turns into History (Athens: Polis 2007). ︎
46. See for example, Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now. Schocken Books, 2019. ︎
47. M. LeVine & E. Cheyfitz, “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited”, Journal of Genocide Research, (2025), 1–23. ︎
48. International Court of Justice, Case on Palestine (South Africa v. Israel), 2024. ︎
49. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present ( Harvard University Press 1999). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge 1994). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). ︎
50. Traverso,The Origins of Nazi Violence. A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology”. The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone, (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books 2012), pp. 272-289. ︎

The post Haunted Pasts and the Politics of Grief: Memory-Shells and the Struggle for Ethical Grief after Gaza appeared first on Void Network.

After slaughtering more than 42,000 Palestinians, including 16,500 children, the Israeli military is now invading Lebanon and threatening to go to war with Iran. In the following in-depth account, an anarchist from occupied Palestine reviews the history of Zionist colonialism and Palestinian resistance, makes the case for an anti-colonial understanding of the situation, and explores what it means to act in solidarity with Palestinians.

Ya Ghazze Habibti

Ya Ghazze habibti, oh Gaza my love. Gaza, which Napoleon, one of its many occupiers, called the outpost of Africa, the door to Asia. This is because he passed through it on his way north and, upon defeat, passed though it again on his way back to Africa.

Gaza, which has always been a central point for passing empires, trade routes, occupations, and cultures, owing to its geographic location along the coast line of the Mediterranean. Gaza, through which passed the Via Maris, connecting Egypt to Turkey and Europe. Gaza, through which the Greeks, the Romans, the Rashidun Caliphate, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British, the Egyptians, and Zionist forces pressed their claims—writing its story as a history of occupations, wars, atrocities, and resistance.

Gaza my love, which was always a battleground, yet always stood still. Gaza, which buries 41,000¹ of its inhabitants, commemorating a year of an ongoing war of annihilation, facing a scale of destruction that has already exceeded the bombing of Dresden by the allied forces during the Second World War, and a daily death rate that is higher than any other conflict in the 21^st century.

Almost a year into the genocide, some things should be clear. The destruction of Hamas is incidental damage. The chief goal is the mass slaughter of children, targeting Gaza’s future. Of the 41,000 deaths reported thus far, about 16,500 are children.

But Gaza is not helpless. The people of Gaza fight, and their courage and resilience are an inspiration for the entire world and generations to come.

Before we discuss the present situation, it is important to review the history. For those of us who grew up and live in the entity, the belly of the colonial beast, it feels like history began in October 7. This is the only narrative Israelis are getting. But things don’t just happen in a vacuum—and similar things have happened before, in similar wars of decolonization and liberation. A little historical background will enable us to zoom out and understand these events as part of long-term processes.

Then we can talk about possible futures.

A History of Conquest, a History of Resistance

Gaza has a long history of occupations and resistance, but our current understanding of the “Gaza Strip” as a rectangle on the map in the south of Palestine does not derive from the natural features of the land—it is an artificial, modern creation. The Mamluks in the 13th century were the first to use the term Quta’a Ghazze (Gaza Strip), but they were referring to the entire south of Palestine, all the way to the modern-day West Bank. The Gaza Strip as we know it was created in 1948.

We cannot understand what is known as the Gaza Strip without discussing the Zionist attack on Palestine in 1948, the massive ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba. Without this context, it’s impossible to understand why most Gazans are not originally from Gaza, and why 80% of the population are refugees. Gaza is an artificial strip of land that became a vast refugee camp after the massive ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Zionist militias. Out of the nearly 800,000 refugees expelled from their villages, many escaped to nearby countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. Those who tried to cross into Egypt found a closed border; unlike other neighboring countries, Egypt did not accept refugees, similar to what the Egyptian government does today. This is how the Gaza Strip emerged: as a Zionist means to control demographics and population.

Many of the Kibbutzim and towns that were attacked on October 7 were built on the ruins of communities that existed there before. Bedouin tribes and other residents from 11 villages around Gaza were expelled to the Gaza Strip, and their lands, which were classified as “abandoned,” were expropriated by the state and turned into military training grounds and settlements. Towns and kibbutzim were built on them to prevent attempts to return. The deportation order, documented by historians as Order Number 40, included an order to burn the villages and leave no remains. We can assume that some of the fighters who attacked these settlements on October 7, 2023 were second- or third-generation refugees who were seeing the ancestral lands of their parents or grandparents on the other side of the blockade for the first time.

By the end of these expulsions, in 1950, the population of Gaza had tripled as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees. There was no infrastructure to receive so many refugees, and until 1950, there was no aid organization like UNRWA in place to assist refugees. Despite that, historians tell of incredible solidarity from Gaza’s locals, who in time of crisis chose to share what little resources they had with the refugees, keeping them alive. By the decision of the United Nations, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was established in 1950 and began the task of building refugee camps and schools and organizing aid for the huge number of refugees who, until then, had slept in local schools, mosques, fields, and private homes of locals that opened their doors for them.

The newly-arrived refugees in what would become the Gaza Strip created a looming threat for the Zionist colonial project. Some claim that Gaza has been under siege since 2007—but in reality, Gaza was under siege from the very beginning, passing through various stages of siege over time. The establishment of the Gaza Strip was a calculated decision by David Ben Gurion, the architect of the Nakba and Israel’s first Prime Minister, to give up a piece of Palestine in order to build a huge refugee camp for expelled people fleeing south. In addition to controlling the demographics of the rest of Palestine, the isolation of the strip served another purpose. Its geographical distance from the West Bank, from the Palestinians that remained in the territories occupied in 1948, and from the rest of the Arab world helped to fragment the fabric of Palestinian society. This was a calculated colonial strategy to carve up the land into isolated ghettos—into what were called Bantustans in South Africa—in order to drive a wedge between different classes of occupied people.

By 1967, Israel had solved its original demographic issues but created new geographic ones. The expansionist appetite had risen again and the Gaza Strip was occupied along with the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula. Israel later returned the Sinai to Egypt, but the rest of the newly occupied territories posed a significant challenge for the Jewish state, as it was not clear that a simple repeat of 1948 was possible. A new model of ethnic cleansing was called for. The conditions had changed, rendering it more difficult to justify physically expelling people from their land; the next best thing was simply to lock them in place.

The top priority was to prevent by all means the emergence of a situation in which settlers would mix with the natives, so Israel constructed two open-air prisons: one in the West Bank and a more tightly controlled one in the Gaza Strip. Unlike the territories occupied in 1948, these new territories were never officially annexed to Israel. The population never received citizenship. They were denied any rights; their villages were surrounded with checkpoints, walls, and settlements; and military rule was put in place. Indeed, ethnic cleansing and military rule have often gone together throughout history.

Another thing that goes together historically with ethnic cleansing and military rule is resistance. The outbreak of the first intifada from the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza in 1987 set off revolutionary waves throughout the region. This was not solely due to the intensity of the insurrection, but also because it signaled a turning point at which Palestinians took matters into their hands and fought for their own liberation.

In many ways, the Palestinian Liberation Organization had already been doing this starting in the 1960s, taking away the Arab states’ role as “liberators” and shifting the focus to revolutionary Arab guerrillas and Palestinian diaspora communities, mainly in Jordan and later in Lebanon. But the first intifada in Palestine broke out spontaneously. It was not under the control of any particular militarized party or organization; it was led by a network of grassroots groups and organizations that came together under the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), a network of coordination between the various regional committees, organizations, and parties involved in the uprising.

The fact that the uprising broke out in Gaza is significant. It is not surprising that it began in a refugee camp. Among Palestinians, the camp is the lowest class; it is also the most revolutionary, always the front line of both popular resistance and armed struggle. It is where guerrillas traditionally organized and strongholds of resistance were formed. Due to its centrality in the struggle, it is also where many of the most horrifying atrocities have been committed and the harshest repression inflicted. Refugee camps in Lebanon were hotbeds for revolutionaries during the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and ’80s; that was also where Lebanese fascists perpetrated the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, under the watchful eyes of the IDF.

To this day, refugee camps such as those in Jenin and Balata in the West Bank remain a hotspot for armed resistance, with many factions, such as the Lion’s Den and Balata Brigade, that insist on remaining unaffiliated with any major faction of Palestinian politics, beyond the control of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The youth in these camps have defended their homes against Israeli raids time and time again, and have paid dearly for doing so. Since October 7, 2023, the refugee camps in Gaza have been a central target for the genocidal forces.

The first intifada articulated the refugee camp as the leading force in the Palestinian revolution. It also showed how explosive the situation was.

The outbreak of the intifada came as a complete surprise to both Israel and the PLO. Israel never imagined the Palestinians would revolt, and the PLO never imagined they would do it outside of their control. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO and its biggest political party, Fatah, saw the uncontrollable and horizontal nature of the intifada as a threat and sought a way to bring it under the control of his organization. This, alongside Israeli and US interference, led Fatah to compromise on their positions and seek peace negotiations with Israel.

This sequence of events, the details of which are beyond the scope of this article, led to the signing of the Oslo Accords, the migration of the PLO to Palestine, the creation of the Palestinian Authority, and the subsequent management of the occupation by Israel’s loyal subcontractor. Among other things, the Oslo Accords involved giving up of 80% of the land in return for the promise of a “two-state solution” and the recognition of Israel. It also meant the division of the West Bank into three areas: area A, comprising 18% of the West Bank, which would be under the control of the PA; area B, 22% of the West Bank, which would be under the civil government of the PA and the security control of Israel; and area C, 60% of the West Bank, which was placed under “temporary” Israeli control.

This also led to security coordination between the newly-formed PA and Israel, which meant that Palestinians were suppressed, jailed, beaten, and executed by Palestinian cops and jailers rather than Israelis. At the same time, the PLO “abandoned terrorism” and armed resistance, dedicating itself to peace negotiations and “nonviolent solutions.” The last part of the agreement, the creation of a Palestinian state, was never implemented.

The accords served as a textbook counterinsurgency tactic. The goal was to crush the uprising, domesticate or isolate the revolutionary wings within the PLO, remove troublesome areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Israeli management, and at the same time, impose the role of cop on the PA while giving the rising masses false hope.

But not everyone was duped. The Oslo Accords did manage to end the first intifada, but they also signaled a fragmentation within Palestinian society, including within the PLO itself, dividing those who favored peace agreements against those who remained committed to the original goals of the Palestinian revolution—refusal to acknowledge the Israeli state, liberation from the river to the sea, and commitment to armed and popular resistance. These two camps were to define Palestinian society and struggle for years to come.

In the midst of the uprising, a few men from the local Gaza chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based religious social movement, met in a house in Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on December 9, 1988. This was to have significant implications for the future of the Palestinian resistance. Under the spiritual leadership of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a refugee from the village Al-Jura, near Majdal Askalan (known today as the Israeli city Ashkelon), the group decided to split off and start a new movement, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat alMuqawama alIslamiya)—as an acronym, HAMAS. A few months later, the nascent organization released its charter, in which it presents Islamic revival and jihad as a form of anti-colonialism and lays out its political and religious philosophy regarding the connection it sees between Islam and Palestinian liberation. Despite affirming that Islamic rule would allow “Muslims, Jews, and Christians to live together in peace and harmony,” the rest of the text is full of antisemitism and conspiracy theories, articulating the movement’s understanding of Zionism, Israel, and Judaism at that time.

A decade earlier, in 1976, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin had applied for a permit from the Israeli authorities to establish the Islamic Association, which was to be an umbrella organization that would provide legal and administrative cover for the Muslim Brotherhood’s social, religious, educational, and medical services within the Gaza Strip. Israel approved the license. This is one of the sources of the myth that Israel “founded” Hamas. In fact, Israel had nothing to do with “inventing” Hamas; as an occupying authority, it merely granted a permit to one of the institutions of the Muslim Brotherhood about a decade before Hamas existed. There are couple of ways to explain why this happened.

Israel had a policy of noninterference with social Islamic organizations. But it is also helpful to understand the social dynamics at that time. The 1970s were the height of Palestinian revolutionary leftism; secular and Marxist-Leninist organizations were the dominant forces in the armed resistance. Religion, on the other hand, was seen as a private matter, and Israel had an interest in enabling the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic movements that could function as a counterforce to weaken the nationalist movement and create social division.

The creation of Hamas, a decade later, while building on the charitable and social infrastructure of the Brotherhood, redefined Islam as a political movement tied with anti-colonial resistance, taking inspiration from many political parties in the Arab world that combined Islam with nationalism. They drew on the legacies of legendary figures such as Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam, a spiritual leader and militant active in Palestine in the 1920s and ’30s, who pioneered defining Islamic Jihad as anti-colonialism and organized guerrilla fighting against the French, the British and the Zionists. Hamas’s armed wing, the Al-Qassam brigade, bears his name.

Hamas was active in the uprising from the start, clashing with Israeli forces but also with other Palestinian factions that they perceived to be collaborationist. Several factors enabled Hamas to position itself as the leader of the resistance camp, including the PLO’s implicit acceptance of partitioning the land of historic Palestine into two states and abandonment of the revolutionary path, which caused the Palestinian national movement to fragment into the “resistance camp” and the “negotiation camp.” At the same time, geopolitical processes including the fall of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the Palestinian left in Lebanon were shifting the context. The intifada first erupted out of the refugee camps of Gaza, Hamas’s home territory and main base of support.

Fast forward to the year 2000. After negotiations failed to deliver and the Palestinian state that was promised in 1999 never came, a second, bitterer, and more militarized intifada erupted, triggered by a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon—then-leader of the opposition Likud party—to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. While the first intifada was popular and decentralized, the second intifada began similarly but quickly fell under the leadership of armed militarized factions, popularizing practices such as suicide bombings and other kinds of deadly armed attacks against Israeli forces and citizens.

Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO and the president of the Palestinian Authority, proved to be quite a pragmatist. To the dismay of Israel and international patrons, he refused to denounce armed attacks, often even encouraged them, and more than once, the police forces of the PA found themselves exchanging gunfire with Israeli forces. He appeared to view the “peace process” and the state-building project merely as tools for Palestinian liberation, worth pursuing as long as they worked, but was prepared to abandon them and change course as needed. In response, in 2002, Israel laid siege to the Mukataa, the Palestinian parliament building in Ramallah, trapping him until his eventual death two years later in 2004.

In his place, Mahmoud Abbas came to power—a Fatah party member with US support. To ensure that Arafat’s pragmatism would not recur, the US and other international donors initiated efforts to “professionalize” the PA. These led to a significant structural shift, resulting in an extensive security sector reform with US support and training, the tightening of security coordination with Israel, the de-politicization of the PA and a large part of the Palestinian public, and the appointment of Salam Fayyad as Prime Minister—a neoliberal American-educated economist accused of purging the PA’s institutions of overly critical voices.

In her book Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, Palestinian anti-authoritarian author Dana El-Kurd details how such aggressive methods of international intervention are used to insulate the PA from its constituency, the Palestinian public, making it answer to international donors instead—especially the US and European Union. They make threats of sanctions and cuts in aid whenever the PA strays from path laid by its masters, the global Western powers. The creation of the PA and involvement in its management were crucial for the US in order to impose its priorities in the region. Palestinians have never been permitted to manage their own affairs in a way that isn’t approved by the United States.

This was visible following Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006. Hamas managed to capitalize on the discontent that followed the failure of the Oslo Accords, the PA’s policies, and corruption and feelings of frustration, gaining 76 of the 132 seats of the legislative council and winning the right to form a government. The resistance camp was at the height of its popularity, as one year before, in 2005, Israel had initiated the Disengagement Plan, evicting all 21 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip along with the Israeli military, following five straight years of armed uprising. Although Israel continued to control Gaza’s border, airspace, and maritime space, this was still seen as a significant achievement of the armed struggle, which managed to force land capitulations from Israel while the “negotiations” and the “peace process” remained stuck.

In fact, few voted for Hamas for religious or ideological reasons. By building guerrilla infrastructure during the 1990s and the second intifada, Hamas had simply managed to position themselves as a leading force for the national cause, the most significant alternative to Fatah.

Shocked by Hamas’s victory, the United States and Israel quickly moved to initiate what amounted to a coup. They put intense pressure on the new government to “moderate” its views—for example, to accept the US-led “peace process,” the two-state “solution,” and not to threaten Western influence in the region. The “Quartet on the Middle East,” an international body composed of the US, the EU, the UN, and Russia, which was assigned to manage the “solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” according to the “peace process,” conditioned aid to the Hamas government on three demands: acknowledging the accords signed between the PLO and Israel, denouncing “terror,” and officially recognizing Israel. Following Hamas’s refusal, the government was isolated, all aid stopped, and economic sanctions imposed.

The Gaza civil war of 2007 saw armed street fighting over the Gaza Strip between the armed wings of Hamas and Fatah. The battle resulted in a victory for Hamas and the subsequent taking over of the Gaza Strip. In defeat, Mahmoud Abbas declared the dissolution of the government, fired Ismail Haniyeh (the Hamas prime minister), and declared a state of emergency. Instead, Salam Fayyad, a more “moderate” Fatah politician approved by the US and Israel, was appointed PM. Abbas also outlawed Hamas’s armed wing. No elections have been held since.

The events of 2007 created a new situation in Palestinian governance, in which Palestinians were under two Palestinian Authorities—the PA under Fatah rule in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza. This benefited Israel, further fragmenting Palestinian society and dividing Gaza from the West Bank and the rest of Palestine. Starting in 2007, Israel intensified its siege of Gaza as a collective punishment for electing Hamas, fully isolating it from the world—basically turning the world’s largest refugee camp into the world’s largest open-air prison. The strip was fully fenced from all sides (including the Egyptian border), tighter control was imposed on its maritime and air space, movement outside and inside was highly restricted, and Israel decided which goods were permitted to enter.

Those who equate Hamas with ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban would be surprised to hear that during sixteen years ruling Gaza, Hamas never implemented Sharia law. It was an authoritarian and conservative government; it was highly repressive, especially to women, queer people, and political dissidents; yet there were constant internal debates and arguments, elections, and representative bodies. The organizational structure has been detailed in depth; suffice it to say that while it was an hierarchical organization, the system of Majlis Al-Shura (General Consultative councils), composed of elected members from local council groups, with representatives from Gaza, the West Bank, leaders in exile, and prisoners in Israeli jails, does represent a somewhat democratic top-down model of governance.

Not only does Hamas not resemble Salafi jihadism, they were its mortal enemies. Salafi cells that tried to mobilize in Gaza were violently repressed. Hamas have no intention of establishing a pan-Islamic caliphate; they were always more nationalist than religious, limiting their activities to the geography of Palestine. All of this is not to vindicate them—we should remain critical—but I believe that we must be fair and accurate in our criticism, understanding nuance and context, so as to avoid spreading Islamophobic nonsense that throws all Islamist organizations into one basket.

Israel appeared to be fine with Hamas taking over. This served the purpose of further dividing the Palestinians, putting a governing body in control in Gaza to manage it, and providing a justification for Israeli attacks. It portrayed itself as fighting a jihadist Islamic-fundamentalist terror organization in the many airstrikes that followed.

Palestinian historian Tareq Baconi details in his book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance how Israel initiated the strategy of “mowing the lawn” in Gaza. It would bomb Gaza every once in a while, just enough to damage Hamas’s military capabilities and massacre hundreds or thousands of Palestinians—keeping Gaza in check, but leaving Hamas in power. Israel conducted five major military operations in Gaza up to 2023 and a few smaller ones. This strategy of keeping Gaza in a frozen state—always under crisis management, one step away from collapse, isolated from the world, and without a long term plan—was to explode in Israel’s face on October 7, 2023. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

From Hamas’s side, there are many ways to explain why they decided to take part in electoral politics. It seems that Hamas saw government something like how Arafat saw it—as a tool of resistance, one of many tools with which to pursue liberation. Like Arafat, they were to discover the tensions and contradictions within this approach. As the head of the resistance camp, the leaders of the revolutionary government, Hamas often found itself as a pacifying force. Several times, they had to restrict other militant factions in Gaza, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that were interfering with their ceasefires. They also didn’t participate in some military clashes with Israel, like the 2022 escalation with between Israel and the PIJ. Some now interpret this as a deceiving tactic, duping Israel to believe that they weren’t interested in escalation in order to surprise them on October 7, but I don’t buy it. It might be true to some extent, but there is no denying that many times, Hamas were in fact deterred, and had to walk a tightrope between maintaining a militant stance and restricting other armed factions in order to keep escalations from getting out of control.

The transition from social movement and guerrilla formation to governing body wasn’t so obvious. Al-Qassam, the armed wing, despite securing a great deal of autonomy from the governing bodies, still found itself having to deal with the growing tension between resistance and government. This is not new in the Palestinian movement. In his book The Palestine Question, Edward Said detailed this dilemma within the PLO in its revolutionary days, when revolution and the state-building project often clashed. When it finally came time to move forward to a state, they completely betrayed their people, sold out the revolution, and capitulated to the disciplining powers of the world order. But Hamas took a different approach.

After taking over Gaza in 2007, Hamas had the choice whether to repeat the PA’s path in the West Bank, selling out the resistance and becoming collaborators with the occupation, or to maintain their defiant stance. They chose the latter. Neither Israel nor the international powers were able to fully domesticate them, and they maintained their commitment to decolonization, resistance, and armed struggle—at least in principle, and sometimes in practice. We could see this during the 2021 escalation, the Unity Intifada. While Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem, was threatened with eviction, Jerusalem was burning and an uprising was spreading all over Palestine; Hamas declared an ultimatum for the Israeli forces to withdraw from Sheikh Jarrah and the Al-Aqsa compound, followed by a barrage of rockets fired into Israeli cities.

This was one of the few instances in which Hamas broke out of the cage that was built for them. The rocket attack against Israel was not used to ease the siege, negotiate about conditions in Gaza, respond to the assassination of one of its militants, or press any other matter within their immediate circle of concern as a governing or military body; rather, it was an act in solidarity with a neighborhood in Jerusalem and in response to Israeli raids on the Al-Aqsa compound. This positioned them once again as a leading front in the resistance, representing Gaza’s participation in the unity uprising and acting on issues that concern all Palestinians.

The contradictions between armed struggle and popular struggle are a constant subject of debate among Palestinians. Some critics accused Hamas of sidelining the popular struggle that erupted during the uprising by shifting the focus to armed struggle. The reality is more complicated. Hamas is much more than its armed wing; it is an entire movement that experiments with many different methods of struggle, evaluating each strategy according to the results. Hamas has a lot of experience with popular resistance—for example, during the 2018-2019 Marches of Return, in which Gaza residents marched unarmed toward the fence, inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the US, demanding an end to the siege and to be permitted to return to their homes on the other side. This was not a Hamas initiative—it was organized by grassroots activists and civilians in Gaza—but Hamas, as a governing body, had to permit the marches, participated in them, and was involved with some of the funding. Israel’s response was to massacre 223 protesters, including 46 children, by sniper fire. The world did nothing. By contrast, the events of 2021 proved that Palestine only becomes an international issue when Israeli citizens pay a price.

In view of this, I want to propose one way to see October 7. No one outside Hamas knows exactly what led them to decide to initiate such an attack. There are many theories, and I’ll add my own. Hamas might have reached the conclusion that the “resistance government” was no longer working, that it was in fact actually an obstacle, and decided to return to its origins as a guerrilla formation and social movement. They might have tried to do this many times before, as we can see from the many reconciliation attempts with Fatah; they showed a willingness to relinquish control over Gaza and work toward elections time and time again. Baconi’s Hamas Contained details many such attempts and how they were derailed by Israel and the US. Perhaps they thought it was time for something extreme to force them back to the path of resistance, a kind of a government suicide. They have made it clear since October that they are willing to give up governing Gaza, but won’t disarm—another indication that they are attempting to return to their origins.

For the revolution to live, the government must die.

Ghetto Uprising

Then October 7 happened.

A year has passed and it’s still not known exactly what happened that day. This is what we know for certain so far.

In the early hours of October 7, 2023, Hamas, alongside other militant factions in Gaza, launched Tufun Al-Aqsa, the Al-Aqsa flood operation, a coordinated surprise attack against Israel. Thousands of rockets were fired into Israel and thousands of militants breached the siege, broke the fence, occupied military bases, and infiltrated Israeli settlements.

The attack caught Israel off guard; it took hours for the army to respond. According to witnesses, there were three main waves breaching the Gaza fence, which was open for hours. The first wave to break the fence involved Hamas and the other chief armed formations in Gaza, including PIJ, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The second wave was comprised of smaller and less organized armed groups, including probably a few Salafi jihadists. The third wave included unarmed civilians, journalists, bloggers, and curious passersby.

There is no denying that some of the participants committed atrocities against Israelis. Plenty of evidence, in some cases from the GoPro cameras of Palestinian fighters themselves, shows them shooting indiscriminately into Israeli settlements, killing civilians, and taking hostages to the Gaza Strip. A massacre also took place at the (now infamous) Nova music festival.

At the same time, a barrage of lies, made-up atrocities, and propaganda circulated. Israeli rescue teams, military officials, Sara Netanyahu, and Joe Biden spread debunked stories about beheadings, killings of children, sexual violence, and other things that never happened. This inflamed the situation and served to justify the genocide.

Some Israelis were reportedly killed by Israeli fire. The Hannibal Directive is an Israeli army policy aimed to prevent kidnapping by any means, including striking Israeli civilians and forces. The reasoning is that the political price for releasing kidnapped Israeli soldiers or civilians via agreements is too high—as it has repeatedly resulted in the release of many Palestinian prisoners in exchange—so it’s better to attack even at the risk of harming the kidnapped. On October 7, Israeli forces deliberately shelled military bases, Israeli settlements, and cars presumed to be carrying Israeli hostages back to Gaza.

By the end of the day, about 1140 Israelis were killed, 3400 were wounded, and 251 were taken captive. Initially, corporate media reported much higher estimates.

Even a year later, Israelis seem unable to comprehend this attack. For them, it came out of nowhere. They perceive it as a “second Holocaust” (a very popular narrative in Israel), an inexplicable and irrational attack by barbaric jihadist forces seeking to kill Jews for no reason.

But it is a gross mischaracterization to think of October 7 as an isolated event that occurred in a vacuum. Practically all of those who are twenty years old or younger in Gaza have spent their entire lives in a reality of siege, bombings, and massacres, raised by relatives who still remember the events of 1948 and how they were expelled from where the Kibbutzim are now. From the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s slave rebellion to Oran massacre in Algeria, every decolonial war of liberation, every slave revolt, every ghetto uprising has always involved atrocities, often targeting civilians. We cannot demand of Palestinians a purity that we do not demand from any other historical struggle for liberation. We can grieve the atrocities, but we cannot condemn a ghetto uprising, we cannot condemn a slave revolt. We must always understand everything in context with an analysis of power relations.

The attack that took place on October 7, 2023 was followed by a genocide that has been ongoing for a year now. As of the end of September 2024, well over 41,000 people in Gaza are reported dead, although the real number is probably a lot higher. More than 95,000 have been injured. About 1.9 million people are internally displaced, some of whom have been uprooted more than ten times. More than half (60% according to Al-Jazeera) of Gaza’s residential buildings, 80% of commercial facilities, and 85% of school buildings have been damaged or destroyed; 17 of 36 hospitals remain partially functional; 65% of the arable land is damaged.

The current war of annihilation differs from the previous rounds of escalations and massacres—and not just in scale. Israel is no longer pursuing a policy of “mowing the lawn.” Gaza, the open-air prison, blew up. Consequently, the entire population had to pay. Indeed, the Israeli authorities made it clear from the beginning that their intention is genocide.

All those years, while Israel had thought it was damaging its military capacities, Hamas was digging a complex network of tunnels below Gaza, getting armed, and preparing for the ultimate fight. Gaza is unfit for guerrilla warfare in the traditional sense, as it is a mostly flat strip of land without mountains or forests that fighters can escape to. The narrow alleyways of the refugee camps could be useful in some stages of the fighting, and they were, but Israel made it clear that those would be the first places to be targeted, as in Lebanon and the West Bank. The network of tunnels, which stretches across the entire strip all the way to the Sinai Peninsula on the other side of the Egyptian border, was necessary to allow fighters to attack and escape, reappear in another place, hide, rest, store weapons, and hide captives. During the years of siege, the tunnels were also crucial for Gaza’s economy: in addition to weapons, they were also used to bypass the Israeli siege in order to smuggle in basic necessities.

Was Hamas not aware that the Israeli reaction would be so deadly? It’s impossible to say for certain what their calculations were. We can assume that they knew that the attack would result in a bloodbath—maybe not on this scale, but they must have known that Israel would respond severely. According to the equation that Israel created in 2014, for example, after Palestinian militants kidnapped and killed three Israeli settlers in the West Bank, Israel killed about 2200 people in Gaza, the worst massacre in Gaza until 2023. So what would be the price for 1140 Israeli casualties, then?

Should we conclude that Hamas doesn’t care about Gazans’ lives? The answer is more complicated.

We can begin by saying that blaming the resistance for the violence of the occupier makes as much sense as blaming the Kurdish fighters for the Dersim massacre or the occupation of Afrin, or blaming the rebels of the Warsaw ghetto for the Nazi repression. A settler colony’s drive is always to acquire more land while diminishing the number of natives. Throughout all the years of Zionist colonization, Zionists have always presented their atrocities as responses to previous attacks—but the actual goal was always ethnic cleansing. The Gaza Strip itself was built as a solution for ethnic cleansing, a locked ghetto to control demographics, and Israel has been killing people there and in Palestine as a whole ever since. To expect people not to fight, to be helpless victims, was never realistic.

According to Hamas themselves, in the document Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, published after October 7, they ask—what did the world expect Palestinians to do? After 75 years of suffering under a brutal occupation, after all initiatives for liberation failed, the disastrous results of the so-called “peace process” that Oslo promised, and the silence of the so-called international community, were they really supposed to die in peace? They note that the Palestinian battle for liberation from occupation and colonialism did not start on October 7, but 105 years ago, against 30 years of British colonial rule and 75 years of Zionist occupation. Ten of thousands of Palestinians were killed between 2000 and 2023; all of those deaths took place with American support, and every kind of protest, including peaceful initiatives such as the marches of return in 2018, has been brutally repressed. In light of murderous aggression with full impunity, the document asks,

“What was expected from the Palestinian people after all of that? To keep waiting and to keep counting on the helpless UN! Or to take the initiative in defending the Palestinian people, lands, rights and sanctities; knowing that the defense act is a right enshrined in international laws, norms, and conventions.”

A similar narrative was expressed by Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, speaking on October 7.

“If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the peaceful victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity. Standing, fighting, fighting back, and standing as dignified martyrs.”

We can also consult Palestinian revolutionary and martyr Bassel Al-Araj. Writing in 2014, just ahead of the Israeli military ground invasion of Gaza on July 17, he made several points²:

1. The Palestinian resistance consists of guerrilla formations whose strategies follow the logic of guerrilla warfare or hybrid warfare, which Arabs and Muslims have become masters of through our experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza. War is never based on the logic of conventional wars and the defense of fixed points and borders; on the contrary, you draw the enemy into an ambush. You do not stick to a fixed position to defend it; instead, you perform maneuvers, movement, withdrawal, and attack from the flanks and the rear. So, never measure it against conventional wars.
2. The enemy will spread photos and videos of their invasion into Gaza, occupation of residential buildings, or presence in public areas and well-known landmarks. This is part of the psychological warfare in guerrilla wars; you allow your enemy to move as they wish so that they fall into your trap and you strike them. You determine the location and timing of the battle. So, you may see photos from Al-Katiba Square, Al-Saraya, Al-Rimal, or Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, but do not let this weaken your resolve. The battle is judged by its overall results, and this is merely a show.
3. Never spread the occupation’s propaganda, and do not contribute to instilling a sense of defeat. This must be focused on, for soon, we will start talking about a massive invasion in Beit Lahia and Al-Nusseirat, for example. Never spread panic; be supportive of the resistance and do not spread any news broadcast by the occupation (forget about the ethics and impartiality of journalism; just as the zionist journalist is a fighter, so are you).
4. The enemy may broadcast images of prisoners, most likely civilians, but the goal is to suggest the rapid collapse of the resistance. Do not believe them.
5. The enemy will carry out tactical, qualitative operations to assassinate some symbols [of resistance], and all of this is part of psychological warfare. Those who have died and those who will die will never affect the resistance’s system and cohesion because the structure and formations of the resistance are not centralized but horizontal and widespread. Their goal is to influence the resistance’s support base and the families of the resistance fighters, as they are the only ones who can affect the men of the resistance.
6. Our direct human and material losses will be much greater than the enemy’s, which is natural in guerrilla wars that rely on willpower, the human element, and the extent of patience and endurance. We are far more capable of bearing the costs, so there is no need to compare or be alarmed by the magnitude of the numbers.
7. Today’s wars are no longer just wars and clashes between armies but rather are struggles between societies. Let us be like a solid structure and play a game of biting fingers with the enemy, our society against their society.

Finally, every Palestinian (in the broad sense, meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities), every Palestinian is on the front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your duty.

One last note before we move forward. In the book Blessed is the Flame, the author Serafinski reviews ghetto uprisings and concentration camp resistance under the Nazi occupation from an anarcho-nihilist perspective. The book shows that despite the repressive and paralyzing conditions in concentration camps, acts of resistance such as sabotage, mutual aid, and uprisings still occurred, often despite severe consequences and very low chances of success. The motivation behind many of these acts was the desire to rebel as an end in itself. Serafinski builds on the idea that jouissance, or enjoyment—the creativity and life of the act or rebellion itself—is worthwhile in its own right, independent of its consequences. Examples show that in the direst situations, people choose not to be passively led to the slaughter, but engage in desperate, wild acts of resistance, escaping established logic, morality, and fields of discourse. Against impossible conditions, they choose impossible action. This is reminiscent of Bassel’s understanding of romance as the reason for war.

And people often do what is within their range of capabilities, not what is the most “right.” This is something we have to accept.

“What really counts is the strength we feel every time we don’t bow our heads, every time we destroy the false idols of civilization, every time our eyes meet those of our comrades along illegal paths, every time that our hands set fire to the symbols of Power. In those moments we don’t ask ourselves: ‘Will we win? Will we lose?’ In those moments, we just fight.”

-“A Conversation Between Anarchists,” Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire

“Even your observations and criticism of the paradoxes of the 2014 war were that it made most of society a passive audience awaiting death. You objected to a death that is not surrounded by a romantic narrative. You know that the balance of power between nations is determined by the ‘potential energy’ and ‘kinetic energy’ (a crushing energy). And you know that potential energy—and its function in war—is to transform into a crushing force. I believe that the possibility of creating romantic narratives around martyrdom and heroism is one of the most important elements of potential energy, in which we outperform our enemy.”

“Why We Go to War,” Bassel Al-Araj

The Fighting since, and Other Fronts

People in Gaza have not been helpless victims since October 7. Yes, Gaza is devastated by the genocide, but the resistance is fighting like hell, despite incredible odds. As of mid-September 2024, Israel has reported 789 of its soldiers and security forces dead. Other reports indicate at least 10,000 killed or wounded. About 1000 Israeli soldiers enter the Defense Ministry Rehabilitation Department every month, according to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Incredible footage circulated online by guerrilla forces shows them popping out of tunnels, blowing up tanks, sniping at and ambushing Israeli soldiers, and blowing up buildings with soldiers inside. The Israeli military admitted that many tanks have been damaged during fighting.

In the city of Khan Yunis, for example, which Israel has repeatedly invaded, so far, every attempt to defeat the guerrilla forces has failed. In many of the cities, refugee camps and stronghold of resistance where the IDF announcing that they “dismantled the local brigade,” guerrilla forces immediately reappear and regroup following their withdrawal.

In the West Bank, the IDF has conducted several incursions into towns and refugee camps, inflicting mass destruction on its infrastructure, killing at least 719 and injuring more than 5700 as of September 2024. Armed resistance, though nowhere near as intense as in Gaza, has claimed the lives of 12 Israeli soldiers and left 27 injured. Several militants in the West Bank have also conducted armed actions against Israeli settlers in the West Bank as well as inside Israeli borders.

Settler violence against Palestinians has intensified significantly since October, with more than 800 attacks and pogroms, killing at least 31 Palestinians, injuring more than 500, and damaging around 80 houses, almost 12,000 trees, and 450 vehicles, according to the UN. About 850 Palestinians were forced to leave their houses as a result of settler and military violence. Settlers also blocked humanitarian aid entering Gaza from Jordan, Egypt, and Israeli ports.

Inside the occupied Interior, also known as 1948 occupied Palestine, or “Israel,” Palestinian communities have found themselves facing a fascist dictatorship. Protesting the genocide was impossible during the first few months, as police violently repressed demonstrations, attacked activists, raided their homes, and jailed people, sometimes for months, for shouting slogans or holding signs. In October and November 2023 alone, Adallah, a legal center for Palestinian citizens in Israel, documented 251 arrests, interrogations, and “warning calls” in response to actions like participating in a demonstration, posting on social media, and expressing opinions in universities and workplaces. Many Palestinian students were expelled from universities; many workers were fired. In some places, this repression eased over time—but in others, especially “mixed” cities like Haifa, protesting the genocide is still impossible.

So far, despite isolated armed groups in the West Bank defending their communities from Israeli raids and conducting armed attacks on nearby settlements and checkpoints, not to mention some attempts in the Interior to organize protests, there is no popular uprising, like the Unity Intifada that broke out in 2021 during the previous major assault on Gaza. Israeli repression has proved to be effective in pushing many people into silence and paralyzing street movements. This might change, as repression can also lead to escalation, but for now, we can’t rely on an uprising inside Palestine to stop the genocide.

The situation inside prisons has become inhumane. Palestinian “security prisoners” face torture, violence, and sexual abuse from Israeli guards. The torture camp Sde Teiman rose to world infamy following leaks from whistleblowers and testimony from released prisoners revealing a routine of abuse, beatings, physical and psychological torture, sexual violence and rape, medical neglect, and amputations of body parts. Conditions in “security” prisons all across the country have deteriorated, with the far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir giving orders to reduce the rights of prisoners to the bare minimum. They are confined to dark, overcrowded cells, hand- and leg-cuffed to each other, sleeping on beds without mattresses or on the floor, on a bare-minimum diet. Thousands of new prisoners have been arrested over the past year; under the sadistic management of Ben-Gvir, repression, incarceration, and concentration and torture camps are set to expand. About 60 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.

The front of those in exile has been active. Palestinian refugees have managed to mobilize mass demonstrations in many places. In nearby countries, there has been a significant street movement of thousands in support of Palestine. In Amman, Jordan, people have clashed several times with police and security forces outside the Israeli embassy, demanding that their country drop its relationships with Israel and the United States. Mass mobilizations have also occurred in Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Bahrain, and all over the refugee camps and cities of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab and Muslim world, often despite repression from their reactionary governments, which fear that the mass mobilizations might turn against them.

In the “West,” a solidarity movement sprang up in the cities of Europe and North America. Much has been said about the inspiring mobilizations on campuses and the various blockades, marches, and acts of sabotage. Those in the imperial core have a particular responsibility to take action like this. We can only hope such movements will grow.

Germany, the country with the largest Palestinian diaspora community in Europe (around 300,000), became a unique battleground. The German state has been hostile toward Palestinian liberation for many years, cracking down on marches, censoring speech and slogans, banning solidarity events, and, in some cases, banning national symbols such as the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag. In Germany, anti-Palestinian racism and support for genocide is shared by the state, the police and repressive agencies, the far-right, and Islamophobic, anti-Arab, colonial, and pro-apartheid elements in the “anti-fascist” scene.

Nonetheless, Palestinians and their supporters are still resisting. Germany is fully complicit in the genocide, supporting it both materially and rhetorically, providing weapons to Israel and going as far as backing Israel in its genocide case at the International Court of Justice. We can only hope the movement there will continue to break the walls of fear and find ways to escalate.

As for the so-called Axis of Resistance—some armed militant groups in the Middle East declared a solidarity front with Gaza. In Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, American bases were targeted. For months, Iran, despite attempting to monopolize “resistance,” chiefly acted as a pacifying force, repeatedly ordering groups to reduce attacks in order to avoid entering into direct confrontation with Israel and the US. Iran attacked Israel with a major missile attack on April 2024, but this was mainly symbolic, as it was announced in advance and caused no significant damage.

Shortly before the publication of this article, in response to the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iran initiated a second direct attack on Israel. On October 2, 2024, 180 rockets fell on Israel. Again, most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel, the US, and allied regimes such as Jordan. Some mild damage was caused to military bases and a Mossad facility. At this time, the only known victim of this attack is a Palestinian from Gaza staying in the West Bank city of Jericho.

The Houthi movement, a Shia Islamist organization in control of a large part of Yemen as part of the ongoing Yemeni civil war, which some describe as an Iranian “proxy” and part of the “Axis” although quite independent, have been firing missiles at Israel and attacking commercial ships at the Red Sea, considering any Israel-linked ship as a target. They have reportedly caused a huge impact on the global economy and a a significant damage to international trade, damaging commercial vessels and forcing many more to reroute around South Africa, greatly extending their journey.

In south Lebanon, Hezbollah engaged in daily rocket and UAV clashes with Israel, though initially, these were largely restricted to military bases close to the border and a few northern Israeli communities. In response, Israel bombed villages and communities in south Lebanon and attacked Dahieh, a suburb of Beirut where some Hezbollah operatives live, killing civilians as well. The situation has been escalating; as of the beginning of October 2024, Israel has invaded south Lebanon, following many escalations.³

In the fog of war, the world order is marching forward. The US sees the genocide and escalation in the Middle East as an opportunity to enhance its power in the region. Israel Channel 12 reported on October 2023 that “two hundred and forty-four US transport planes and 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war [sic].” That month also saw special US military aid to Israel reaching 14.3 billion dollars.

In the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean Sea, and the many US bases in surrounding countries including Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, the US has deployed several fighter squadrons as well as a THAAD battery and several Patriot anti-missile batteries. They seek to deter any attack on Israel by regional powers, but they are also actively participating in the fighting—like the US-led international coalition to strike the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea and the militias in Iraq and Syria.

The US has also directly intervened in Israeli decision-making in order to influence the course of war. President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin participated in Israeli government and war cabinet meetings, exerting significant pressure to implement their post-war vision. After realizing the American vision might be harder to initiate as long as Netanyahu is in charge, Americans also met with opposition leaders and Israeli civil society organizations.

In that vision, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are united under a “reformed” (meaning American-controlled) Palestinian Authority, and a “two-state solution” is implemented, following a series of normalization agreements with local regimes, in order to “integrate Israel into the region,” ensure its safety, and build a strong pro-American bloc to increase American influence and isolate competing quasi-imperialist regional powers such as Iran and Russia.

This is nothing new. The US has been interfering in this region to maintain its hegemony for decades now. A neocolonial policy of supporting corrupt and reactionary puppet regimes that serve as local proxies in order to guarantee American control over resources is a long US tradition. Ilan Pappe tells us how, following the British withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, the US was in a dire need of a pro-Western regional power. The US decided to invest further in Israel following its military victory in 1967, a major blow to secular nationalist movements in the region.

The Oslo Accords constituted an international intervention in local Palestinian politics. Not only did they serve to break a popular uprising led by decentralized and horizontal networks of grassroots activist groups and parties—they established an authoritarian, collaborationist puppet regime for the colonized to govern themselves according to US, EU, and Israeli incentives. When that regime failed to serve its global sponsors, with Arafat thinking he had more room to maneuver than he was allowed, it was quickly abolished and replaced by more obedient actors. In 2006, when Palestinians voted for the wrong candidate in democratic elections, a coup was initiated and the entire population punished. Palestinians are not allowed to make decisions regarding their own destiny. They must be kept under tight control, as they tend to reveal unruly elements unfavorable for US hegemony.

In recent years, in what Noam Chomsky dubbed “the Reactionary International,” Israel has signed a series of agreements and normalization pacts—known as the Abraham Accords—with local dictatorships, monarchies, and repressive regimes. This took place under US mediation, in opposition to the will of the populations of those countries. The states to join the normalization treaty so far include the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Saudi Arabia was reportedly also on its way to normalization with Israel, but the process froze following October 7.

The economic impact of these agreements includes formal investments and business relations between the countries, especially regarding hi-tech industries, and also military relations and weapons trade. According to Israel’s Ministry of Defense, the value of Israeli defense exports to the countries with which it normalized relations in 2020 reached $791 million. Oil deals between the UAE and Israel threaten to inflict ecological disaster in the Red Sea and exacerbate concerns regarding climate change.

This entire trajectory, coupled with the “two-state solution” as an aftermath to the “conflict,” represents a pattern in the US involvement in the region. A proposal was even made to have “moderate” (meaning US-controlled) regimes from the region take control of Gaza in the aftermath of the genocide until a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (domesticated enough not to cause its international patrons any further troubles) could take their place as the sovereign.

The regional theater of conflict between the American reactionary authoritarian alliance and the Iranian reactionary authoritarian alliance resembles Cold War campist politics. If back then, people were limited to choosing between the American bourgeois model and the Soviet bourgeois model, today it appears that the choices for the peoples of the region are once again between American imperialism and reactionary, tyrannical, expansionist, and quasi-imperialist powers like Iran, Russia, Turkey, and to some extent China. These countries have their own visions for the region and their own alliances with other repressive regimes, all of which brutally crack down on revolutionary movements that interfere with their plans or steer away from their monopoly on “resistance.”

It won’t be easy to escape the trap of being caught between these two camps and the dark future both of them represent for the region. But we could start by focusing on grassroots struggles on the ground, instead of on states and their proxies. No government is going to save us from this hell.

Palestinians have been betrayed by their leadership over and over. The PLO sought to be the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” only to crush the first intifada—which had broken out beyond its control and against its wishes—and plunge into the disaster of the Oslo Accords. They went on to become fully entangled with the US regional order, making it one of the most successful examples in the history of the domestication and neutralization of revolutionary movements. The Palestinian resistance as an uncontrollable and ungovernable force, beyond the control of various waves of “representation,” authorities, and mechanisms of pacification and manipulation, remains threatening to all those who compete to impose their preferred world orders and whatever forces seek to bind it to their own interests.

For years, regimes in the Arab world used the Palestinian cause as the only issue around which people were allowed to mobilize and protest; this enabled them to allow people to let off steam while silencing criticism of their own policies. They also used this issue to claim legitimacy, as it was always widely supported by the peoples of the region. Dana El-Kurd shows how the movements organizing around Palestine in those states became schools for activism for the participants, enabling them to eventually oppose their own governments as well. Many of the movements that went on to participate in the Arab Spring started with Palestine solidarity organizing.

Even so-called “radical” regimes masquerading as supporters of the resistance, such as the Syrian government, turned to impose siege and slaughter Palestinians as soon as the latter were perceived to threaten their interests or to join freedom movements, as in Yarmouk refugee camp in 2014. Whether “normalizing” regimes or “resistance” regimes, authoritarians have always treated the Palestinian cause as a tool of legitimacy, empty rhetoric to be thrown around to ensure stability, even though their policies were anti-Palestinian in practice. In moments of truth, whenever the situation is getting out of control, they reveal their true faces.

Today, many governments in the region are actively suppressing Palestine solidarity movements and opposition to the genocide, as they see that these movements might “get out of control” or threaten normalization efforts that they hope will boost their economies, militaries, and repressive capabilities. Our best way out of this mess might be a revolutionary alliance of freedom movements throughout the region, and hopefully the world—a Liberation International that would stand proudly against the reactionary international led by the US and the authoritarian international involving Iran.

Palestine is deeply connected to the Syrian revolution, the tragedy of Sudan, the revolutionary feminists of Iran, the Rojava revolution, the uprising in Lebanon, the many movements in the Middle East since the Arab Spring, and—more globally—the Stop Cop City and Black Lives Matter movements in the US, the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous peoples everywhere, the anti-junta resistance in Myanmar, Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, and all struggles for freedom and liberation. We draw inspiration, strength, and lessons from each other. A Palestinian victory in Gaza would send waves of freedom to the farthest corners of the earth, while an Israeli victory will embolden those pursuing violent and genocidal strategies everywhere, strengthen the grip of reactionary and authoritarian alliances over entire populations, and enable them to further crush movements of liberation, whether in the name of “stability” or of “resistance.” If we depend on each other, we had better start acting accordingly. Who knows how much time we have left.

Attempting to Clear the Fog

Anarchists have reacted to the genocide and the solidarity movement with several layers of cognitive dissonance. Some positions were confused or naïve, lacking nuance and understanding of the material conditions prevailing in different geographies and political contexts—for example, sloganeering “No war but class war” arguments calling for the “Israeli and Palestinian proletariat” to “unite” against “their common oppressors” and other class-reductionist nonsense. Other positions went all the way to Islamophobia and conspiracy theories: “Israel created Hamas,” “Hamas are just like ISIS.”

Hamas is the subject of the most significant cognitive dissonance. Anti-authoritarians want to support the Palestinian movement, like any other movement for freedom and liberation, but they can’t comprehend that Hamas is an organic and integral part of that movement, so they make up stories to the effect that Hamas is the invention of the occupier, that Palestinians don’t really support them, that we can somehow tell the story of the resistance without them. They wish to somehow separate Hamas from the broader cause. How much easier things would be if that were possible!

Hamas are in fact a national liberation movement dedicated to the liberation of Palestine. The idea of using the religious concept of jihad as anti-colonialist resistance and self-defense is not new; it goes all the way back to the struggle against the French in Syria in the 1920s, if not further. It has appeared in Algeria and many struggles since. It has nothing to do with the Salafi-jihadist brand, and a pan-Islamic transnational caliphate is not on the table. The Palestinian liberation movement is heterogeneous and diverse; it includes many ideologies and ideas we might disagree with. Hamas deserves criticism for its patriarchy, its homophobia, its reliance on reactionary forces such as Iran and the Assad regime, its brutal repression. Brave anti-authoritarian Palestinian groups have already offered this, like Gaza Youth Breaks Out back in 2011. But our criticism should be fair and grounded in reality, not simply a litany of preconceived notions.

We also need to talk about the settlers. There any many different ways to analyze Israeli society. We can use the useful distinction that historian Ilan Pappe makes between the State of Israel and the State of Judea. In short, on one side, the liberal, secular, and “democratic” (Jewish democracy, for Jews only) wing of Jewish supremacy, apartheid, and settler colonialism, the one leading the anti-Netanyahu protests in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities; on the other side, the more far-right, theocratic, and openly fascist wing, composed chiefly of West Bank Jewish pogromists and their allies. The anti-fascist author and journalist, David Sheen, offers another useful schema, dividing Israeli society into supremacist, opportunist, reformist, and humanist camps.

All of these analyses explore the internal debate within settler society over the best way to manage apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. These social rifts are not new, but they have been exacerbated over the last few months. If we do not understand them, we might reach the wrong conclusions.

For example, some comrades cite the Anti-Netanyahu protests to pressure him to accept a ceasefire in order to strike a deal with the resistance to release hostages as evidence that many Israelis oppose the regime. Some people even present it as a mass anti-war movement. This is inaccurate. It fits the anarchist narrative because we are used to insisting on the distinction between people and states, and many Israelis really do oppose Netanyahu. But support for genocide is overwhelming across various political camps.

A huge sign in neon lights over protesters in Tel Aviv tells the whole story—bring back (the hostages), and go back (to Gaza). This is a brazen proposal to resume fighting as soon as the Israeli captives are released. This does not necessarily represent all the thousands of participants, but it does indicate the Zionist logic of these demonstrations—another manifestation of Jewish supremacy, maybe its liberal camp, but nonetheless, there is no concern for Palestinian lives there. Honest, genuine, anti-Zionist voices calling to end the genocide do exist in Israel, and they hold small demonstrations every once in a while, which are often repressed by police and attacked by fascists. They are a tiny, hated, and insignificant minority, with no hope of becoming a mass political power any time in the near future.

The inconvenient truth is that when it’s time to commit a massacre, Israeli society puts aside all petty arguments, stops pretending to be a civil society in a “democratic state,” and unites for the task. Then it is revealed what Israel is in reality: a huge military base. There is no mass opposition to genocide. The mass protests against the judicial overhaul stopped for a few months following the shock of October 7, then reappeared in the form of protests for the release of hostages, renewing the discussion about genocide management. All the reservists’ threats to refuse to serve came to an end after October 7, 2023; they never really intended to follow through. Rebellion and protest in Israel are always limited to narrow Zionist narratives that explicitly delineate what is acceptable and what’s not. The fascist and liberal wings of Zionism might express it differently, but Jewish supremacy and the complete dehumanization of Palestinians are the common threads.

The situation was bad already, but the radical left has shrunk significantly since October 7, with the attacks shocking the Israeli society to its core, awakening settler anxieties and pushing many “leftists” into the warm hug of Jewish supremacy. We can expect this to continue. The reason for this is that the “Israeli left” is overwhelmingly predicated on the notion that “the end of occupation” (decolonization) would mean that they could continue their convenient settler lifestyle minus the guilt. For example, one of the main messages of the anti-occupation bloc during the mass movement against the judicial overhaul that existed up until October 7 was that “the occupation” (which typically means the 1967 occupation) is an “obstacle to Israeli democracy,” and if only we could take care of that, the rest would be fine. It is not easy to find anyone who sees that the entire Israeli regime is illegitimate, that the occupation began in 1948 not 1967, that the land is stolen from the river to sea and decolonization means the radical transformation of power relations.

Alfredo Bonanno said, “The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalized insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them.” I like Bonanno and think that most of his observations are brilliant, but this particular analysis does not fit the reality on the ground. It’s part of a long tradition of Western thinkers who focus on settler society, as if it could be a meaningful vehicle for change. I strongly disagree. There is no historical precedent for societies of settlers or slave masters rebelling against their own privileges, and I don’t think Palestine would be the first to break from this trajectory.

There are settler-colonial societies, like the US, that managed to develop a proud tradition of race traitors after a long development. We saw this during the George Floyd uprising; French Algeria offers another example. I believe that this is theoretically possible for the settler society in Palestine, maybe in some point in the future, but probably not right now. Some Israelis went far beyond the “Israeli left” and fully betrayed “their” society, switched sides, and joined the Palestinian popular struggle, under Palestinian terms and leadership. Some even joined the armed struggle. These are very few, far from representing a significant phenomenon in Israeli society.

Those who want to express solidarity with the very few anti-Zionist Israelis should do so. It’s a good cause and they would appreciate it. But honestly, support for the Palestinian resistance is much more important right now. We should stand with the resistance against the violence of settler colonialism and genocide.

This might be inconvenient, but we must have this conversation. No one has to agree with me, I’m speaking from my own perspective and conditions, and this can be seen as my attempt to appeal to my camp of origin, the anti-Zionist Israeli radical left. In my opinion, the “Israeli Left” is a dead end. I have no reason to doubt the intentions of many of my former and current comrades in the “anti-occupation bloc” and “radical bloc” in Tel Aviv and other cities. They are honest, brave, rebellious souls; many of them really are in it for Palestinian lives, fighting to end the genocide.

But those who have managed to escape the cult of Zionism must now take another step forward. To them, I want to say that we must stop seeing ourselves as actors within Israeli society, trying to improve or reform it in order to save it from itself. It would be better to adopt Al-Araj’s framework of the liberation camp vs. the colonial camp,⁴ and Fanon’s understanding of the adoption of the resistance identity as a political choice rather than an issue of race or origin, and work to shed the settler identity completely.

This is what Palestinians have been calling on us to do for years. There is no reforming a sick society; it will not work to appeal to the interests of a system that is rotten to its core. There hasn’t been a single second in the history of this state since its inception that wasn’t predicated on intense violence and complete dehumanization. This is a call for desertion, full race treason and betrayal, switching sides, with all the risks, repression, torture, and death it might entail. This is not easy, but we have a rich global history to draw from. We can recall John Brown and his militia, or the French in Algeria switching sides and joining the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale, “National Liberation Front”). What those people understood, at crucial historical junctures, was that despite what liberal interpretations of “identity politics” tell us, when revolution calls, it’s not about being a passive “ally” or checking your privileges, but throwing yourself into the struggle. Identity becomes a political choice, based on actions, rather than origins.

“The settler is not simply the man who must be killed. Many members of the mass of colonialists reveal themselves to be much, much nearer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation.”

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Anxieties about decolonization are not coming out of nowhere. Nothing is promised to us. Not even liberation itself, to be honest. Some colonial projects have ended somewhat peacefully, with regime transition and reconciliation committees, as in South Africa; others have ended in a bloodbath, like in Algeria. Even the libertarian, confederalist example of Rojava hasn’t been a smooth process. In none of these cases was it perfect. Liberation is always a messy and bloody process in real life.

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in their essay Decolonization is not a metaphor, explain that decolonization is incommensurable with other social justice struggles—it is meant to be unsettling, as it would undoubtedly relieve the settlers—including workers—of their stolen resources. We must be honest about what we’re saying. For example, in the debate about the phrase “from the river to sea,” about whether it means democracy or the abolition of Israel—the simple answer is that it means both. Decolonization on Palestinian conditions—the abolition of Zionism, the return of the refugees, the end of military rule, and equal civil rights—will mean that Palestine goes back to what it was before Zionist colonization, a majority Arab land. I believe Jewish people would be welcome to stay—those who are willing to live equally with the rest of the people on the land, without a racist system of segregation and privilege based on ethnicity.

As for class reductionism, there’s no material basis for “class solidarity” between “Palestinians and Israelis.” Under settler colonialism, this is not the same class. Jews and Arabs are not equal, not even when they work in the same workplaces. As Frantz Fanon noted, in a colonial context, national oppression is primary and class oppression is secondary. Settler colonies do not simply exploit the labor power of the colonized or the land resources of the colony, like other kinds of colonialism; they are predicated on the complete erasure of the colonized through ethnic cleansing, genocide, or both.

According to historian Ilan Pappe, Zionism, like any other settler-colonial movement, requires the annihilation or expulsion of the native population in order to succeed. Many such movements were composed of European refugees escaping exclusion and persecution, looking for a place to build their own new Europe. Indigenous populations are always an obstacle to such utopian visions, and so the solution is typically a massive campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Similar settler-colonial projects, such as the US, Australia, South Africa, and Canada, also often found a religious justification for settling, used a superpower to gain a foothold in a foreign land, then looked for ways to get rid of both the empire that aided them and the majority of the Indigenous population.

Israel has made it pretty clear that wherever it engaged in massive ethnic cleansing camping, such as 1948, or during the current genocide in Gaza, its targets are not the Palestinian proletariat, but the Palestinians as a people. All classes and social groups are a target.

If even Marx recognized that the struggle for the eight-hour workday in the US couldn’t really begin before the abolition of slavery, today’s Western leftists should be able to reach the same conclusions regarding settler colonialism and apartheid. If we want to have a meaningful footing in the solidarity movement, we must acknowledge that some issues cannot be reduced to class.

Revolutionaries have already made this mistake before. Many male anarchists in the CNT (Federación Anarquista Ibérica, “National Confederation of Labor”) during the Spanish revolution were dismissive of the women’s organization Mujeres Libres (“Free Women”), proclaiming that gender repression was secondary to the class struggle, and that in any case the revolution would solve it. Today, we know that overthrowing capitalism won’t simply abolish patriarchy. We could create a classless society that would still be sexist and oppressive to women and other genders. Some leftists see the Kibbutz movement as an example of libertarian socialist societies, ignoring the fact that the Kibbutzim are a racist and colonialist project for Jews only, built in the context of the Zionist land theft, often on the physical ruins of villages that were ethnically cleansed. Without a proper analysis of settler colonialism and an understanding of national oppression as a primary issue unto itself, any understanding of the situation in Palestine will remain an awkward attempt to import foreign worldviews and solutions into geographies with radically different problems.

Along with the commitment to free Palestine, I would like to suggest to comrades to allow Palestine to free them as well. It can work both ways. Don’t participate in the movement just to preach, but also to listen. We should not give up our perspectives and critiques, but we must use this this opportunity to enrich ourselves and broaden our horizons by learning from other liberation struggles, instead of simply trying to impose our preconceived notions on them. I would love to discuss sensitive subjects with my Palestinian comrades, such as the dependence of the armed resistance on reactionary elements like Iran and Assad’s Syria⁵. But I must be able to do this as a comrade, from inside the struggle, after developing trusting relationships and accepting a Palestinian worldview, not as an annoying leftist critiquing from the outside. If all we do is spend time with those like ourselves, it will show, and it will reflect badly on us. People notice this, and it will sabotage the relations of trust that we are trying to build within the movement.

Facing the Age of Genocide

The colonial world order has divided the world into the “civilized” part, the impenetrable Global North where liberal democracy prevails, and vast genocide fields filled with a surplus population to be exterminated, enslaved, robbed of resources, and forgotten. In a settler-colonial context, this process happens in the same territory, without the geographic distance between the colony and the metropolis. Ghettos, besieged cities, military rule, and a system of ethnic segregation are constructed, dividing the colonized into several classes of oppressed people, building mental barriers where physical ones are absent, and making sure to prevent any mingling of natives and settlers.

There are several ways in which the colonial order can get out of balance. One way is fascism, in which the colonial practices are brought inside, into the metropolis. In this case, genocidal and racializing practices that were previously reserved for the surplus population in the colonies are utilized against unwanted populations at home. But the colonial order can also go out of balance during uprisings. The natives, refusing to be confined to their place, break the supposedly impenetrable fortress of the colony—which turns out to be very much penetrable—and, as Fanon put it, they flood the forbidden cities, taking everything in their path.

Israel sought for decades to maintain a population of Westernized, liberal democratic settlers, experiencing home (Europe) away from home, after their original home became too dangerous for them. Other, non-European Jews were welcome to join, as long as they were Jewish and accepted Western hegemony. Concrete walls, isolated ghettos, and mental barriers were instilled in order to separate the settler society from the brutal daily violence necessary to maintain this order. There is no one way to do this. Strategies include cultural erasure (for example, Palestinians with citizenship become “Israeli Arabs”); massive ethnic cleansing campaigns when possible (like in 1948) and when not—small ones, like the Judaization⁶ of the Galilee, the Naqab, and neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa⁷; military rule⁸; conflict management, strict racial segregation, and counterinsurgency, as seen in the Oslo Accords, the separation wall in the West Bank, and the siege of Gaza; and genocide. Today it seems that conflict management, at least, has failed to deliver.

Israel has been humiliated more than once in the last few years. The state lost control during the uprising of 2021 and again on October 7, 2023. The Palestinians have proven time and time again to be an uncontrollable force, capable of threatening a nuclear superpower supported by the strongest empire in the world, despite that empire pouring billions of dollars into security apparatus, counterinsurgency, and advanced technology. Israelis have noticed that the state is incapable of delivering security despite its mighty power, and they are starting to panic. We can only expect that the punishment for rebelling will be crueler each time as pressure grows from shocked Israelis and the international powers to keep rebellious Palestinians under control.

It is entirely possible that as time passes, the genocide fields will expand, and more people will be treated as surplus population. There is no guarantee that we, the privileged citizens of civilization, will not eventually find ourselves on the wrong side of that wall. Racialized minorities know that already, and as for the rest of us—we shouldn’t count on our whiteness, as Jews found out during the Second World War, Irish people experienced under British occupation, and Ukrainians are finding out today. Just as whiteness can be ascribed, it can also be taken away.

Whenever an empire brands a new demographic as surplus population, the borders around “civilization” shift. The more they succeed in trapping a growing part of the earth’s population in a living hell, the bleaker and more uncertain our own future becomes. The more they succeed in crushing the rebellion of the undesirables, the more their success will inform other empires and competing world orders. Just as we are inspired by every slave revolt and ghetto uprising, regimes also take notes and inspiration from each other when it comes to repression. We are all deeply connected.

What should we do, those of us situated in this or that entity, citizens of the Global North, whether as settlers in the colony or the imperial core? It’s hard for me to say. Situated in the occupied Interior, which, as I said, does not openly rebel at the moment, is it fair for me to advocate for things I don’t do myself? We feel the need for an insurrection, but our communities are devastated and broken, people are paralyzed, and the wounds are still open from the last round of repression. I can’t tell anyone what to do. All I can do is share my perspective. It’s for you to analyze your conditions and see what fits.

Comrades in the imperial core of so-called North America have showed some amazing and inspiring resistance. Comrades in Europe have too. Sabotage, port blockades, marches, campus occupations—all of these are meaningful, and some have won significant achievements. I don’t want to claim, as some do, that these actions have accomplished nothing so far. We don’t know what the state of Gaza would be right now if not for these courageous actions. Movement building is important in itself. A whole new generation has been politicized and radicalized, and they will carry the struggles forward.

But one thing is certain. We didn’t stop the genocide.

We need to focus. The genocide has been in progress for a year, and at this point, it shows no sign of slowing down or remaining confined to Gaza. I believe the time to escalate is now. The implications are enormous. Right now, Israel is committed to go to war with Lebanon and perhaps also with Iran. The worst-case scenario seems to be unfolding. This is going to make the situation spiral out of control even more; it could cause a full-blown regional war involving an unimaginable amount of death and destruction. We are facing a completely psychotic world order intent on causing the maximum amount of devastation to everything that stands in its way. We cannot remain passive spectators. We are involved and what happens will reflect on us.

From the looks of it, throughout the course of the occupations last semester, comrades in the US developed many insurrectionary elements to develop and expand. They also faced many cops—some in uniform, others concealed within the movement, like liberals, pacifists, professional “activists,” and reformists. People need to find ways to deal with them. Don’t fall for counterinsurgency tactics intended to pacify you, divide and fragment the movement, define for you what is “acceptable” and “legitimate,” or delimit the boundaries of the protest. Be brave, uncontrollable, and ungovernable. The rest is up to you to analyze, as far as tactics go, but don’t let anyone confine you.

Also—ignore smear campaigns. They might become louder if the movement becomes more successful. I already saw Zionist media and propaganda depicting the protests as “antisemitic pogroms.” I shouldn’t have to spend a single moment explaining how ridiculous this is.

We all know that the repressive agencies of Israel and the US are training together, and share tips, tools and tactics on how to repress populations and movements of freedom. This should concern anyone involved in local struggles, such as Stop Cop City, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous solidarity, and support for migrants and refugees. We also know that Israel is exporting weapons and repressive technology everywhere. AI tools are being developed and used to automate identifying and killing “suspects.” And we know it goes the other way around—Israel is bombing Gaza (and now also Lebanon) with US weapons and full support. This is an American (and European) war as much as it is Israeli. The imperial core of the Global North is absolutely involved and is a belligerent part of the aggression, and this makes its citizens an active part as well.

It’s not entirely possible to physically join the armed struggle on the ground the way one can in Rojava or Ukraine, but there is no need to. People can come to Palestine to participate in the popular struggle, as brave American and European citizens already have; some of them have become martyrs themselves. This helps, but the resistance is asking for something else: turn your own cities in the imperial core into a battleground. Bring the war home. Open another front. Join the liberation camp, as Al-Araj puts it, and raise hell against the world order that allowed this to happen. They must feel consequences. I believe an uprising is still possible, here in the Interior as well, but it will require us to be brave, like Gazans are.

One last thing I want to ask—as I was writing this piece, the fighting on the fronts in Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere escalated significantly. If a full-blown war erupts elsewhere, the attention of the world will shift and Gaza could be forgotten. People should fight for the lives of Lebanese people as well, but don’t stop talking about Gaza and acting for the sake of people there. The genocide there isn’t over. It might even accelerate once attention shifts away from it.

Raise your voice, raise the flag of revolution.

No voice is louder than the voice of the uprising.

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh

not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.”

-Refaat Alareer, (1979-2023), writer and poet. On December 6, 2023, he was murdered by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza along with his brother, his sister, and their children.

Bibliography

• Rev & Reve, The Gaza ghetto uprising [YouTube]
• From the Periphery, Understanding Hamas: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives [YouTube]
• Anonymous, “Hamas, Anarchists in the West, and Palestine solidarity”
• Bassel Al-Araj, “Why do we go to War?”
• Bassel Al-Araj, Live Like a Porcupine, Fight Like a Flea
• Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”
• Ilan Pappe, “The Collapse of Zionism”
• Aufheben, “Behind the 21st century intifada”
• Budour Hassan, “The Colour Brown: De-Colonizing Anarchism and Challenging White Hegemony”
• Serafinski, Blessed is the Flame
• Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
• Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
• Edward Said, The Palestine Question
• Edward Said, Orientalism
• Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
• Dana El-Kurd, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine

_____

NOTES

1. According to official statics from Gaza’s Ministry of Health. In addition to that number, more than 10,000 are missing, and it is unknown how many more are still buried under the rubble. It’s important to remember that Israel systematically destroyed Gaza’s health care system, bringing it to near collapse, and since then, the numbers are stuck at around 40,000. Other estimates state a much higher number. 
2. Translated by Resistance News Network. 
3. This front has escalated and currently the future for people in Lebanon is uncertain. On September 23, an IDF attack on Lebanon killed at least 570 people. On September 27, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, was assassinated, and millions in Lebanon are uprooted from their homes. Now Israel is invading south Lebanon. 
4. “I no longer see this as a conflict between Arabs and Jews, between Israeli and Palestinian. I have abandoned this duality, this naïve oversimplification of the conflict. I have become convinced of Ali Shariati and Frantz Fanon’s divisions of the world (into a colonial camp and a liberation camp). In each of the two camps, you will find people of all religions, languages, races, ethnicities, colors, and classes. In this conflict, for example, you will find people of our own skin standing rudely in the other camp, and at the same time you will find Jews standing in our camp.” -Bassel Al-Araj 
5. This is a touchy subject. Hamas initially supported the Syrian revolution back in 2012 and broke ties with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. This move severed the financial support that the movement received from Iran. A decade later, in a controversial statement, Hamas restored relations with Assad. The political chaos and shifting of alliances in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, the military coup against Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and the closing of Gaza’s tunnels on the Egyptian side, and the normalization pacts between various local regimes with Israel all served to isolate Hamas and force it to “pick a side.” In either case, I believe that, just as anarchists and anti-authoritarians in the West were able to understand the decision made by people in Rojava to accept American aid while facing the genocidal army of ISIS in Kobane, they can also understand the decisions made by Palestinians under difficult conditions. Until we have built a Liberation International that can offer actual material support to struggles on the ground, there will be a limit to how much we can criticize decisions made by those facing the threat of annihilation, caught between competing empires and regional orders. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize at all, but we should at least do so with nuance and context. 
6. This is the official Israeli term. 
7. Under neoliberal global capitalism, ethnic cleansing can be privatized as well. Judaization attempts can be under the management of settler organizations or real estate agents, thus allowing the issue to be presented as a simple real estate dispute. The involvement of American settler organizations in the attempts to evict Palestinian residents in east Jerusalem, and gentrification in Jaffa and certain neighborhoods in Haifa, is intrinsically linked to decades-long ethnic cleansing campaigns, under different faces, as colonial systems adapt to new opportunities and circumstances. 
8. There was only half a year, in 1966, when Israel wasn’t imposing military rule on Palestinians. Internal communities of uprooted people inside what became Israel were under military rule until 1966; then Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza a year later and imposed military rule there. 

SOURCE

https://crimethinc.com/2024/10/03/ya-ghazze-habibti-gaza-my-love-understanding-the-genocide-in-palestine

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Geopolitics for anarchists?

Geopolitics tends to be a field of analysis for experts and journalists interested in the competing fortunes of nation-states, their alliances and institutions. They bring to it a level of strategizing similar to sports commentators at Sunday football: they understand the repertoire of plays, they can suss out strengths and weaknesses, but they will never deconstruct the history of the game, ask about the relationship between the bench and the field, the coach and the owner, the spectators and the players (that is, beyond a democratic spectacle: do they get along? are the fans happy with their team?). They will not dissect the architecture of the stadium or the commercial break, and they certainly will not wonder, is there another kind of game we could be playing? They need the game to go on forever. If the game stops, they disappear.

Some anarchists might think, if we want to abolish all nation-states, why engage with their irrelevant strategy games? Why understand them on their own terms?

It is absolutely true that anarchists will never show up as a player on the Risk board of geopolitics. We have entirely been drawn off that map. And that is as it should be. If we are anarchists, we are approaching strategy and power from a completely different place, and with completely different desires and methods.

But currently, it is the geopolitical system of states and capitalism that is most active in producing the future we are forced to inhabit. Knowing what range of futures are likely helps us understand the system we are up against and it helps us prepare.

If you think the zombie apocalypse—or really any apocalypse movie—presents a realistic scenario for what systemic collapse looks like, then you will be engaged in the wrong kind of preparation.

Over the last two decades, I’ve seen numerous anarchists make serious predictions about where we were headed, and what dangers we faced. This is a bold thing to do, and a good thing, because it allows us to test our theories. All the predictions I remember have turned out to be wrong.

• Trump did not launch a coup: in fact, John Bolton was speaking from experience when he said a coup requires a great deal more organization.
• Fascists are not close to taking over: they are primarily a danger for people at the street level and in the way they push the center rightward in terms of acceptable policy for a democratic government to enact.
• Promoting antifascism in the midst of a growing antiracist movement was a mistake, a step backwards. As it did in its previous iterations, antifascism decentered questions of whiteness and colonialism and allowed the Left to gain ground in what had previously been anti-state movements: it left us flatfooted when real fascism faltered but the democratic State plowed forward.
• Democracy is facing a crisis, but it still poses the biggest danger to us: spreading this awareness more generally might have saved some of our most powerful movements—in Chile and in Greece—from falling into fatal strategic dead ends. It would also have improved the initial framing of the Occupy and 15M movements, allowing them to develop in far more radical directions.
• “Late capitalism” or “the final stage of capitalism” were declared after WWI and it’s still chugging along. Discarding Marxism would allow us to more clearly see capitalism’s vital strategic, state-driven element: states and their institutions proactively open up new territories to ensure capitalist expansion.
• Being on the look-out for these new frontiers would have given us a head start in identifying the mainstream climate movement and green energy as the biggest threats to life on this planet. Now, we have to play catch up.

It worries me immensely that, as far as I have seen, people who made false predictions didn’t own up to their mistakes. Doing so would have been brave, honest, and it would have strengthened us immensely, giving us more chances to sharpen our theoretical tools, to hone our strategic intuition.

And I think that ego, that headlong retreat from our mistakes, has been a major factor shunting radicals around the world into even bigger mistakes, obvious mistakes. Frustrated, would-be revolutionaries are turning to single-issue activism, municipal democracy, or the latest Stalinist cults with robustly defined organizations, a carefully curated prole machismo, but no actual engagement or relevance to social conflict.

Which way the world system?

To summarize, a world system is a system that understands itself as global and that mediates political conflict and the flow of resources and information in accordance with a certain logic. Each successive world system has a leading state, but that leader does not have the power to control everything that happens in the world system: rather, they are the architect who at a critical moment achieves the power and legitimacy, the hegemony, to design a new world system that all the relevant players agree to take part in.

After World War II, the US took over from the UK and became the architect of the next world system, centered around a putatively universal order of states governed by the UN, headquartered in New York, and a capitalist regime of free trade and investment overseen by the Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF.

The US and its closest allies are no longer the main motors of economic growth, and the share of new investments they capture is diminishing. Politically, the NATO bloc had been expanding its web of alliances into territory that had long belonged in the Russian sphere of influence. Russia is pushing back in Ukraine, but divisions within NATO and the EU have recently immobilized those alliances, so that while Russia continues to receive armaments and financial support from its allies, critical funding for Ukraine has stalled.

Elsewhere, Russia has suffered humiliating defeats, as in its inability to support Armenia against the expansionism of Azerbaijan, which is backed by Turkey. When Turkey joined NATO during the Cold War, this was a major victory for the military alliance as it constituted a partial encirclement of Russia. But now, Turkey is acting on a strategic level like a non-aligned country, even as it continues to wield the ability to block consensus within NATO.

In the Cold War, the non-aligned countries consisted of states that were far weaker economically and militarily than the US and Russia, but that could incrementally improve their position by keeping their doors open to both blocs, essentially seeing who would give them a better deal.

So Turkey is effectively pursuing its own interests, against both the US/EU and against Russia, as well as other mid-weight rivals to its south and east, for example in the way it has weaponized Sunni fundamentalist groups related to the Islamic State against both Iran and the Kurds.

Futures

When a world system is faltering, the general options are:

a) the system successfully renovates and reinvents itself, with the old leader launching a reformed architecture

b) a new leader secures the power and legitimacy to win adherence to a new architecture, beginning a new world system

c) people increase their ability to fight back against the State and we win a global revolution, destroying the world system and preventing a new one from taking its place

d) the current world system remains in place, corroding and descending increasingly into civil war until eventually option a, b, or c occurs.

A New American Century

I’m making this reference to the Project for a New American Century, the group of neoconservative intellectuals who backed Bush II and believed they had the strategic plan for revitalizing the US as the undisputed world leader, ironically. The reason is that no player has done more than the US to undermine US hegemony.

The foreign and economic policy championed by Bush II and carried on in some ways by Trump and in other ways by Biden, has probably destroyed any chance the US has of restoring the global architecture that it put in place on the heels of its triumph over the Nazis.

The fact that no one in the US or British political elite seem aware of this fact only reconfirms it. And though the level of self-defeating ignorance is astounding, it should not be surprising, as capitalists usually only understand capitalism at a superficial level, and statists usually only understand the State at a superficial level, similar to sports commentators going over the latest plays.

When the US was at its most powerful, in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, immediately after winning the Cold War, the hubris of the neoconservative movement in the political class, and the unbridled avarice of the neoliberal technocracy amongst the financial institutions, directly destroyed the basis for US hegemony.

The IMF, G7, and the whole circus of humanitarian NGOs and international investors were blatant in the ways they benefited from corruption, authoritarian regimes, and internecine civil wars in recently decolonized countries; how by “development” they meant absolute dependence on a single export commodity, so that every poor country was not only completely vulnerable to political pressure from the US and Europe, they might also be plunged into starvation based on the vagaries of the currency market; and how, after the ‘70s, what they were most interested in was making cutthroat profit on the basis of sheer financial speculation rather than any productive growth that, from a capitalist standpoint, could be seen as sustainable. In other words, the entire Lawrence Summers crowd didn’t hide the fact that they were absolute vampires who didn’t even believe their own dogma, and the entire Rumsfeld and Bolton crowd couldn’t hide how ignorant they were about the world, about politics, and about the countries they believed they could dominate.

US power was not masked any better on the political stage.

The US and UK could have accepted occasional disappointments, not always getting their favored outcomes in international conflicts. This theater of “playing fair” could have generated widespread faith in and reliance on the United Nations framework. And this would have buttressed US power in the long run, since the UN was authored by the US and it headquarters global politics in New York City. But instead, they misunderstood the hegemonic and relational nature of power, and thought that having an unprecedented amount of power meant that they could act unilaterally without undermining the basis of that power.

This would be like if Apple had gotten everyone in the world to use Apple computers, but then didn’t let people produce any media on an Apple computer that was critical of Apple. What does it matter if you trash talk X, if the only forum to do it on is X?

By unilaterally invading Iraq twice and killing millions of people, by flagrantly overthrowing social democratic (but capitalist!) regimes that didn’t favor a handpicked list of Western investors, by protecting Israel from any slightest slap on the wrist to the point where nearly the entirety of Israeli society now feels entitled to commit genocide—not out of view, the way the US sometimes does, but in front of the cameras, and they’re the ones holding the camera, smiling and cracking jokes—the US and UK have destroyed the legitimacy and functionality of their own political instrument. The US (and under its protection, Israel) flagrantly ignores UN resolutions whenever it wants. It acts like a “rogue state” within the interstate system that it designed, and designed to its advantage. And this cowboy attitude has always characterized US foreign policy (except, arguably, under FDR), but it accelerated under Reagan and especially Bush II.

Trump aped the arrogance of it with several unilateral moves, increasing blank check support to Israel, for example, and retreating from the very question of strategy with a non-interventionist tendency that left key US allies in the lurch. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has tried to press a reset button on strategic thinking, but they’re acting like it’s 1996.

Israel was once an important military laboratory for the US and a nuclear option in the world’s key oil producing hub, at a time when a pan-Arab alliance posed the threat of controlling both the oil and the Suez canal. Now, Israel is largely a liability; Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran are all aggressively trying to redraw power lines in West Asia and none of them rely exclusively on the US as a patron; Yemen is effectively threatening shipping through the Suez canal; and most West Asian oil is exported to India and East Asian economies, primarily China.

As Israel carries on with its blatant genocide against Palestinians, the UN is even proving inept at delivering humanitarian aid and barely even registers as a potential mediator. The only actors able to target Israel with any real consequences are Hizbollah, the Houthis, and Revolutionary Guard-linked militias. The chief actor in the mediation process is Qatar. In other words, all the actors who are gaining in legitimacy and power are allies of Iran, which is the only one of the three regional powers that the US has no leverage or alliance with.

Meanwhile, the US is damaging its relationship with European governments. Trump in particular showed the EU and NATO that they could not assume the US would always be reliable, and this is a direct result of the dysfunction of democracy as the world system falls apart. Democratic mechanisms still provide an important release mechanism that can pacify and incorporate resistance movements before they become revolutionary. But in the US, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, and the UK, rightwing populist electoral victories have shown that actually, democracy is dangerous to power because it is not total bullshit. Up until now, electoral promises were all rubbish because no new political administration endangered the underlying economic policies of neoliberalism. The technocrats didn’t have to worry: their machine would keep humming along.

Even progressive electoral victories in Greece, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere let the capitalists know: nothing to worry about here. And the democratic states have proved capable of dismantling actually fascist movements like Golden Dawn in Greece before they proved too much of a threat. But the rightwing white populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Johnson not only eroded the functionality of democratic governance, they also threatened the stability of the technocratic status quo, scaring the hell out of investors who had been living in a Candyland made just for them, and they burst the assumed durability of key political formations like the European Union or the US-European alliance.

Europe—long a valuable container for cultural and political legitimacy, given the white supremacy at the heart of the world system—has for the first time in nearly a century had to consider its separate interests, and this is already showing up in a markedly different approach towards China. In the US, the political elite already consider China an adversary worthy of a new Cold War, whereas in Europe, China is considered a partially reliable strategic partner. If something does not change quickly, the US will be relegated to the same status.

And without reliable US support, the EU will have to bring itself up to war readiness, able to dissuade Russia from further invasions. In order to find a balance that Russia won’t risk upsetting, that may mean abandoning Ukraine to a permanent partition.

From the perspective of US power, none of this looks good. To have any chance of renovating the world system it authored, the US would need to make grand gestures in order to expiate their rotten brand:

• supporting Palestinian statehood and breaking Israeli public support for its current ruling class by wrecking the Israeli economy
• normalizing relations with China and Iran but ensuring favorable investment and trade deals with putative democracies like India, Taiwan, and South Korea
• making a convincing, substantial pitch for rebranded international investment that distinguishes itself from the mercenary monetary policy of the IMF by assuring more autonomy for “sustainable development” directed by the local ruling classes of formerly colonized countries, etc.
• unveiling a convincing plan for a global transition to green energy that accelerates the current wave of profitable investment, extraction, and production, while also including a “global justice” element that gives meaningful resources to poor countries to participate in the transition and improve their economic standing

And internally:

• co-opting abolition for the second time (the first time being in 1865) by decriminalizing drugs, eliminating prison for all nonviolent offenders, and expanding the use of unarmed neighborhood patrol cops
• instituting universal healthcare.

The likelihood of this happening, however, seems minuscule, given how little awareness the current ruling class has of all the ways they are sabotaging their own power. They even seem to think that projecting force is the way for them to stay in control. But no one is contesting that the US has the strongest military in the world. They don’t need to. All rivals need to show is that the US military is not effective at creating the outcomes desired by its ruling class. That was demonstrated in Afghanistan. The question was brought to a costly standstill in Iraq. And now the US is stomping up and down the Red Sea and the Mediterranean firing missiles into Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, puffing out its chest and demonstrating that if you hit me with a straw I’ll hit you with a hammer but what they’re actually showing is their ineffectiveness, their willingness to destabilize the region out of pure hubris, and their permanent contempt for any other country’s sovereignty, even that of their allies. This seriously damages faith in the US as a potential world leader because one of the key changes from the British world system to the American world system was decolonization, and in the wake of World War II the US positioned itself as a champion of freedom from dictatorship and freedom from aggression.

US force is irrelevant. For two years, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill, the second strongest military in the world, destroying million dollar Russian tanks with thousand dollar drones. The Houthis are now using drones to threaten shipping in one of the most important commercial waterways in the global economy. The effectiveness of multibillion dollar US missile defense systems is moderate. Meanwhile, US missile strikes from bases, ships, and planes all across the region are worse than ineffective, because they are strengthening rivals and forcing nonaligned countries to realign themselves at a more cautious distance from both the US and Israel.

Instead of projecting force, the US needs to be projecting intelligence, creating solutions to the many crises pummeling the world system. The current US ruling class does not see the actual problems, and is not proposing any real solutions. The chance of a change of guard that pushes the US and European elite in a more intelligent direction is extremely low, based on a glance at the electoral map.

From the Trumps, throwing gasoline on the fire at home and abroad, to the Bidens, trying the same old techniques and hoping for different results, the political mainstream is at war with itself. Politicians, technocrats, and investors would receive the kind of proposals actually needed to save the current world system like some bizarre mix of treason, progressive nonsense, and socialistic revolution.

A BRICS road

At this juncture it seems unlikely that the US could rescue its project of global dominance, but until an effective new world leader steps forward with a convincing new architecture, that means the current system will drag on, descending increasingly into conflict, civil war, and even a neofascist regimes in a few regions, until a decisive change occurs in one direction or another.

In the essay, “Anarchy in World Systems,” the argument is made that that next global architect would probably be China, or potentially India.

Before exploring those possibilities, let’s take a look at a feature of this theoretical framework we’re using, the world system. The most relevant theorist is Giovanni Arrighi, who was combining a largely materialist analysis of global economic flows with a largely anarchist analysis of power and social design under the modern state. He doesn’t credit the anarchists of course, but he’s an academic, so that’s to be expected.

In the first edition of the book published in 1994, Arrighi does that bold thing: he makes a prediction. And he gets it completely wrong, saying that Japan will be the architect and leader of the next world system. In a later edition of the book, however, he does the decent thing and acknowledges that he was wrong and that it would likely be China. He doesn’t, however, offer a convincing analysis of what flaw in the theory led him to make that mistake.

“Anarchy in World Systems” argues that his mistake comes from Arrighi favoring the materialist side of his own theoretical tool over the anarchist side. Capital accumulation is not the driving force of the world system. It is a necessary fuel, but capital accumulation does not happen without the architecture and the strategic planning of states. We can realize how obvious this should be if we let ourselves see, in hindsight, how ridiculous the prediction was that Japan would be the number one global power. This prediction was based on statistics for Japan’s economic growth, leaving out the non-quantifiable factor: strategic planning and power contests by states.

Japan could not possibly be the next global architect because it had never won a war against the old leader, the US, so it had no bubble of autonomy within which to begin creating a new design. Once Japan challenged the US—at a purely economic level—in the ‘80s, US planners simply turned off the faucet. After the Korean War, though, China did have that military victory, and with it a bubble of regional autonomy.

So could China be the architect of the next global system, and what would that look like?

For starters, China does not appear to have the military strength that earlier world system architects enjoyed. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the British had the most powerful fleet, giving them a global military reach, and at the end of World War II the US had the most effective military, the largest carrier fleet, nuclear bombs, long range bombers, and military bases with runways large enough for these bombers, all across the world.

Today, China has advanced technology but only recently achieved a blue water fleet, and only recently went intercontinental, setting up military bases in eastern Africa. However, this distinction may not be as important as it was in the past.

There is no state that the Chinese government needs to overthrow or conquer in order to take its place as a global architect (Taiwan comes close to holding this status, although for reasons far more relevant to Chinese ruling class ideology than to China’s stature on the world stage; Taiwan, in fact, could become China’s Israel). In the current system, open warfare has shown diminishing returns. No major powers have gone head-to-head since 1945, and all the greatest interventions of the two world powers (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iraq) cost them more than they gained.

The only military capacity China would likely need to take on the role of global leader is the capacity for deterrence and for stabilization operations. Deterrence simply means that they pose enough of a military threat that no other state would directly attack China or the smaller countries that China considers to be in its primary zone of influence, more on this in a moment. Stabilization operations would require China to project force internationally to protect the flow of commerce and protect major investments. Its bases in Eastern Africa are well positioned to help it police the Red Sea and Suez Canal route through which a great deal of commerce flows between Europe and Asia.

Taking this analysis further, though, would be making the mistaken assumption that one state alone needs to be the sole military and economic powerhouse to launch a new world system. From the Westphalia system to the United Nations, all previous world systems relied on a strong degree of cooperation (between nation-states), and if not consensus, then at least consent.

We can see this more clearly when we look at BRICS, which is the most likely vehicle currently prefiguring a new world system. BRICS, together with the New Development Bank and other linked institutions, provide a counterweight to the G7 and the IMF. They are organized by the powerhouses of the so-called developing world: Brazil, Russia, India, and China starting in 2009, with South Africa added a year later. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates joined at the beginning of this year.

Clearly, BRICS is achieving important growth, with the original five constituting 45% of the world’s population and 33% of the world’s GDP (or 27% if not adjusted for purchasing power parity). Compare that to NATO (which is a military alliance and not an economic alliance like BRICS), with 31 members who account for 55% of global military spending, 12% of the world population, and over a third of the world’s GDP.

Meanwhile, the New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, has total capital of $100 billion, with $34 billion in authorized lending annually. This is much less than the $932 billion that make up the IMF’s total resources, but is still nothing to sneeze at.

Both the UN and IMF were founded inside the US (with the first UN General Assembly convening in the UK, the closest US ally). The main US rival, the USSR, was included in the UN, since the purpose was to be a universal body for all modern states, but the US consistently used the UN to constrain its rivals, or immobilized the UN when it couldn’t get its way. And the USSR was not initially included in the IMF and similar financial institutions, though over time they were invited and integrated. In other words, the US system purported to be universal, just in ways that subtly benefited the US and its allies.

BRICS, on the other hand, is pursuing a different strategy. The alliance gives itself the possibility of being counterhegemonic by not pretending to be universal. It is very explicitly a counterweight to the dominant economic institutions and alliances (the G7 and IMF). And yet, it offers more meaningful collaboration. Especially at its founding in 2009, China was the economic powerhouse of the alliance. China has ongoing political and economic rivalries, as well as border disputes, with both Russia and India. Yet both of those countries were invited to form the ground floor, and the founding summit was held not in China but in Russia (though, not without significance, in Yekaterinburg, which is in Asia).

There is nothing revolutionary about the Chinese-authored system. It is absolutely a continuation of the global system of capitalism that has ruled the world with a tighter and tighter grip since the 1500s.

It does demonstrate some different organizing principles, though. We can identify the following principles in the US-led system.

national decolonization: the US distinguished itself from Great Britain, the biggest colonizer in world history, by championing the cause of decolonization… within a certain framework. Every nation-state should have a government along Western lines, but colonized populations were not allowed to self-define. The borders were usually defined by the former colonizers, and independence would only be granted once the former colonizers and the US decided that a new (local) ruling class was ready. Thus, most oppressive power dynamics from the colonial era carried over after decolonization.

neoliberalism: the IMF and WTO pushed world economies away from protectionism and towards a liberalization of monetary policy, so that in theory, capitalists anywhere in the world could invest anywhere else in the world. The concept of a “free market” was pure mythology, though, as large investments in poorer countries tended to have monopolistic characteristics, and powerful countries could wreck the currencies of less powerful countries. Furthermore, investments in formerly colonized countries tended to achieve profit in a purely speculative, financial way, and/or by reinforcing single export/extractivist/plantation economies.

democracy and human rights: the US pushed for universal democracy and guaranteed human rights. However, these proved the most imperfect of all the organizing principles. Investors often found it more expedient to work with dictatorships, especially when their goal was quick profit or the construction of highly destructive megaprojects. And the US, British, French, Dutch, and Belgian political elite were too jealous of their hold on power to countenance free elections if it meant a government gained power that was less docile or didn’t give favoritism to the right investors. As such, these NATO states in particular engaged in coups and supported dictatorships across the world, respectively in “America’s backyard” or in former colonies across Africa and Asia. As for human rights, it has proven to be a largely meaningless concept in hierarchical societies that produce vast inequality.

I would love to see a better analysis, but I believe the organizing principles being promoted by China can be summarized as the following.

state sovereignty: though China engages in a great deal of ethnic cleansing and should be qualified as a settler state in at least half its claimed territory, and Xi himself could accurately be described as a very nationalist socialist, China does not place emphasis on the nation-state, per se, as an organizing principle globally. The far more important principle is state sovereignty: within its borders, a state has the legitimacy to do whatever it wants. It can impose ethnic homogeneity to constitute itself as a nation, it can do away with ideas of nation entirely. It isn’t anyone else’s business. Presumably, disagreement around existing borders between sovereign states should be settled through bilateral diplomacy. Also presumably, as their military power grows, the Chinese ruling class will support coups and regime change in weaker countries throughout Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and Africa, but they will need to find an effective way of governing or justifying these exceptional actions.

infrastructural investment: China will continue to support the global discourse of free trade, walking the usual balance between giving strategic support to important domestic companies and ensuring the possibility for governments to attract investment from anywhere in the world, the right of investors to invest anywhere in the world. But unlike a focus on pure profit, as under the US system, there may be a real shift towards promoting sustained economic growth, initially achieved through major infrastructural “improvement” in post-colonial countries. In other words, China—and India, and Brazil—will likely seek to achieve an expansion in real production, not just domestically, but around the world.

quality of life: given their technocratic background, the Chinese ruling class is likely to favor an emphasis on quality of life over one on human rights. Quality of life, according to the capitalist religion, is something that can be measured quantitatively, unlike human rights. And promoting (this view of) quality of life dovetails with increased investment in advancing infrastructure, whereas the figure of human rights encourages violations of other states’ sovereignty. Human rights is a holdover from the paternalism of colonial, Christian countries who need to make sure colonized people have learned how to recite the proper dogmas before they can be trusted with independence. Quality of life, however, can be a point of common ground between diplomats working for a political order based on absolute state sovereignty, and technocrats and investors working to achieve economic growth through infrastructural investment. Promising a higher quality of life can also be an effective strategy for pacifying potentially threatening popular movements.

Both the paradigm and the resources that BRICS has to offer are proving attractive. Just this year, Iran was one of multiple new countries to join BRICS, flaunting US attempts to isolate Tehran.

What would the tipping point look like, heralding the beginning of a new world system?

BRICS wouldn’t necessarily be the vehicle for the new world system, especially since it was designed as an economic and political counterweight within the current world system. But similar to the relation between the League of Nations and the United Nations, it gives a good indication of what the new system would look like.

It could easily kick off as an alliance or treaty after a global recession and the spread of one or two regional wars. The treaty or alliance would include language around a respect for borders and the internal sovereignty of states, and a commitment to mediation instead of warfare. It could be cast as a win-win (rather than the negative sum game of open war) if it were the expansion of an already existing, successful alliance between economic powerhouses. This alliance would open an invitation to all other countries, requiring a recommitment to free trade while announcing major investments as an incentive. Rather than the predatory lending of the IMF, this investment would be putatively designed to modernize infrastructure around the world and increase quality of life.

Original signatories to this alliance would probably have to include China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Egypt, maybe Argentina and Saudi Arabia, and—critically—the European Union, or at least Germany and France. As noted, the EU has already begun distancing itself from the US and keeping the doors open for good relations with China.

An important change that might tilt the scales could be the US defaulting on its debt in a future recession, or any continuation of unhinged US military aggression around the world, without a matching commitment to its historical allies.

The new alliance would begin among a self-selecting group of countries, but it would open itself up globally and quickly eclipse the UN and IMF in legitimacy, functionality, and resources.

What early tensions would such a world system face? Not that the Paris Agreement or UN are having any effect on mitigating planetary disaster, but the BRICS emphasis on using “sovereign resources” (fossil fuels) to fund development and pay for an energy transition directly block any real alternatives for the planet. This means accelerated and catastrophic climate change would be the backdrop of the new world system. Weather changes are proving most catastrophic for middle latitude countries, but these are the very countries that have to pull the weight of inaugurating a new world system.

Chinese and Indian investment in Africa would likely retain an overtly colonial character (moreso, for example, than Brazilian investment in Latin America), preventing the new system from benefiting from a change in branding or an increased legitimacy.

Power struggles among the most powerful members of the alliance could prove destabilizing, especially as India (a rightwing democracy) overtakes China in economic growth. As the resistance movement in Hong Kong demonstrated, China, as an autocracy, has fewer options for incorporating rebellion. If they could not repress a subversive movement with police force, CCP leadership might split and the system would crack.

Also, dictatorial power arrangements rarely survive strong leaders. Granted, Xi is not a dictator in the way that Hitler and Franco were. There is a very strong party apparatus behind him and he has consolidated his power in the Party over the last decade.

India will not fall apart after Modi. but Russia could easily fall apart after Putin. With China, it’s hard to say, because earlier administrations of the CCP lacked Xi’s political acumen, his ability to make aggressive calculations that hone in on how the Chinese state could increase its power without accepting any of the options on the table (e.g. neither Maoism nor a new Open Door Policy).

In other words, Xi and his advisers can think in a new paradigm, a quality necessary for being able to design a new world system. But part of Xi’s system of governance has required an intolerance for any disobedience or dissent, which will make an effective succession much more difficult when Xi is gone. The critical question is, does robust debate happen in secret at the upper and intermediate levels of the CCP, with a projection of consensus and unity in public? Or does Xi’s governing method breed a culture of acquiescent bureaucrats who cannot challenge a bad idea? If the latter, China might be able to help launch a new world system while Xi is in charge, but they might not remain the dominant member of the system’s central alliance.

Talking about a revolution

Honestly, the only reason I gave a bump to the probability of a successful global revolution is because global power systems are facing more friction and becoming unable to project stability. Not because we’re getting stronger.

And the main reasons we are not getting stronger under our own steam is because we have lost memory and imagination.

We rarely know how to achieve any continuity from one generation to the next within the alienation and scarcity of capitalism, so we commit the same mistakes again and again. And under the colonial spirituality of rationalism we have forgotten that the real world cannot exist without imaginary worlds. We let capitalism do all our imagining for us until our imaginations become atrophied, so we can no longer turn to revolution as a meaningful concept because barely anyone knows how to imagine a revolution anymore.

Once we get through the early moments of revolution in which we can carry ourselves solely on passion, spontaneous intelligence, and our own tactical innovation, we have not imagined what steps to take next. So, we do not take them. We either become passive, or exhausted, or we try repeating the exact same dance moves that brought us to that place. Or we try an opposite set of dance moves (which usually bring us to a much worse place).

This is unfortunate because we have the most latitude to build a revolution in a moment like this, when one world system is falling apart, and before it rejuvenates itself or before the next system has the chance to fully animate the replacement.

To not squander our chances, though, we need to remember a great many things:

• Democracy is our enemy. Supporting democracy only turns us into innovative designers for the rejuvenation of the American project.
• The Right and the Left are the two hands of the State, equally dangerous. The real line of conflict runs between above and below. However, Right and Left are not the same. The followers of the Left are mostly sincere. We need to be present to them to help spread meaningful forms of revolt, and we need to show them the true nature of their leaders. As for the Right, we must always attack its lies and paranoias. The key is to leave the door open for followers of the Right to betray authority, but never accommodating their anxieties. We need to build power based on expansive solidarity to show them what that could look like, but they need to take the step of abandoning identities based on oppression.
• Marxism betrayed the strongest revolutionary movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It does not deserve any more chances. Vanguards, authoritarian parties, and reforms betrayed the strongest social movements of the last 100 years. They do not deserve any more chances.
• Abolition already happened, but because it was partial, it only changed the institutions of oppression without ending oppression itself. Meaningful abolition needs to identify the shared root of exploitation and white supremacy (many of today’s abolitionists are already preparing the groundwork for a second major defeat-in-victory).
• Decolonization already happened. But because it was political, it only spread the colony, training the colonized to act like their colonizers. To destroy colonialism, its beginning points and the vehicles for its adaptation need to be destroyed.
• A revolution needs to enact solidarity between all people, but people need to be honest about where they are coming from. People who bear a middle class culture need to unlearn it, as it manifests in a politics of comfort: building informal social power, flattening contradictions, and avoiding conflict. Currently, its crusade is to destroy practices of transformative justice—and the difficult experiences those practices come from—in favor of the kind of attitudes (simultaneously fragile and vicious) that flourish on social media.
• Revolution is a question of organization, but nearly everyone who poses it this way is already limiting themselves to a counterrevolutionary idea of organization.
• There is another way of organizing ourselves, of making plans, of taking strategic steps. And there always has been.

I’ve been trying to develop these arguments in my writing, and it is a major focus of my forthcoming projects. But if you have a specific question, want me to elaborate on something, drop a comment, and I’ll respond if I’m able.

https://petergelderloos.substack.com

Additionally, something I’m less able to contribute to: Black and Indigenous anarchisms need more space and more support. To be truly successful, any revolutionary approach needs to be multiple, it needs to be anticolonial, and it needs to understand the origins of oppression. The specific historical lineage of anarchism that was born in Europe is not sufficient, not for those of us trapped within whiteness and certainly not for everybody else.

For more on these directions, check out Klee Benally’s No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred

Modibo Kadalie, Intimate Direct Democracy

Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson, As Black As Resistance

and William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map

Finally, here is a thought-provoking article about solidarity with both the Kurds and the Palestinians—two peoples facing genocide—and a call for internationalism from below rather than an internationalism that privileges state actors.

Ozlem Goner, “Internationalism beyond the Geopolitics of States and Solidarity in ‘Complex’ Situations”

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https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/geopolitics-for-2024

Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloos is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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By Zubayr Alikhan

On October 7, 2023, the Palestinians launched the greatest decolonial operation in Palestine’s history. They sawed off their shackles, tore down their cage, and seared through the iron walls. The Palestinians took to the skies. They blinded cameras, severed communications, and penetrated settlements. They paralyzed a nuclear settler colony and brought the empire to its knees. They severed the umbilical cord of impregnability, safety, and sacrosanct dominion, vital to all colonial projects. 

Immediately, imperial scribes and politicians, colonial settlers and administrators, conservatives and liberals — especially liberals — went to work. Their task was two-fold: ensure the world sees the natives as the savage hoards, barbarians, animals, the quintessence of evil — here, the liberals quickly forgot their political correctness and rushed to condemn — and simultaneously re-establish dominion.

The first took the world by storm, but for any of sound mind, was always fallacious and has now been tirelessly and thoroughly debunked. The second however, permeated the minds of many, even the potentially well-meaning, unnoticed. This re-establishment of imperium has manifested itself in several ways: the Palestinians could not have broken out themselves, they could not have penetrated the iron dome, Israel’s security systems are too advanced to have been surpassed or disarmed — Israel “let them do it.”

Without missing a beat, an unprecedented operation that shattered the notion of imperial invincibility was recast as an imperial tool. It was part of a larger master plan to further entrench and expand dominion — the natives were senseless pawns at the disposal of an all-knowing, intellectually supreme colonial power. From this strain of thought — and into it — expound several other truths, half-truths, and lies that evidence it and solidify its grasp. Israel actually supports and created Hamas, some say. Netanyahu planned this to win the upcoming election, others maintain. And my personal favorite — particularly because it has now been fleshed outby the New York Times‘s Zionist stenographers — Israel knew about this all along.

Surely, the next discovery shall be that Israel knew of the Al-Aqsa Flood before the Palestinians themselves, that they concocted it, introduced it to Hamas, and planted it in Palestinian minds. Undergirding all of this — and constituting these theories’ collective raison d’être —is the unthinkability of slave (or native) revolt. 

The unthinkability of slave revolt is a concept introduced by Michel-Rolph Trouillot to explain Western Imperial responses, silences, and silencing of the Haitian Revolution. While Trouillot uses it in relation to the imperialists of the 18^th century, this unthinkability applies seamlessness to the present — the empire, its ideologies, its colonialism, its genocides, and its colonies are not histories to be studied, but material realities and violence experienced today.

At the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, the most common reaction in France, England, Spain, and the U.S. was disbelief. The news was false. The facts — much like those of the Al-Aqsa Flood — were too unlikely. In any case, the facts had to be false, because the blacks, like the Palestinians, were mindless beasts, savages whipped into docility, lazy, disorganized, and inferior — they were flatly incapable of thinking up such an operation, much less organizing themselves or carrying it out.

Even if they had somehow conjured spirits and performed these miracles, the intellectual, military, economic, and racial superiority of the whites ensured that they would swiftly be quelled, shackled, and put to work once more. The issue, however, was precisely that the West was reacting — after the fact — and devising explanations as the blacks and Palestinians enacted the unthinkable, actively neutralized colonial forces, and reclaimed lands.

Slowly and begrudgingly, the reality of the operations sank in. News of merciless black hoards massacring whites reached Europe, and the Zionists proclaimed the “Horrors of St. Domingo,” anew. The news then had to be rationalized a different way — the plain facts were, are, still unthinkable. Thus, the revolution was “an unfortunate repercussion of planters’ miscalculations,” the Al-Aqsa Flood was the result of Israel’s “yearslong cascade of missteps,” “it did not aim at revolutionary change,” it did not aim at decolonization, “it was not supported by a majority of the slave population,” it was Hamas acting alone and the Palestinians did not support them, “it was due to outside agitators,” Iran instigated it, “it was the…consequence of various conspiracies connived by non-slaves,” there were “leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.” With the blacks and Palestinians intellectually nil, “every party chose its favourite enemy as the most likely conspirator…[and] accused each other of being the brains behind the revolt.” In Haiti, it was the British, Royalists, and mullattos; in Palestine, Iran was the mastermind, and behind them, Russia and China. 

Here, some will likely rush in to hurl abuse or lay the charge of naivety for my disregarding of the glaring facts (as though I were the empire) of Zionist knowledge. I shall clarify. None of what I have written is to say that the Zionist regime definitively did not know — though my gut instinct still hesitates to believe they did — but rather that the operation was unthinkable for them, that their knowing/unknowing is irrelevant, and that the unfolding of events and their outcomes lies not in their omnipotent hands, but those of the Palestinians, the owners of the land, and the resistance.

Interestingly, amidst all the imperial tachygraphy work presented in the Times investigation of the Al-Aqsa Flood, there is one line that has been overlooked and discounted most in the effort to bombard the ground-breaking successes of October 7 back into the realm of the imperium, under siege, or better, out of memory.

This line, then, can be gleaned to possess potential truth:

“[Israel maintained the] fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so…[a] belief so ingrained in the Israeli government…that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.”

Note the perception of Palestinian incapability — and docility through fear — as well as the acknowledgment that such an operation was so viscerally unthinkable that the Zionists, like the Europeans of 1792, belied their own eyes. Such is the arrogance of empire, and therein lies its destruction. 

Imperialism rests on the idea of it, the centrality and supremacy of the self over those awaiting conquest and civilization. The primariness of the empire relies on the secondariness of the Other. Imperial superiority relies on native inferiority. Yet, paradoxically, this secondariness and inferiority is indispensable to the primariness and superiority of the European and of empire. Events like the Haitian Revolution, the Milk Bar Bombing, and the Al-Aqsa Flood, invert, revert, or shatter these hierarchies completely.

Hence, for the native, this violence is a “cleansing force,” it frees him “from his inferiority complex and his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” To follow this through, if the native is freed from his inferiority complex, he is no longer inferior; if he is no longer inferior, the colonizer is not superior; if the colonizer is not superior, then the idea of empire is compromised, the idols collapse, and imperialism falls.

Thus, Fanon writes, “it is precisely at the moment he [the native] realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure his victory.” The function of the rationalizing theories elucidating the unthinkable then becomes apparent — it is the preservation of dominion, of hierarchy, of settler-futurity, of the imperial self.

The threat posed by any native act of resistance anywhere in the colonized world is not merely a material threat to its direct target or local lordship but an existential scourge against the empire and imperialism as a whole. In the ever-pertinent words of Ghassan Kanafani, “Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.” 

I must conclude with an explanation. The idea for this piece first came to me on October 7. I have contemplated writing it ever since but found myself barred by the devastation of genocide. How can I write about anything besides the genocide? Indeed, as you have been reading this piece, a Palestinian child — the soul of someone’s soul — was murdered in Gaza. Every 7 minutes. As the days blurred into months, to think, speak, or write about anything else felt increasingly inappropriate, even immoral. After endless debate, I remembered the pattern of colonial history — following a native act of resistance comes the settler colony’s most ferocious and unbridled brutality. It is designed to teach a lesson, to make the native forget his triumphs — however small — so as to engulf him in fire and drown him in blood until he is consumed. This erasure and conquest cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.

As we watch news agencies, politicians, ideologues, and spectators explain the unprecedented away, stripping the Palestinians of agency — and humanity — we must recognize the sanitizing, civilizing, and trivializing cogs of the imperial machine at play. As the bombs drop on Gaza, seeking to obliterate the Palestinians’ memory of their victory, bury their glimpse of liberation in the rubble, and erase the world’s memory of their presence, we must not forget. On October 7, Palestine toppled the imperial world order, and today, or tomorrow, in ten years or a hundred, it will be free.

____

Zubayr Alikhan is a writer and activist whose primary focus is on Indigenous liberation and decolonisation around the world. He writes on issues highlighting settler-colonial terror and championing indigenous resistance.

SOURCE: https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/the-unthinkability-of-slave-revolt/

The post The unthinkability of slave revolt appeared first on Void Network.

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed to a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per-capita income from 1757 to 1947.[1]

Churchill, explaining why he defended the stockpiling of food within Britain, while millions died of starvation in Bengal, told his private secretary that “the Hindus were a foul race, protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due.”[2]

During its 190 years of looting and pillaging, the Indian Subcontininent as a whole underwent at least two dozen major famines, which collectively killed millions of Indians throughout the length and breadth of the land. How many millions succumbed to the famines cannot be fully ascertained. However, colonial rulers’ official numbers indicate it could be 60 million deaths. In reality, it could be significantly higher.

British colonial analysts cited droughts as the cause of fallen agricultural production that led to these famines, but that is a lie. British rulers, fighting wars in Europe and elsewhere, and colonizing parts of Africa, were exporting grains from India to keep up their colonial conquests—while famines were raging. People in the famineaffected areas, resembling skeletons covered by skin only, were wandering around, huddling in corners and dying by the millions. The Satanic nature of these British rulers cannot be overstated.

A Systematic Depopulation Policy
Although no accurate census figure is available, in the year 1750 India’s population was close to 155 million. At the time British colonial rule ended in 1947, undivided India’s population reached close to 390 million. In other words, during these 190 years of colonial looting and organized famines, India’s population rose by 240 million. Since 1947, during the next 68-year period, Indian Subcontininent’s population, including those of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, has grown to close to 1.6 billion. Thus, despite poverty and economic depravity in the post-independent Indian Subcontininent, during those 68 years population has grown by almost 1.2 billion.

Records show that during the post-independence period, the Subcontininent has undergone drought conditions in parts of the land from time to time, but there was no famine, although thousands still die in the Subcontininent annually due to the lack of adequate amount of food, a poor food distribution system, and lack of sufficient nourishment. It is also to be noted that before the British colonials’ jackboots got firmly planted in India, famines had occurred but with much less frequency—maybe once in a century.

There was indeed no reason for these famines to occur They occurred only because The Empire engineered them, intending to strengthen the Empire by ruthless looting and adoption of an unstated policy to depopulate India. This, they believed would bring down the Empire’s cost of sustaining India.

Take, for instance, the case of Bengal, which is in the eastern part of the Subcontininent where the British East India Company (HEIC, Honorable East India Company, according to Elizabeth I’s charter) had first planted its jackboots in 1757. The rapacious looters, under the leadership of Robert Clive—a degenerate and opium addict, who blew his brains out in 1774 in the London Berkley Square residence he had procured with the benefits of his looting—got control of what is now West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, and Odisha (earlier, Orissa), in 1765. At the time, historical records indicate India represented close to 25% of the world’s GDP, second only to China, while Britain had a paltry 2%. Bengal was the richest of the Indian provinces.

Following his securing control of Bengal by ousting the Nawab in a devious battle at Plassey (Palashi), Clive placed a puppet on the throne, paid him off, and negotiated an agreement with him for the HEIC to become the sole tax collector, while leaving the nominal responsibility for government to his puppet. That arrangement lasted for a century, as more and more Indian states were bankrupted to facilitate future famines. The tax money went into British coffers, while millions were starved to death in Bengal and Bihar.

Clive, who was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1768 and whose statue stands near the British Empire’s evil center, Whitehall, near the Cabinet War Room, had this to say in his defense when the British Parliament, playing “fair,” accused him of looting and other abuses in India:

Consider the situation which the Victory of Plassey had placed on me. A great Prince was dependent upon my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! By God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.

However, Clive was not the only murderous British colonial ruler. The British Empire had sent one butcher after another to India, all of whom engineered looting and its consequent depopulation.

By 1770, when the first great famine occurred in Bengal, the province had been looted to the core. What followed was sheer horror. Here is how John Fiske in his American Philosopher in the Unseen World depicted the Bengal famine:

All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field. . . . The streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and dead. Interment could not do its work quick enough; even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens…. [3]

Was there any reason for the famine to occur? Not if the British had not wanted it. Bengal, then, as now, harvested three crops a year. It is located in the delta of the Gangetic plain where water is more than plentiful. Even if drought occurs, it does not destroy all three crops. Moreover, as was prevalent during the Moghul days, and in earlier time, the surplus grain was stored to tide the population over if there were one or two bad crops.

But the looting of grains carried out by Clive, and his gang of bandits and killers, drained grain from Bengal and resulted in 10 million deaths in the great famine, eliminating one-third of Bengal’s population.

It should be noted that Britain’s much-touted industrial revolution began in 1770, the very same year people were dying all over Bengal. The Boston Tea Party that triggered the American Revolution had taken place in 1773. The Boston Tea Party made the Empire realize that its days in America were numbered, and led Britain to concentrate even more on organizing the looting of India.

Why Famines Became So Prevalent During the British Raj Days
The prime reason why these devastating famines took place at a regular intervals, and were allowed to continue for years, was the British Empire’s policy of depopulating its colonies. If these famines had not occurred, India’s population would have reached a billion people long before the Twentieth Century arrived. That, the British Empire saw as a disaster.

To begin with, a larger Indian population would mean larger consumption by the locals, and deprive the British Raj to a greater amount of loot. The logical way to deal with the problem was to develop India’s agricultural infrastructure. But that would not only force Britain to spend more money to run its colonial and bestial empire; it would also develop a healthy population which could rise up to get rid of the abomination called the British Raj. These massive famines also succeeded in weakening the social structure and backbone of the Indians, making rebellions against the colonial forces less likely. In order to perpetuate famines, and thus depopulate the “heathen” and “dark” Indians, the British imperialists launched a systematic propaganda campaign. They propped up the fraudster Parson Thomas Malthus and promoted his non-scientific gobbledygook, “The Essay on Population.” There he claimed:

This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature.

Although Malthus was ordained in the Anglican Church, British Empire made him a paid “economist” of the British East India Company, which, with the charter from Queen Elizabeth I under its belt, monopolized trade in Asia, colonizing vast tracts of the continent using its well-armed militia fighting under the English flag of St. George.

Malthus was picked up at the Haileybury and Imperial Service College, which was also the recruiting ground of some of the worst colonial criminals. This college was where the makers of British Empire’s murderous policies in India were trained. Some prominent alumni of Haileybury include Sir John Lawrence (Viceroy of India from 1864-68) and Sir Richard Temple (Lt. Governor of Bengal and later, Governor of Bombay presidency).

While Parson Malthus was putting forward his sinister “scientific theory” to justify depopulation as a natural and necessary process, The British Empire collected a whole bunch of other “economists” who wrote about the necessity of free trade. Free trade played a major role in pushing through the Empire’s genocidal depopulation of India, through the British Raj’s efforts. In fact, free trade is the other side of the Malthus’ population-control coin.

By the time the great famine of 1876 arrived, Britain had already built some railroads in India. The railroads, which were touted as institutional safeguards against famines, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding. In addition, free traders’ opposition to price control ushered in a frenzy of grain speculation. As a result, capital was raised to import grains from drought-stricken areas, and further the calamity. The rise of price of grain was spectacularly rapid, and grain was taken from where it was most needed, to be stored in warehouses until the prices rose even higher.

The British Raj knew or should have known. Even if the British rulers did not openly encourage this process, they were fully aware of it, and they were perfectly comfortable in promoting free trade at the expense of millions of lives. This is how Mike Davis described what happened:

The rise [of prices] was so extraordinary, and the available supply, as compared with well-known requirements, so scanty that merchants and dealers, hopeful of enormous future gains, appeared determined to hold their stocks for some indefinite time and not to part with the article which was becoming of such unwonted value. It was apparent to the Government that facilities for moving grain by the rail were rapidly raising prices everywhere, and that the activity of apparent importation and railway transit, did not indicate any addition to the food stocks of the Presidency . …retail trade up-country was almost at a standstill. Either prices were asked which were beyond the means of the multitude to pay, or shops remained entirely closed.

At the time, Lord Lytton, a favorite poet of Queen Victoria who is known as a “butcher” to many Indians, was the Viceroy. He wholeheartedly opposed all efforts to stockpile grain to feed the famine-stricken population because that would interfere with market forces. In the autumn of 1876, while the monsoon crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton was absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India.

How did Lytton justify this? He was an avowed admirer and follower of Adam Smith. Author Mike Davis writes that Smith

a century earlier in The Wealth of Nations had asserted (vis-à-vis the terrible Bengal droughtfamine of 1770) that famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth, Lytton was implementing what Smith had taught him and other believers of free trade. Smith’s injunction against state attempts to regulate the price of grain during the 1770 famine had been taught for years in the East India Company’s famous college at Haileybury.[4]

Lytton issued strict orders that “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food,” and “in his letters home to the India Office and to politicians of both parties, he denounced ‘humanitarian hysterics’.” By official diktat, India, like Ireland before it, had become a Utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were gambled, pursuant to dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets overcoming the “inconvenience of dearth.”[5]

The Great Famines
Depicting the two dozen famines that killed more than 60 million Indians would require a lot of space, so I limit myself here to those that killed more than one million:

The Bengal Famine of 1770: This catastrophicfamine occurred between 1769 and 1773, and affected the lower Gangetic plain of India. The territory, then ruled by the British East India Company, included modern West Bengal, Bangladesh, and parts of Assam, Orissa, Bihar, and Jharkhand. The famine is supposed to have caused the deaths of an estimated 10 million people, approximately one-third of the population at the time.

The Chalisa Famine of 1783-84: The Chalisa famine affected many parts of North India, especially the Delhi territories, present-day Uttar Pradesh, Eastern Punjab, Rajputana (now named, Rajasthan), and Kashmir, then all ruled by different Indian rulers. The Chalisa was preceded by a famine in the previous year, 1782-83, in South India, including Madras City (now named Chennai) and surrounding areas (under British East India Company rule), and in the extended Kingdom of Mysore. Together, these two famines had taken at least 11 million lives, reports indicate.

The Doji Bara Famine (or Skull Famine) of 1791- 92: This famine caused widespread mortality in Hyderabad, Southern Maratha Kingdom, Deccan, Gujarat, and Marwar (also called Jodhpur region in Rajasthan). The British policy of diverting food to Europe, of pricing the remaining grain out of reach of native Indians, and adopting agriculture policy that destroyed food production, was responsible for this one. The British had surplus supplies of grain, which was not distributed to the very people that had grown it. As a result, about 11 million died between 1789-92 of starvation and accompanying epidemics that followed.

The Upper Doab Famine of 1860-61: The 1860-61 famine occurred in the British-controlled Ganga-Yamuna Doab (two waters, or two rivers) area engulfing large parts of Rohilkhand and Ayodhya, and the Delhi and Hissar divisions of the then-Punjab. Eastern part of the princely state of Rajputana. According to “official” British reports, about two million people were killed by this famine.

The Orissa Famine of 1866: Although it affected Orissa the most, this famine affected India’s east coast along the Bay of Bengal stretching down south to Madras, covering a vast area. One million died, according to the British “official” version.

The Rajputana famine of 1869: The Rajputana famine of 1869 affected an area of close to 300,000 square miles which belonged mostly to the princely states and the British territory of Ajmer. This famine, according to “official” British claim, killed 1.5 million.

The Great Famine of 1876-78: This famine killed untold numbers of Indians in the southern part and raged for about four years. It affected Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad and Bombay (now called, Mumbai). The famine also subsequently visited Central Province (now called, Madhya Pradesh) and parts of undivided Punjab. The death toll from this famine was in the range of 5.5 million people. Some other figures indicate the number of deaths could be as high as 11 million.

Indian famine of 1896-97 and 1899-1900: This one affected Madras, Bombay, Deccan, Bengal, United Provinces (now called, Uttar Pradesh), Central Provinces, Northern and eastern Rajputana, parts of Central India, and Hyderabad: six million reportedly died in British territory during these two famines. The number of deaths occurred in the princely states is not known.

The Bengal Famine of 1943-44: This Churchill-orchestrated famine in Bengal in 1943-1944 killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people.

Relief Camps, or Concentration camps
There were several policy-arrows which Adolf Hitler might have borrowed from the British quiver to kill millions, but one that he borrowed for certain in setting up his death camps, was how the British ran the camps to provide “relief” to the starving millions. Anyone who entered these relief camps, did not exit alive.

Take the actions of Viceroy Lytton’s deputy, Richard Temple, another Haileybury product imbued with the doctrine of depopulation as the necessary means to keep the Empire strong and vigorous. Temple was under orders from Lytton to make sure there was no “unnecessary” expenditure on relief works.

According to some analysts, Temple’s camps were not very different from Nazi concentration camps. People already half-dead from starvation had to walk hundreds of miles to reach these relief camps. Additionally, he instituted a food ration for starving people working in the camps, which was less than that was given to the inmates of Nazi concentration camps.

The British refused to provide adequate relief for famine victims on the grounds that this would encourage indolence. Sir Richard Temple, who was selected to organize famine relief efforts in 1877, set the food allotment for starving Indians at 16 ounces of rice per day—less than the diet for inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp for the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. British disinclination to respond with urgency and vigor to food deficits resulted in a succession of about two dozen appalling famines during the British occupation of India. These swept away tens of millions of people. The frequency of famine showed a disconcerting increase in the nineteenth century.[6]

It was deliberate then, and it’s deliberate now.

______________
1. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, London, Verso Books, 2001.

2. Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, New York: Basic Books.

3. Davis, op. cit.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid

6. Bhatia, B.M., Famines in India, A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India, 1860-1945, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963.

Dr Ramtanu Maitra
A specialist on South Asian Affairs who operates out of Washington D.C. Ramtanu Maitra specialises on strategic and infrastructural developmental studies with the focus on South Asia.
He holds a Masters Degree in Structural Engineering and was working as a Senior Project Engineer with the Nuclear Power Services, Secaucus, NJ.
Ramtanu Maitra participated in developing a document, India: An agro-industrial superpower by 2020, in 1981.
He established and published a quarterly journal, Fusion Asia, on science, technology, energy and economics from New Delhi for more than 10 years (1984-1994).
He wrote and published the first feature report on India’s high-energy physics program based in PRL, Ahmedabad. Prepared and published a detailed report on Ganges River Valley Development that was presented at an international conference inaugurated by the late president of India, Shri K.R. Narayanan, then Minister for Planning.
He participated on behalf of Fusion Asia on a feasibility study that also involved the Mitsubishi Research Institute (Tokyo) and the Thai Citizen Forum. Presented papers at a number of international conferences on strategic infrastructures in Bogota, Colombia, Tokyo, Japan, Kolkata, Indore, Madurai, Indore, New Delhi, among other Indian cities.
In 1994, Shri Maitra established New Delhi bureau for Asia Times, a Bangkok-based news daily published simultaneously from Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and New York.
Presently, he conducts research, analysis, writing on international economic and strategic developments for publications internationally, including: Foresight (Japan); Aakrosh, Agni, Indian Defense and Technology (India); Asia Times Online (Hong Kong); and Executive Intelligence Review (USA).
http://www.sasfor.com/about.html Ramtanu Maitra is a regular columnist with the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), a news weekly published from Washington DC. He writes columns for Asia Times of Hong Kong, Frontier Post of Peshawar and some other newspapers in Asia on South Asian political economy and Asian security. He has written on terrorism in a number of publications in the United States and India.

The post GENOCIDE, THE BRITISH DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT British Colonials Starved to Death 60 million-plus Indians, But, Why? by Ramtanu Maitra appeared first on Void Network.