Written by Blade Runner– first published by Plan C, an anti-authoritarian communist organisation based in UK

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The year began with fresh bloodshed in Iran and Syria, adding to the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. The Middle East, as Abdullah Öcalan—ideological leader of the Kurdish movement in northeastern Syria—has argued, is the cradle of nation-state civilisation. From the Sumerian ziggurat to today’s capitalist modernity, the region has long seen patriarchal, hierarchical structures emerge, deeply embedded in state power. The Kurds, who have experienced genocide in their history, state-less, now face another looming threat in Rojava, where Turkish-backed jihadist militias operate with impunity. In Iran, a youth- and middle-class-led uprising is being brutally crushed by the Islamist regime, with Kurdish-majority areas paying the highest price in blood.

These developments expose a broader split in the Western left: some emphasise grassroots liberation struggles from below, while others focus on geopolitics and great-power alignments. Still, both camps acknowledge the surge in militarisation—rooted in the agendas of white men in power, securing their castles as the world burns.

Trump’s version of fascism, built on brute-force governance, gave new expression to an old white supremacist worldview: domination as virtue, state violence as default. In the US, vulnerable communities are under attack both in law and daily life, while federal institutions are being hollowed out and reshaped by far-right actors exploiting the left’s strategic collapse. As capitalism slams into ecological and resource limits, elites double down—playing the fascist cardas their system fractures alongside the ecosystem.

Much of the Western left remains trapped in a framework inherited from the postwar compromise—where revolutionary potential was traded for social peace and welfare became the terrain of struggle. This strategic vacuum continues today. 

How did we get here? 

Capital’s restructuring since the 80s through digitalisation and financialisation detached life from collective decision-making. Based on a drastic technical shift, the neoliberal political design enforced the merger of state and capital into a hierarchy-preserving machine, that protects the pyramidic structure of economy and power while producing dependence to it.

The neoliberal assault to the working class under the ‘less state’ marquise staged a spectacle on which the unions negotiate in the midst of a raging social war waged on the lowest classes. There is a deeper continuity here that remains protected—the very architecture of the welfare state is tied to capital accumulation and state sovereignty. Reforms, however welcome, cannot do much to erode its core functions for discipline, control and population management.

Welfare, even at its heights, never enabled autonomy. Today, we find ourselves defending scraps—yet unable to replace the model with bottom-up infrastructures not based on extraction or obedience.

A great shift towards consumerist abundance has taken place: smart phones, branded clothing, laptops, vehicles, traveling, are now accessible to wider strata than ever before. Or at least this is the promise that has been built upon decades of urban gentrification and the expansion of the services economy. Middle classes are deeply invested in this materialistic social contract, so much that leisure time is willingly being replaced with commercial entrepreneurship. For many activists of the white middle class, the boundaries between “the struggle” or “the action” and a paid relationship with charities or NGOs is becoming increasingly blur.

This new reality has been conditioned as ‘freedom,’ to justify the installation of the core-zone insulation through militarised borders and technocratic management. Welfare state and the promise of consumerist abundance is not a function of solidarity anymore—it is a cushioned internal border, mirroring its reverse spiky version from the outside.

In this context, the mainstream narrative frames the uprisings of the 2010s as relics or cautionary tales. But the uprisings led by Gen Z across Asia, Africa, and Latin America is a reality check: mass militant street action not only remains possible—it continues to erupt as the clearest threat to regimes when electoral politics stall. This signals a shift from demands for inclusion and integration, to anti-hierarchial participation, to construction of new autonomous spaces. Forms of resistance not aimed at improving state functions, but bypassing or replacing them.

Genocide at the bordersⁱ

The fractures in today’s Western left echo the deeper planetary divide. The neoliberal information age sharpened the separation between the fortified Western citadel and the militarised periphery. In the global South, war is a reality for many, and its toll is most brutally felt by women—those raped, enslaved, executed by jihadists and warlords. Patriarchal terror that feels like time travel to the Dark Ages thrives under structures propped up by the liberal West.

That terror arrives at the beaches of Fortress Europe. Tens of thousands of immigrants die every year attempting to reach safety, mostly at sea. Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone. The real number is likely far higher, since undocumented movement is difficult to trace. In 2023, the Greek Coast Guard allowed more than 600 people drown in a single shipwreck—a direct result of the informal pushback policy. Deadly incidents as a result brutal push-back operations are reported every year. Frontex—Europe’s ICE—has become the EU’s most heavily funded agency, with its own ships, aircraft, drones, and weapons. Its 10,000-strong Standing Corps is the first and only pan-European armed force, operating with a budget that rivals those of small countries.

But border violence is only one face of the system’s breakdown. Behind it lies a deeper contradiction: capitalism has always emerged from a largely peasant and rural society. The agrarian question remains structurally unresolved: how can capital dismantle, discipline, or absorb peasant production while preventing rural populations rendered surplus from becoming a source of instability? What happens to land, labour, food systems, and social relations when profit demands endless expansion in a world of finite resources?

As ecosystems collapse and agriculture fails, more and more people are forced into motion—some fleeing drought and desertification, others pushed by floods, fires, or rising seas. Climate displacement is here and will become increasingly a major factor in global migration. The uneven impact of eco-collapse mirrors and reinforces the divide between the fortified Western citadel and the militarised, expendable periphery. It is overwhelmingly the poorest who are forced to move, while the wealthiest retreat behind borders, flood walls, and drone-enforced no-go zones.

In a way, rivers of people returning to the source close an infinite loop, further sharpening the divide between resurgent nationalism and emancipatory politics. And there is no ‘new world’ left to colonise with Europe’s so-called ‘dangerous classes’—its surplus poor, displaced, and radicalised. Increasingly, capitalism’s only remaining ‘solution’ appears to be mass death. The systematic slaughtering of migrants on Europe’s shores is not a malfunction but a structural expression of a dead end. 

The farmers in Europe have felt that dead end too, that they are among those slated for sacrifice. Greece, among other countries like France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium, saw one of the largest agricultural uprisings in years as farmers face soaring fuel costs, livestock disease, and decades of rural neglect. Their demands go beyond subsidies, asking for the reversal of the whole neoliberal EU agricultural design. The repression has been severe and has been met with widespread solidarity from workers, students, anarchists, and local communities. The agricultural sector is another frontline in the wider collapse of extractive economies under the state/capitalist-created climate stress.

Genocides are becoming a permanent tendency in a system that, having exploited the planet to its limits, now turns inward, consuming its own surplus population in a futile attempt to stay alive. Neocolonialism delayed this reckoning by exporting social conflict and looting the periphery to build welfare at the core. This pacified the working classes of the West. But immigration undoes this arrangement, reverses the flow, and brings the contradictions home.

Fascism has returned out of necessity—from the ruling class’s need to retain control when the old arrangement no longer works. Social democracy is entirely unfit for the current moment, stuck in domestic redistribution politics while the global system itself rots. Electoral results across Europe confirm this irrelevance.

What was always a fragile compromise is now in terminal decline. The migrant genocide is not just a consequence—it’s an expression of this slow breakdown. Western foreign policy increasingly centres on keeping immigration contained at the source. Governments can’t resolve the global agrarian question. And so border violence, genocide, and militarisation all flow from the same unresolved root.

The system is now operating at boiling point. Rising mass radicalisation at home has led to escalated repression. Dissent is criminalised, disruptive direct action is proscribed as domestic terrorism, and zero tolerance becomes doctrine.

Militarisation, then, becomes the new organising logic. The Cold War’s ideological veneer has melted. What remains is open competition, brute force, and intensified suppression of disagreement. The logic that obliterates Gaza and threatens the Kurds in Rojava, is the same logic that drowns migrants in the Mediterranean, assassinates them and their supporters in the US, demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white supremacist narratives.

What can we do?

All state actors—despite tactical differences—ultimately reinforce the same oppressive capitalist modernity. They align in their efforts to crush any alternatives. Our task, as the libertarian anti-authoritarian communist tendency, is to expose this machinery and stand with those at the front lines of resistance—from London to Minneapolis, from Iran to Sri Lanka, from Gaza to Peru, and beyond.

The US may soon lose its role as the lead architect of the world system—and it will not fall quietly. For us, this may also be an opportunity. Our role is to articulate and express a libertarian communist perspective: the destruction of the state and the creation of horizontal cooperation among communities from below. Taking action means embracing a diversity of tactics, supporting those targeted by state surveillance and carceral violence, and building bonds of trust with communities under attack. We must carve out spaces of refusal where strategy can be shared and disagreement doesn’t splinter solidarity. We need local defence and mutual aid structures rooted in everyday life, rather than reactive pursuits of far-right narratives and media spectacle.

Some tendencies on the left continue to back authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West. But true anti-imperialism isn’t about choosing sides in a geopolitical chess match, but supporting the poor, the colonised, the non-binary, the femmes, the non-whites, the children, the underdogs that suffer under any regime. We need to keep grounding our efforts in the lives and resistance of the displaced, the exploited, and the exiled. To build trust in our communities, we must come as allies and co-conspirators against the enemies at the top. And we need to rethink the ideological habits that isolate us and make us appear like a lifestyle cult rather than a political force.

There is a persistent tendency within both liberal and radical activism to treat issues like Palestine or climate collapse as isolated causes, each with their own branding, tactics, and acceptable narratives. In Palestine solidarity spaces, mass marches are welcomed—rightly—but dissenting tactics are often policed. Protesters who reject pacified, choreographed action get framed as threats to “unity,” exposing a vanguardist obsession with respectability and non-violence. Meanwhile, in environmental campaigns, urban symbolic action that leads to arrests—with minimal strategic impact—has popularised a model of low-barrier, media-friendly protest. This spectacle has come at a cost: hundreds jailed, public support thinned, and long-term grassroots organising sidelined. For all the visibility, the material impact on emissions, extraction, or capital flows remains negligible in the face of accelerating ecocide.

Palestine Action was proscribed because its targeted, disruptive tactics—like shutting down weapons factories—began to seriously impact arms production. Similarly, in Germany, Ende Gelände’s mass blockades of coal infrastructure have repeatedly disrupted mining operations and transport, forcing coal phase-out into the political mainstream. What gets criminalised is often what works.

We will not be passive observers to suffering and collapse. The system is cracking. Our task is not to patch it—but to resist with a variety of tactics—and build the ground beneath us before it falls.

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NOTES

i This section refers to info and arguments from this post: https://mronline.org/2025/06/18/the-migrant-genocide-toward-a-third-world-analysis-of-european-class-struggle/

The post This world is cracking- We need to start building appeared first on Void Network.

Written by Jamal Kanj

Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international publications.

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Amnesty International warned on November 27, that “The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal…. the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.”

Israel has violated the Gaza ceasefire almost 600 times, killed and injured over 1350, includingmurdering 136 Palestinian children, under various pretexts. Yet, the supposed guarantors of the truce remain hushed. Whatever they may claim to whisper or pressure behind closed doors, Israel’s actions make one thing clear: their opinions do not matter.

The so-called ceasefire served one purpose only: the release Israeli captives. Recent Israeli onslaught across Gaza, West Bank, Syria and Lebanon exposes Israel’s true intention. On November 19, Israel killed 28 Palestinians bombing neighborhoods previously labeled as “safe zones.” A day earlier, its drones struck Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon, murdering 13, including 11 teenagersplaying soccer.

Three weeks earlier, on October 28 to be exact, and following the massacre of 109 Palestinians throughout Gaza, the Qatari mediator claimed that “both sides remain committed”  to the ceasefire. The reply came from Israel on November 18 and 19, in expanded attacks killing 41 more Palestinians across Gaza and Lebanon.Notwithstanding this, Washington continues to repeat that the truceis “holding.” A ceasefire, it seems, only collapses when Israeli Jews die, not when Palestinian blood is spilled.

Since October 10, Israel has murdered 352 Palestinians. Adjusted for population size, this is equivalent to more than 1,500 Israeli deaths.What if Israel was at the receiving end of this murder spree, and 1500 Israeli Jews lost their lives? Would Washington and Europe still call the ceasefire as“holding,”or would we hear the rehearsed cry: “the largest number of Jews killed since the Holocaust,” as if the Holocaust took place in Palestine?

The U.S. president would lead a long procession of European leaders paying homage to Israel. Western media would blanket every screen with the faces and names of those Israelis, cable networks scrambling to interview grieving families. The White House and other Western officials would then defend Israel’s vengeful massacres as “self-defense.”

The above is not hypothetical; we’ve watched it play out, time and again.

However, sincethe killers are Israeli-Jews, and Palestinians are the victims, then“restrain” and “de-escalation” become Washington’s and EU’s sage policy. The European Nazi Jewish-Holocaust would be religiously invoked, ritualistically and unfailingly—as to temper criticism of Israel’s massacres and genocide of non-Jews.

The fiction of ceasefire is amplified when examining Israel’s covert war in the occupied West Bank. According to reports, the Israeli army and Jewish-mobs have carried out 2,350 attacks in the month of October alone. Human rights organizations havedocumented a wave of war crimes:Israeli extrajudicial execution of young menat point-blank range, farmers harvesting olives attacked by armed Jewish-mobs, refugee camps are besieged, demolished, emptied and bombed from land and air.

A new 105-page Human Rights Watch field report, “All My Dreams Have Been Erased,” exposed chilling patterns of mass displacement and destruction. 32,000 Palestinian residents of Jenin, and Nur Shams refugee camps have been forcibly displaced and barred from returning to their homes. Hundreds of homes were blown-up and entire neighborhoods erased.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli military and armed Jewish-thugs have murdered more than 1,000 Palestiniansin the West Bank. Administrative detention (jailed without charge) has surged, land expropriation and the building of Jewish-only colonies have accelerated, freed prisoners re-arrested, and torture of detainees has increased.

For Israel,the ceasefire is a tactical pause, not binding obligations. Itcurbs Palestinian resistance while permits Israel to violate it with impunity.It serves as an opportunity to ease global outrage, deflect criticism, and give Arab mediators a face-saving role, all while Israel’swar continues unhindered.Arab mediators, eager to please Washington and unwilling to confront Israel, maintain the fiction of a functioning ceasefire while ignoring the everyday Palestinian funerals.

Diplomacy has become a theater, and Palestinians are casualties ina daily live performance. This is not necessarily a breakdown of a ceasefire but rather a fulfillment of its intended purpose. It wasdevised to keep Palestinian suffering under the radar screen, and whitewash Israeli violations as “little skirmishes.”

Donald Trump, insulated within an Israel-first-bubble, pushed for the ceasefire not to end the starvation in Gaza. Instead, it was a political lifeline designed to rescue Israel from a growing isolation. It wasn’t meant to end the genocide; it was to shield Israel from mounting European pressure and to stop the EU from advancing sanctions against Israel.

A ceasefire that allows Israel to murder unnoticed, is not a ceasefire: it is a tool to fool. It is a managed apartheid killing field normalized by world powers. For Trump’s Israel-first-bubble, the ceasefire is “holding” so long as only non-Israeli are murdered.

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The article appeared also in other Middle East independent media with the title Ceasefire is “Holding”: So Long as Only Non-Israeli-Jews are Murdered

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READ MORE:

The post A ceasefire that allows Israel to murder Palestinians is not a ceasefire appeared first on Void Network.

FREE PALESTINE Festival
– για όλους τους λόγους του κόσμου

Πεμ. 27 έως Κυρ.30 Νοεμβρίου 2025

Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο Θέατρο Εμπρός
Ρήγα Παλαμήδη 2, Ψυρρή (Μετρό Μοναστηράκι) Αθήνα

Είσοδος με ελεύθερη συνεισφορά. Το θέατρο είναι φιλικό και μερικώς προσβάσιμο για ανάπηρα άτομα. Όλα τα έσοδα του φεστιβάλ θα διατεθούν για την στήριξη των συλλογικοτήτων στην Γάζα: Al – Awda Network, Nahnu, Hope in Hands.

Το Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο Θέατρο Εμπρός σε συνεργασία με συλλογικότητες και άτομα απ’ την Παλαιστινιακή κοινότητα στην Αθήνα και την Γάζα καλούμε σε τετραήμερο φεστιβάλ αλληλεγγύης για την Παλαιστίνη. Σε μια εποχή που ο πόλεμος κατοχής και οι μαζικές συλλήψεις σε όλη την Παλαιστίνη επιχειρούν να συντρίψουν το πνεύμα του λαού, ο ρόλος των κοινοτήτων της Παλαιστινιακής διασποράς και του παγκόσμιου κινήματος είναι σαφής: να οργανωθούμε, να αντισταθούμε και να σταθούμε ασυμβίβαστα στο πλευρό όσων αγωνίζονται, όσων αδίκως κρατούνται και όλων όσων συνεχίζουν να αντιστέκονται. Το μονοπάτι προς την ελευθερία περνάει μέσα από την αλληλεγγύη, την αποφασιστικότητα και τον συλλογικό μας αγώνα.

ΑΝΑΛΥΤΙΚΟ ΠΡΟΓΡΑΜΜΑ:

ΠΕΜΠΤΗ 27/11

19:00 Καλωσόρισμα (Αραβικά, Ελληνικά, Αγγλικά, Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα) «Η τέχνη της αλληλεγγύης – Η αλληλεγγύη ως αντίσταση»

19:30 Το χρονικό της αντίστασης: Η ιστορία ενός αδιάκοπου αγώνα- Διάλεξη και Aπαγγελία: Τέσσερις ώρες στη Σατίλα (Ζαν Ζενέ) | Ναουζάτ Χαντίντ, Φιλοθέη Κολιοπούλου, Mohammed Khatib (Η ομιλία θα πραγματοποιηθεί με ταυτόχρονη Διερμηνεία στην Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα)

21:00 Συνάντηση- Διαδικτυακή ζωντανή συζήτηση με τον Mahmoud Alarda (Παλαιστίνιο αγωνιστή και πρώην πολιτικό κρατούμενο). Μέσα από τα τείχη των σιωνιστικών φυλακών και το παγκόσμιο κίνημα για την απελευθέρωση, ο Mahmoud al- Arda στέκεται ως σύμβολο ακλόνητης αντίστασης και επαναστατικής διαύγειας. Ένας από τους ήρωες της απόδρασης από τις φυλακές Gilboa και ισόβιος αγωνιστής του παλαιστινιακού αγώνα, ο al-Arda ενσαρκώνει την ακλόνητη θέληση όσων έδωσαν τα πάντα για την ελευθερία της Παλαιστίνης. Αυτή η εκδήλωση ενώνει τις φωνές των απελευθερωμένων και φυλακισμένων Παλαιστινίων πολιτικών κρατουμένων με εκείνες του διεθνούς κινήματος αλληλεγγύης. Μαζί, επιβεβαιώνουμε ότι ο αγώνας των κρατουμένων παραμένει στην καρδιά του απελευθερωτικού κινήματος – μια άγκυρα ενότητας, θυσίας και επαναστατικού οράματος.
Ελάτε μαζί μας σε αυτή τη σημαντική συνάντηση με τον Μαχμούντ αλ-Άρντα, για να τιμήσουμε το κίνημα των κρατουμένων και να ενισχύσουμε το διεθνές μέτωπο για την απελευθέρωση της Παλαιστίνης.
(Η συζήτηση θα πραγματοποιηθεί με ταυτόχρονη Διερμηνεία στην Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα)

ΠΑΡΑΣΚΕΥΗ 28/11

18:30 Καλωσόρισμα (Αραβικά, Ελληνικά, Αγγλικά, Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα)
«From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free- μια Παλαιστίνη ελεύθερη, δίκαιη και ανθρώπινη, από το ποτάμι ως τη θάλασσα.»

19:00 Παλαιστινιακά Τραγούδια | Nahed Bshara και Δημήτρης Μικέλης

19:30 Θεατρική παράσταση: “Δε Λυγάνε τα Ξεράδια” | Πρωτοβουλία Καλλιτεχνών Θεάτρου Δρόμου για την Παλαιστίνη

20:00 Προβολή Nτοκιμαντέρ: 48, Αντίσταση στον Μεγάλο Αποικισμό | Ομάδα 218
Η καθημερινότητα των αποκλεισμένων από το καθεστώς απαρτχάιντ, οι διαφορετικές όψεις της Ισραηλινής κατοχής. Μέσα από αφηγήσεις, εξομολογήσεις και συζητήσεις στην κατεχόμενη Παλαιστίνη, γυναίκες, άντρες και παιδιά μιλούν για τις απαγορεύσεις στις ελεύθερες μετακινήσεις, τις αρπαγές σπιτιών, τους εξευτελιστικούς ελέγχους, τις φυλακίσεις και τις δολοφονίες.

21:30 Παρουσίαση – Συζήτηση: «Γάζα, η πατρίδα των περισσότερων ακρωτηριασμένων παιδιών στην σύγχρονη ιστορία» | Κίνηση Χειραφέτησης Αναπήρων: ΜΗΔΕΝΙΚΗ ΑΝΟΧΗ και ζωντανή σύνδεση με τον Naji Mahmoud Naji (Πρόεδρο της Παλαιστινιακής Γενικής Ένωσης Αναπήρων στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας).
Τα φερόμενα ως «επίσημα αναπηρικά κινήματα» διεθνώς αποσιώπησαν όσα καταγγέλλουν οι παλαιστινιακές αναπηρικές οργανώσεις. Το καθεστώς αποικιακού εποικισμού συνδέεται με την παραγωγή σωμάτων με βλάβες. Το Ισραήλ αναπηροποιεί σκόπιμα, δημιουργώντας ένα μόνιμα εξουθενωτικό πλαίσιο σε όλη την Παλαιστίνη. Σε ζωντανή σύνδεση με τον Naji Mahmoud Naji (Πρόεδρο της Παλαιστινιακής Γενικής Ένωσης Αναπήρων στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας) αναλύουμε τα δεδομένα της εξαθλίωσης.
Αυτό που συντελείται στη Γάζα δεν είναι απλά ανθρωπιστική κρίση. Είναι συστηματική εξόντωση. Είναι γενοκτονία. Και τα ανάπηρα σώματα είναι στο κέντρο αυτής της γενοκτονίας.
Δικαιοσύνη για τα ανάπηρα άτομα – Λευτεριά στην Παλαιστίνη (Η συζήτηση θα πραγματοποιηθεί με ταυτόχρονη Διερμηνεία στην Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα)

22:30 LIVE Mahmoud | Μουσικός από την Παλαιστίνη

23:00 Al-Awda | Χορευτικό Συγκρότημα από την Παλαιστίνη

23:30 Παραδοσιακό Γλέντι με Μουσική από την Ανατολική Μεσόγειο | dUGRUV και trimýsteRa

ΣΑΒΒΑΤΟ 29/11

14:30 Καλωσόρισμα (Αραβικά, Ελληνικά, Αγγλικά, Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα)
«Η αλληλεγγύη ως αρχή, η απελευθέρωση ως κοινός προορισμός»

15:00 Αφήγηση Παραμυθιού για μικρούς και μεγάλους: “Το Φαναράκι” του Γκασάν Καναφάνι και ζωντανή σύνδεση με Γάζα (αφήγηση και κουκλοθέατρο) | Ναουζάτ Χαντίντ

17:30 Ανοιχτή Συζήτηση- Ενημέρωση: Τι Συμβαίνει ΤΩΡΑ στην Παλαιστίνη | Συμμετέχουν συλλογικότητες και άτομα απ’ την Παλαιστινιακή κοινότητα στην Αθήνα. Θα πραγματοποιηθεί ζωντανή σύνδεση με αγωνιστές από την Γάζα οι οποίοι θα μιλήσουν για τις εμπειρίες και τον αγώνα τους.
(Η συζήτηση θα πραγματοποιηθεί με ταυτόχρονη Διερμηνεία στην Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα)

20:00 Διαδραστική Performance με θέμα τη Παλαιστίνη : Crossing Borders 3 | Ελένη Κολλιοπούλου solo συμμετοχική performance η οποία στοχεύει στην ενσωμάτωση του πόνου και του θρήνου. Η performer χρησιμοποιεί υλικά φορτισμένα με έννοιες που παραπέμπουν στο δράμα της Παλαιστινιακής κοινότητας. Μέσα από τελετουργικές κινήσεις και τη συνύπαρξη, η performance προσκαλεί τη λύτρωση έστω και αν αυτό συμβεί στο χώρο του συμβολικού.

20:30 Sheel Sheel & Τρία Ποιήματα της Φιντάα Αμπού Μάριαμ | Θεατρικό Εργαστήριο Ενηλίκων

21:00 Καλλιτεχνικά Δρώμενα | Πρωτοβουλία Κουκλοπαικτών για την Παλαιστίνη

21:30 Παλαιστινιακοί Παραδοσιακοί Χοροί

22:00 LIVE:

PPP ergo a sage | Αλκίνοος Ιωαννίδης | Φυσιλάτες | Balothizer | +DJSets

ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗ 30/11

13:30 Καλωσόρισμα (Αραβικά, Ελληνικά, Αγγλικά, Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα)

14:00 Ζωντανή Σύνδεση και ανοιχτή συζήτηση με συλλογικότητες απ’την Γάζα
Οι αγωνιστές φοιτητές της Ιατρικής στη Γάζα — η συλλογικότητα Hope in Hands
Η πολιτιστική συλλογικότητα «Nahnu» (Εμείς) — Εικαστικά, αφηγήσεις, κουκλοθέατρο από την ομάδα αγωνιστών καλλιτεχνών
(Η συζήτηση θα πραγματοποιηθεί με ταυτόχρονη Διερμηνεία στην Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα)

17:00 Παρουσίαση των Εικαστικών Εκθέσεων από τους δημιουργούς / Περιήγηση στο Θέατρο

18:30 Προβολή Ντοκιμαντέρ: To Kill a War Machine | Hannan Maji Richard York- Ένα ντοκιμαντέρ της ομάδας Rainbow Collective που περιγράφει την ιστορία και τη δράση της οργάνωσης Palestine Action. Οι δημόσιες προβολές του ντοκιμαντέρ απαγορεύθηκαν στην Αγγλία καθώς στις 30/6/2025 προτάθηκε νόμος στο βρετανικό κοινοβούλιο ώστε η οργάνωση αλληλεγγύης στον δίκαιο αγώνα του Παλαιστινιακού λαού Palestine Action να καταταχθεί ως τρομοκρατική. Καμία ποινικοποίηση της Αλληλεγγύης στον παλαιστινιακό λαό. We are all Palestine Action

20:00 Ανοιχτή Συζήτηση: Art as a form of Resistance | Nisreen Faour (σκηνοθέτιδα, ηθοποιός), Mohammed (ακτιβιστής) – Ο ρόλος των καλλιτεχνών στον αγώνα για την απελευθέρωση του Παλαιστινιακού λαού

21:00 LIVE Κενό Δίκτυο: Οπλισμένες Λέξεις για την Παλαιστίνη | Spoken Word Performance
Ομαδική performance ποιητών, visual artists και μουσικών παραγωγών της συλλογικότητας – ένα μήνυμα αντίστασης

22:00 LIVE Electronica from Iran | No-Mad

22:45 Συναυλία Αραβικής Μουσικής | Συμμετέχουν: Nάνσυ Λεγκίτσα, Στέφανος Φίλος, Δημήτρης Μικέλης, Θοδωρής Ζιάρκας & Παναγιώτης Κορωναίος

Παράλληλες Δράσεις καθόλη τη διάρκεια του φεστιβάλ:
Εικαστικό και Φωτογραφικό Υλικό (Wafa Hourani, Στεφανία Μιζάρα, Ράνια Μουρελάτου κ.α.)
Παλαιστινική κουζίνα – Bazaar Gather 4 Gaza –
Συλλογή τροφίμων και φαρμάκων για την Παλαιστινιακή Παροικία

Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο Θέατρο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ

The post Free Palestine Festival 27-30/11 Theatre Embros- Athens appeared first on Void Network.

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.

I recently saw yet another progressive with a huge platform say that Trump’s ongoing horror show is proof that we all should have done more to get out the vote for Kamala Harris. This kind of historical amnesia, whether it’s the result of intentional manipulation or panicked myopia, makes me sick to my stomach. I want to take a moment to explain why.

We cannot argue for the lesser of two evils if the difference between those two evils is not enough for survival. If the difference between two choices is not enough to make the difference between life and death, we all have the responsibility to denounce both choices and create other options.

If Republicans under Trump devise new ways to terrify immigrants and weaken meager protections against deportations, but the Democrats still manage to deport more people, the ethical and strategic response is to fight against both parties and the entire system they represent.

Greenhouse gas emissions are shooting past tipping points whether it’s the Right or the Left in power, such that an increasing number of scientists are finally admitting what anarchists and other radicals have been warning for a long time: that in the next few decades there is a very real danger of billions of humans dying¹ amidst a mass extinction event that could wipe out over half the species on the planet. In this situation, anyone who frames capitalism as a lesser evil that can be made sustainable is either harmfully ignorant of what’s actually going on or they have a psychopathic ability to barter unimaginable suffering for short-term profit.

And then there’s the question of ongoing genocide. I wish we could put a spotlight on these progressives and ask them, is genocide not a red line for you? Do you honestly believe that the political Left, in either North America or Europe, when in power, has not enabled or supported Israel’s genocide against Palestinians?

Obviously, the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany all directly arm, supply, and militarily participate in the genocide. The antisemitic government of Hungary gives a great deal of political support to Israel, while Netanyahu helps cover up Orbán’s antisemitism, and the anti-Roma, anti-antifascist government of Germany shows they in fact have learned nothing from the Holocaust and give their own big, self-serving stamp of approval to Israel’s continuous war crimes.

The Socialists in Spain made a few noises and delayed a shipment or two, but in the end it was little more than a symbolic protest.

What the hell is wrong with the world where, on top of all the shitty things going on, we have to say that an ongoing genocide requires more from us than symbolic or peaceful protest? And what the hell is wrong with people that they’ve already forgotten that the largest peaceful protest movement in human history—against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003—quickly killed itself through ineffectiveness and did absolutely nothing to slow or stop the invasion and the US/UK/Australian² slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?

Recently, the Boston Globe, the most progressive major newspaper in the US, reprinted a New York Times article about the recent assassination of two employees of the Israeli government outside the consulate in DC. The article worried that “the killings of the Israeli Embassy workers […] cast a harsh spotlight on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and the impact even peaceful protests might be having on attitudes against people connected to Israel. […] The killings also risked painting all pro-Palestinian activists, the vast majority of whom do not engage in violence, with the same brush”.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations and Jewish Voices for Peace both gave voluminous quotes condemning the violence (by which they meant the two dead Israeli government employees), saying things like “Peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and political engagement are the only appropriate and acceptable tools”.

I’ve heard several people claim that the two people killed were not complicit in Israel’s genocide. To be clear, one was an IDF soldier who did “political research” for the Israeli government, whereas the other, Sarah Milgrim, worked on “public diplomacy” and described herself as encouraging “dialogue” and “peacebuilding”. I can’t state emphatically enough, this is a whitewash. Any large US embassy around the world has similar missions, including in countries where the US military supports death squads or has carried out war crimes: the purpose is always to improve the image of the home country so it can continue to carry out atrocities with less resistance. There is no way the Israeli government was paying someone to do public diplomacy if that involved so much as acknowledging the ongoing genocide.

Farther down the page, the Globe ran this article:

This article distorts what is going on in a number of ways. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been subjecting the Gaza strip to starvation conditions, using hunger as a weapon, which is a war crime and a form of genocide. Sometimes they let a little food in, sometimes they let no food in. The tiny convoy Israel allowed last week was not “minimal,” it was completely insufficient to reduce the ongoing starvation caused by the prior two months in which Israel had completely stopped food shipments. Gazans do not “face a high risk of famine” as the article claims; they have been enduring famine for over year, Israel has deliberately engineered these conditions, and thousands of Palestinians have already died from famine. In just two days, the same week as the attack on the Israeli Consulate workers, 29 people in Gaza died of acute starvation, and 71,000 Palestinian children under the age of five are estimated to be suffering acute malnourishment, which can lead to premature death and lifelong disability, and chronic health problems.

Now let’s take these two articles together. Somebody kills two Israeli government employees who are taking large paychecks to help cover up an ongoing atrocity and improve Israel’s political position in the world even as it promises to continue the killings. According to progressives, even though more than 300,000 Palestinians have probably been killed by bombs, guns, starvation, and skyrocketing disease rates in a calculated campaign of genocide, it’s not justifiable to kill two people who are complicit in that genocide, even after the campus occupation movement tried peacefully for over a year to get one set of institutions—the universities—to divest from the genocide, with no major successes. Not only that, but the consulate shootings, carried out by one person, cast a mark of shame and should potentially be cause to demobilize the entire movement.

Meanwhile, that same week, the Israeli military murders 60 Palestinian civilians in an area where they are deliberately subjecting 2 million people to starvation, and Israel’s supporters and business partners are not stained at all, they can just walk around with their heads held high?

Here are some relevant facts that rarely get mentioned in the mainstream conversation about the genocide.

• On a weekly basis, the Israeli state, together with paramilitary settlers, demolishes Palestinian homes, destroys Palestinian orchards and farmland, and steals Palestinian land. On average, every year over 1000 Palestinian homes are destroyed and 2000 hectares of Palestinian land are stolen, with an average of 12,000 Israeli settlers streaming onto those lands every year. (2000 hectares of land equals almost 5000 acres or 3,700 football fields.)
• In the decade prior to the October 7 offensive, the Israeli military killed around 1000 Palestinian children, and over 4000 total Palestinian civilians. They injured over 100,000 Palestinians, leaving many of them permanently disabled.
• By the UN’s count, Israel has killed over 16 times more Palestinians and injured 30 times more Palestinians (i.e. Palestinians are not the aggressors: the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians is miniscule, and all of those killings happen on Palestinian land, which the Israelis are invading).
• The UN inflates the numbers to Israel’s favor, setting a lower bar for registering injuries to Israelis and admitting that they don’t count casualties that overwhelmingly hurt Palestinians, like “access delays” [i.e. ambulances held up at checkpoints] and “unexploded ordnance”. In other words, we’re looking at something closer to 20 Palestinians killed for every 1 Israeli.

This isn’t a secret genocide. It’s not like Israel is effectively covering it up. Just this Monday, Israelis held their annual, state-funded, police supported racist march through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, celebrating the ethnic cleansing of 1967 when Israel seized all of Palestine, and shouting pro-genocide slogans like “Gaza is ours,” “death to Arabs” and “may their villages burn!” as they vandalize and ransack Palestinian shops and homes.

The only people who can’t admit that Israel is the clear aggressor are white supremacists who refuse to believe Palestinian lives have any value.

Since the Hamas offensive in Gaza on October 7 2023, the IDF began killing many more children in the West Bank, which is controlled by the PLO, an anti-Hamas organization not connected with the October 7 attacks. And they accelerated their land theft and forcible displacement—also acts of genocide—in the West Bank.

Saying that Israel is taking advantage of the war to carry out ethnic cleansing isn’t exactly correct, since whether or not Palestinians are rising up in resistance, the Israeli government and paramilitary settlers are killing Palestinians and stealing their land. Nobody can point to a single year this century without Israel erasing Palestinian communities through home demolitions, land theft, torture, mass imprisonment, and lethal force. There is no modern Israel without ethnic cleansing.

(I strongly recommend this historical overview from Al Jazeera, that includes plenty of maps and visuals that represent the progressive occupation of Palestine, as well as this chronology of the occupation and Amnesty International’s description of 50 years of dispossession.)

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/27/palestine-and-israel-brief-history-maps-and-charts

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/6/4/the-naksa-how-israel-occupied-the-whole-of-palestine-in-1967

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/

Most of the death tolls that are cited in the media do not include the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died premature deaths because the Israeli military and apartheid regime denied them access to food and medicine. And it usually does not include Palestinians who fight back against the genocidal Israeli regime. For example, the study on the 126 Palestinian children killed in the West Bank in 2023 simply leaves out any children “involved in hostilities,” which as near as I can tell means throwing stones or running messages for resistance groups.

And yet, Israeli deaths are counted even if they’re soldiers engaging in war crimes. Israeli paramilitaries—settlers armed with uzis and sniper rifles living on recently stolen land—are routinely referred to as “civilians” by the news.

With the complicity of the military, police, and rightwing parties, heavily armed, racist and ultranationalist settlers have captured the mainstream of Israeli politics and now set the agenda. Click the link to read a detailed story of how it unfolded.

Here’s something else you probably didn’t know:

Hamas didn’t kill 1,195 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Their primary mission was to take prisoners to use as political leverage. Who caused how many deaths is unknown, but it is well documented by video records and the testimony of the Israeli military itself that the Israeli military opened fire on the music festival as well as convoys and military bases full of imprisoned Israelis, because they have an official policy to kill Israeli soldiers and civilians in a potential hostage situation, to deny any leverage to their enemy.

Also, according to the media, Hamas “kidnaps” or “takes hostages,” whereas Israel “arrests” or “detains,” even though Israel has around 10,000 extrajudicial Palestinian hostages taken from Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, many of them children, and Palestinians held by Israel have no rights of due process, face “sham trials” with 100% conviction rates, and are systematically subject to torture, racist treatment, and sexual violence.

Additionally, the Israeli military systematically uses Palestinians, including children, as human shields, forcing them to walk in front of columns of soldiers, and to open doors and tunnels that are potentially booby-trapped. And yet the media consistently use language that portrays Israelis and Israeli institutions as more legitimate.

What we are dealing with are a series of double standards, many of them reproduced across the political spectrum, that are used either to justify genocide or to pacify and delegitimize any real resistance.

Israel is allowed to have a military, but even though Palestinians are facing down genocide every day, if one of them picks up a gun they become a terrorist. And if a Palestinian child picks up a rock, they are no longer a civilian and their death is quite literally not counted. An Israeli “civilian,” though, can walk around with a semi-automatic rifle, assaulting unarmed Palestinians, destroying their property, harassing them with racist insults, smug in the knowledge that Israel’s military administration of the West Bank is there to protect them and their systematic land theft.

We know peaceful protest is incapable of changing the hearts and minds of IDF soldiers or the Israeli government, and we also know it’s incapable of materially sabotaging the war effort at an effective scale.

We can accept that historically, people who shot back, who killed Nazis, were doing the right thing. When looking at the 19^th century or earlier, many people will also accept that Indigenous peoples had a right of self-defense against the genocidal settlers who founded the US, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Australia… Fewer people will apply those same principles to, say, Iraqis fighting the US invasion and occupation from 2003 onward. A more common version of NIMBY, Not In My Backyard, is Not In My Century: so many people cannot admit that the governments that rule them are completely evil and irredeemable, even if they are carrying out genocide or, in the case of NATO, killing millions of people.

Instead, they claim these are bad things that need to be solved by getting out the vote and choosing the lesser evil. There is nothing about this viewpoint that is reasonable, or caring, or nuanced, or engaged with reality. It is a panicked dissociation based in fear, comfort, and self-interest.

We need to be able to acknowledge that Palestinians have both a valid right and an existential necessity to shoot back; and we also need to be able to criticize the PLO for their total corruption, and to criticize Hamas for being a far Right, homophobic, patriarchal, authoritarian organization.

But if we can’t even validate Palestinian resistance and international solidarity, we become complicit in the current situation, in which Palestinians are subjected to the corruption and brutality of the PLO, the oppressive, authoritarian politics of Hamas, and—the worst by far—the mass killings, calculated starvation, torture, land theft, housing demolitions, hospital bombings, racism, and harassment at the hands of the state of Israel.

Validating Palestinian resistance, supporting meaningful and high-impact acts of solidarity, and supporting the many initiatives and groups that are fighting against apartheid and for a free Palestine and a free world: that is the only conscionable response to the genocide, which has been occurring in one form or another for well over 60 years.

If you encounter anyone who makes knee-jerk condemnations of Palestinian resistance or says we should support the Democrats, the Liberals, Labour, SPD and the Greens – please, call them out and try to explain how they are legitimizing genocide. And if you’re too shy for that kind of confrontation, just drop them a link to this article.

None of us are free until all of us are free.

_____________

Read more articles by Peter Gelderloos and support his magnificent work here: https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/deadly-double-standards

Peter Gelderloos is a writer and social movement participant. He is the author of The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Non-Violence, and Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation. He has contributed chapters to the anthologies Keywords for Radicals and Riots and Militant Occupations. His books have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Greek and Serbo-Croat. 

_____________

NOTES:

1. If you google search for the predicted death toll of the climate crisis, you are likely to get articles from 2023 that claim “a billion” deaths over the next decades. Few of them mention that the August 2023 study they reference describes 1 billion as a conservative estimate, and several billion as a more likely death toll. Conservative sources like the University of Chicago and World Economic Forum articles claim that there “might be” hundreds of thousands or even a couple million yearly deaths “in the future,” obscuring the fact that tens of millions of humans are already dying every year from the compounded effects of the ecological crisis, a figure I demonstrate in The Solutions Are Already Here. ︎
2. The Australian government still claims that Saddam Hussein’s regimes had weapons of mass destruction and ties with terrorist groups like al Qaeda, even though both of these justifications were known to be lies even before the invasion was launched in 2003. ︎

The post Deadly Double Standards – Peter Gelderloos appeared first on Void Network.

written by Blade Runner 

Various parts of the article have been published before in Freedom News.

—

The battle for Tishrin Dam in Syria

For almost two months, Tishrin Dam, a vital infrastructure for water and electricity in northeastern Syria, has been subjected to continuous drone and warplane attacks. The likelihood of a catastrophic failure grows each day, and if the dam collapses, it could release approximately 2 billion cubic meters of floodwater, causing widespread destruction to villages, farmland, and lives downstream. Beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis, this would significantly threaten Rojava’s revolutionary project.

On January 8, thousands gathered to create a human shield in defence of the dam. Ongoing drone strikes have already resulted in 25 deaths and numerous injuries, including journalists. Despite the relentless attacks, vigils persist as convoys of supporters have been arriving from various parts of northern Syria. The damaged yet still-standing dam has become a powerful symbol of Rojava’s resistance, inspiring solidarity actions worldwide.

Tishrin Dam is not only a crucial source of water and electricity but also a strategic gateway between contested territories. To the east, it links areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who are resisting attacks by the Turkish-backed former ISIS group, the Syrian National Army (SNA)—a militia infamous for looting, robbery, and kidnappings. Supported by Turkish artillery, drones, and fighter jets, the SNA’s offensive on the dam is part of a larger strategy: the assault on Kobani, a key centre of Rojava’s resistance against the Islamic State (ISIS). This renewed aggression seeks to dismantle the autonomous Kurdish-led region.

In recent developments, the Turkish-backed offensive has escalated—a pumping station has been damaged, leaving over 200,000 people without drinking water. This follows weeks of shelling of villages in the countryside area south of Kobani, as the aggressors continue to spread terror in an effort to break the resistance.

Brief history of Rojava’s radical self-governance experiment

The Arab Spring of 2011 was part of a larger global wave of uprisings, beginning with the Zapatista movement in the 1990s, and sparked mass protests across the Arab world. In Syria, governed since 1963 by the Ba’ath party, a political movement blending secular Arab nationalism and Arab socialism that evolved into a family loyalist dictatorship, the initial uprising quickly escalated into a full-scale revolution and civil war. In the northeast, the Kurdish population seized the opportunity to launch their own autonomy project in the Rojava region.

The Kurds are a stateless nation, numbering around 30-45 million people today, and have lived since the Neolithic era scattered across regions currently controlled by Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. With a long history of struggles for independence and social justice, the Kurdish movement in Rojava (the Syrian part of Kurdistan) formed an alliance with Arabs, Assyrians, and Turkmen, creating the Democratic Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria (DAANES).

This marked the onset of the Rojava social revolution, a movement aligned with the revolutionary ideology of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned founder and ideological leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Kurdish political organisation that has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy within Turkey. Öcalan, during his imprisonment in Turkey shifted away from Marxist-Leninist nationalism to a form of libertarian socialism known as democratic confederalism.

Rojava’s project is grounded in decentralisation, gender equality, and direct democracy. These principles have led many to idealise Rojava as an anarchist or anti-capitalist utopia. However, it remains a complex endeavour: while it rejects the centralised state model, it retains certain government structures, such as prisons, and continues to engage in trade and monetary exchange. In Rojava, there are some of the most fertile lands in Syria as well as significant oil fields, the exploitation of which has been one of the main sources of revenue.

The military forces defending Rojava include the Kurdish liberation militias of the People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, YPJ). These were the primary forces that halted the advance of the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) early in the Syrian civil war, safeguarding an autonomous Rojava and allowing the revolutionary experience of democratic confederalism to develop.

YPG and YPJ led the formation of the SDF, a coalition of military and political organisations of which they are the largest. The SDF have increasingly relied on military and political support from the US, entering into realpolitik compromises that have limited the spread and development of the Rojava revolution and its potential for global revolutionary solidarity.

The Kurdish movement remains in tension between the historically entrenched authoritarian Marxist currents that constitute the old guard of the PKK and the anti-authoritarian current developed by Öcalan, as well as the women’s organisations, local communes, and much of the younger generation. Nonetheless, SDF-controlled areas remain by far the safest for women, ethnic minorities like the Yazidi, and atheists and religious minorities.

In Syrian Kurdistan the people were prepared and knew what they wanted. They believed that the revolution must start from the bottom of society and not from the top. It must be a social, cultural and educational as well as political revolution. It must be against the state, power and authority. It must be people in the communities who have the final decision-making responsibilities. These are the four principles of the Movement of the Democracy Society.¹

Radical leftists and anarchists who have travelled to Rojava—whether to fight alongside the local forces or to volunteer in communities—view it as a significant experiment in self-organisation. People from diverse backgrounds, including Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Muslims, Christians, and Yazidis, have worked together in solidarity. The region is structured through a federation of towns and cantons, where local communes, councils, and committees manage governance at all levels.

Rojava’s revolution has significantly transformed society. Women hold leadership positions in governance, the military, and civil institutions. Ethnic and religious minorities enjoy greater protections and representation than in surrounding states. While challenges and contradictions persist, Rojava’s model stands as an alternative to the authoritarianism, sectarianism, and capitalism prevalent in the region.

How the Middle East crisis entered its new phase and the re-ignition of the Syrian war

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a surprise offensive against Israel. Despite millions invested in surveillance technology, settlement expansion, and the construction of a massive separation wall, the Israeli state was caught off guard. In response, Israel has waged over a year of genocidal warfare against the people of Gaza while escalating a US-backed proxy war against Iranian-aligned forces, to secure regional dominance.

Both Israel and Iran have framed their aggression in nationalist and religious terms, justifying military operations as necessary for national security and ideological preservation. Israeli leadership has openly declared its intention to reshape the Middle East by neutralising regional adversaries while advancing a doctrine of Jewish supremacy. Meanwhile, Iran presents the conflict as a “holy war against the forces of evil,” using it to consolidate regional influence with support from China and Russia.

In December 2024, the Syrian civil war, which had been in a period of relative stasis, reignited when a coalition of jihadist rebel groups led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebranded offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Syria, launched a surprise offensive in northwest Syria. The insurgents advanced rapidly, facing zero resistance and seizing major cities such as Aleppo and Hama within two weeks before capturing Damascus. Initially, the fall of the Assad regime sparked cautious optimism among Syria’s diverse communities, but this quickly turned to fear as HTS imposed fundamentalist rule.

In response to this renewed jihadist offensive, the DAANES declared a state of “total mobilisation.” The SDF have faced coordinated attacks on power stations and vital infrastructure, prompting calls for unity among Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs, Assyrians, Armenians, and Circassians to defend their communities against both ISIS-aligned groups and Turkish military incursions.

In the meantime, Israel’s own military operations diverted Iran and Hezbollah’s focus, and together with Russia’s preoccupation with its war in Ukraine, created a power vacuum in Syria, which Turkish-backed forces have exploited. The timing of Turkey’s military offensive appeared strategic, aligning with the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency and shifting geopolitical priorities. With Iran and Russia facing their own challenges and uncertainty surrounding US policy under the new administration, Turkey positioned itself as a key beneficiary of the region’s shifting power balance.

The diplomatic chessboard and Neo-Ottoman idealism

In this context, Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza and its expanded operations in Syria further demonstrate the alignment of regional power plays. Israel, backed by the US and UK, has used the crisis to bomb Syrian military infrastructure, ensuring that the new Syrian regime does not re-emerge as a regional threat. Netanyahu’s declaration that “The Golan Heights will remain forever under Israeli sovereignty” reflected Israel’s broader strategy—securing military and intelligence advantages while cutting off Hezbollah’s critical supply routes between Lebanon and Syria.

The future of Syria has been contested. HTS is putting forward a centralised authoritarian regime similar to Assad’s Ba’athist rule. In contrast, the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political wing of the SDF, advocates for a federal democratic model based on decentralised governance and democratic confederalism. The SDC’s vision includes local autonomy for Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Druze, and other communities, fostering cooperation rather than sectarian rule. 

The US administration faces a complex diplomatic challenge. It must continue supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in their fight against ISIS while simultaneously appeasing NATO ally Turkey, which has the second-largest military force in the alliance. Israel and France are pressing for the former scenario, while Erdogan wants the US troops to leave so that he can freely strike Rojava. A 2,000-strong US force remains stationed in Kobani, maintaining a red line that deters Turkey from launching a full-scale invasion. The SDF also retains its own leverage—holding tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and their families in the Al-Hol refugee camp and serving as the only force capable of containing ISIS’s resurgence. 

Erdogan was threatening an imminent invasion while waiting for the Trump inauguration. A full-scale invasion did not happen, and the SDF forces have been successful in repelling the SNA attacks on the ground. However, the Kurds’ grave concern is based on the previous experience of Turkey’s invasion in Afrin in 2019, and the Erdogan regime’s Neo-Ottoman ambitions, with officials asserting that cities like Aleppo are “Turkish” and signalling broader territorial aspirations. While the US has threatened sanctions in response to potential Turkish aggression, past patterns suggest that Erdogan could proceed regardless, especially in the scenario of US troops’ withdrawal, escalating to one of the most brutal conflicts in the region since the height of ISIS’s rule.

Initially, Israel, Russia, and Saudi Arabia all had a strong interest in preventing the spread of HTS or the installation of a Turkish-backed government in Damascus. However, the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad and the rise of HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa as de facto and self-proclaimed president have altered regional dynamics. Saudi Arabia, which previously balanced clandestine support for various factions, is now engaging directly with Syria’s new leadership, signalling a shift toward stabilisation rather than proxy support. 

Meanwhile, Turkey remains deeply involved in shaping Syria’s future, continuing its backing of the SNA and working diplomatically with al-Sharaa’s government. The role of Israel remains ambiguous, but the likelihood of increased support for the Kurdish-dominated SDF from both Saudi Arabia and Israel remains, especially as the SDF seeks a decentralised and secular post-Assad Syria. Russia, however, faces challenges in navigating this new order, as open support for the SDF would provoke Iran and complicate its relations with Turkey.

With Assad’s removal two months ago, Syria’s conflict entered a new phase and a clear resolution appears to be distant. The country is divided along the lines of the SNA (Turkish-backed mercenaries and Sunni fundamentalists) and the SDF (multiethnic democratic forces with U.S. and possible Saudi and Israeli backing). Given that the U.S. and Turkey remain NATO allies, an open proxy war remains unlikely. Instead, Syria could face a long-term partition between these two factions, with the new regime attempting to navigate a fragile balance between Turkish, Saudi, and Western interests. 

The pressure on the Kurdish-led forces to abandon their revolutionary aspirations will only grow in this environment, reinforcing the lesson that global movements have to unavoidably contend with the tension between capitalist state democracy and radical change.

Negotiations between Damascus and SDF continues but it’s clear that any agreement is out of reach. With Trump in the White House and his calls for US forces to withdraw, Rojava’s autonomy is very uncertain. Other minorities in Syria are slowly being bent under the authority of the new centralised rule, as international states support and assist the new government to establish its power. Any revolutionary dreams of democratisation and federalisation of Syria fade away, as the new administration gets integrated into the ranks of capitalist nation-states.

The imperialist influence that Russia and Iran had over the Assad regime is being exchanged for the imperialist influence of Turkish Neo-Ottoman dreams, with support from Turkey’s NATO partners, which are western countries. The Islamic fundamentalist politics of the self-proclaimed president of Syria are now kept hidden, waiting to consolidate the power grip before starting any moves that could scare their newly acquired western partners. The promises of protection for ethnic minorities and women’s rights probably will only last until economic sanctions are lifted, but after that, nothing will remain between the new centralised state and any resistance against their authoritarian measures.

The revolution of Rojava is funnelled into a very difficult position, forced to accept the integration of SDF into a new Syrian state under the rule of an islamist force, or the annihilation under the bombs of the Turkish army. But after more than a decade of revolutionary developments in Syria, and more than four decades of efforts and struggle of the Kurdish Liberation Movement, a historic announcement by Abdullah Öcalan is expected on the 26th anniversary of his imprisonment. In the background, there have been diplomatic efforts to resolve the decades long Turkey-PKK conflict. A proposal for Öcalan’s release and a $14 billion development plan for Kurdish regions have been widely promoted in Turkey, in exchange for PKK disarmament. However, trust issues persist, especially with ongoing Turkish military strikes against PKK positions in Iraq and as Turkey views the U.S.-allied SDF as a PKK extension. 

The Kurds have historically faced oppression from all states within whose borders they have lived. Unlike other minorities such as Armenian and Assyrian Christians, which the Assad regime allowed to preserve their languages, Kurds were forced to run schools in Arabic. PKK has been designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US, the EU, and NATO allies. This includes the UK, which raided the Kurdish Community Centre in North London on November the 27th, the 46th anniversary of the PKK’s founding.

Turkey’s expansionism targeting the Kurds and other minorities echoes the atrocities of Ottoman-era ethnic cleansing. The Armenian genocide was carried out by the Ottoman Empire primarily between 1915 and 1916, and resulted in the systematic extermination of up to 1.5 million Armenians. The mass killings were carried out through death marches into the Syrian desert, resulting in widespread starvation, disease, executions, and the destruction of Armenian cultural and religious heritage. This played a key role in the ethnic and demographic changes that facilitated the emergence of modern Turkey in 1923.

In the autumn of 2023, following Azerbaijan’s military offensive supported by the Turkish government, nearly 120,000 Armenians were forcibly displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh, exacerbating the region’s long-standing ethnic conflicts. Entire communities were displaced and Armenian cultural heritage sites were destroyed, while the international community turned a blind eye. Netanyahu’s government in Israel was no doubt paying attention, and Erdogan must also be tempted to “cleanse” Rojava of Kurds if he believes the entire world will empower him to do so.

Brief update on the situation in the Palestinian territories

The situation in Gaza and the West Bank remains highly volatile, marked by significant political developments and ongoing military actions. 

In early February 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump proposed a controversial plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip, suggesting the relocation of its Palestinian inhabitants to neighbouring countries like Egypt and Jordan. He described Gaza as a “demolition site” and envisioned transforming it into a luxurious destination, akin to the “Riviera of the Middle East.” 

This proposal has been rejected by the Palestine leaders and was met with widespread condemnation from international organisations and various governments, with Amnesty International labelling the plan “appalling and unlawful”. In the West Bank, Israeli military operations have intensified, resulting in casualties among Palestinians. 

The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire, as international organisations continue to call for immediate ceasefires and the provision of essential aid to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people.

A war waged on the bodies of the weak and the marginalised

The proxy wars devastating the Middle East are driven by patriarchal and nationalist power struggles that prioritise capital and domination over freedom, diversity, and communal life. These conflicts have systematically erased historical memory, destroyed communities, and deepened cycles of division and hopelessness.

Nations and cultures predating modern state borders—such as the Armenians, Palestinians, and Kurds—have been repeatedly targeted for elimination when asserting their right to autonomy. Women, children, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and ethnic and religious minorities are treated as expendable, facing extreme violence and exploitation. The global system, dominated by hegemonic states, presents the marginalised with two options: assimilation or destruction.

In just one year, the devastation in Palestine has been staggering: since Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, Israel’s military onslaught has retaliated thirty-fold, with over 41,000 Palestinians killed, including 13,000 children and 115 infants born after October 7. More than 10,000 Gazans remain missing, buried under rubble. The entire population of Gaza—2.3 million people in an area smaller than 360 square kilometres—has been displaced, forced into extreme deprivation, and denied access to basic healthcare, food, and services.

83,000 tonnes of explosives have been dropped on Gaza, four times the explosive power used to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 80% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. It has systematically obliterated all universities, more than 70% of schools, 34 out of 36 hospitals, and countless other essential facilities: 165 health units, 137 ambulances, 611 mosques, all three churches, and 178 shelters in Gaza.

In Lebanon, over 2,000 people have died, and one million have been displaced. Another 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. Israel has lost an additional 350 soldiers in Gaza, and 200,000 Israelis have been forced to abandon their homes near Gaza and along the northern borders with Lebanon. Hezbollah rocket fire has killed around 50 Israeli soldiers and civilians.

In Syria, According to the Jineolojî Academy thousands of women and children have been raped since the civil war began, with at least 353,900 people killed since 2018. Another 56,900 are missing or presumed dead. Women and children make up 40% of the victims. Many Syrian women fleeing to Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan have been forced into prostitution or sold into marriage under economic desperation. Non-binary and gender-nonconforming individuals face systematic violence due to rigid gender norms and the absence of legal protections.

Call for international solidarity

The developments in Syria highlight the broader consequences of US-led proxy wars, such as Israel’s campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. The current Middle East crisis unfolds within a global power shift, where key actors compete for influence amid economic strain, climate collapse, and growing instability. Warfare, which has been a persistent feature of the 21st century, has accelerated into a higher gear.

As financial crises and social unrest intensified in the last decades, ruling elites capitalised on rapid technological advancements and the lingering fear cultivated by the “War on Terror” to expand military budgets, surveillance, and repression. These resources were not deployed to ensure peace but to fuel ongoing conflicts, reinforcing a global restructuring process driven by militarisation and state violence.

In the meantime, the “Rojava Experiment” has reinvigorated the Kurdish movement across Kurdistan and in the exile communities of Europe, as well as inspired anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist movements across the world.

The fighting people of Northeastern Syria are calling on allies worldwide to rise in solidarity. Their revolutionary project stands for autonomy, direct-democracy, feminism, and social ecology, challenging authoritarian regimes across the region. As drone strikes intensify and an invasion looms, grassroots action and international solidarity may prove to be crucial to deter another state-led ethnic cleansing in this tormented region.

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READ ALSO

1. Zaher Baher, The experiment of West Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) has proved that people can make changes (August 26, 2014, libcom.org) ︎

The post Rojava in the shadows of war and ethnic cleansing 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

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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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The post Gaza, My Love- Understanding the Genocide in Palestine appeared first on Void Network.

Written by Soraya Chemaly

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Τhere is an irony in the fact that students protesting the Israel-Gaza war grew up hearing that they were “coddled” and “lack resiliency.” Critics scolded Gen Z for “needing safe spaces” and being “unable to cope” without trigger warnings. They claimed society was raising this generation in a “feminized” culture that’s left it weak and without purpose.

The early 2000s, the birth years for many of the students now protesting, marked the start of a period in which parents and educators worried that American children were not resilient enough. These concerns centered on children in upper income brackets attending elite institutions like the ones where protesters are now clashing with administrators and law enforcement. In 2006, one psychologist dubbed privileged children “America’s newly identified at-risk group,” leading to the warped conclusion that social vulnerabilities were resilience advantages for materially impoverished children. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff put it, in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, this generation has been “set up for failure.”

And yet, here they are, many of them the most privileged students in the country, risking their physical safety, academic standing, and futures by demanding accountability from powerful administrators. They are facing down militarized police and being threatened with arrest, tear gas, tasers, and brutality. They are, in fact, exhibiting the grit and competence, control and commitment that they have been castigated, as a generation, for lacking.

Resilience-shaming critics often conflate two different things: “resilience” as a process of adaptation and resilience as a proxy for a worldview. A worldview that is, at best, individualistic, hyper-masculinized, universalizing, and, at worst, invested in perpetuating supremacist norms and violent domination. That’s a lot to pack into “resilience,” I know, but bear with me.

The presumption behind the suggestion that younger generations lack resilience is that there is one “best way” to cope with hardship that is optimized for achieving personal well-being and success. This standard includes, among other factors, the belief that we grow from suffering and that only the fittest survive, through an amorphously defined “mental toughness.” Young people are supposed to be self-sufficient, optimistic, able to “bounce back” and quickly return to productivity and be grateful for what they have.

In this estimation, resilience is an individual trait demonstrated through self-sufficiency, control, and competence. Insofar as this notion of adaptation highlights independence and productivity, it takes for granted the emotional labor and care work that make both possible. It’s an ideal well-suited to competition, workplace needs, and winning, and it is invested in the belief that we personally “grow” from our suffering. In the process, however, this paradigm of resilience erases power, social context, and history. It depoliticizes circumstances of stress and crises. At its core, it is a resilience based on separation, competition, and domination.

The students protesting today have had to adapt to the world as it is. Younger people aren’t “different” and distressed, because they lack the right mindset or don’t understand what is happening around them. They are distressed, because they understand that the world is burning, and that adults have repeatedly failed them.

We are all familiar with the crises that this generation faces: climate catastrophe, widening economic inequality, highly visible and violent social injustices. They’re inheriting water, land, and bodies filled with chemicals. They’ve grown up, carrying bullies, racists, and rapists in their back pockets, as ever-present threats that live on their phones. They’ve watched delusional billionaires benefit from their addictions and anxieties. Their introduction to public and civic life—going to school—was shaped by gun violence and the constant threat of death. All of this before a pandemic derailed their adolescent lives. Covid-19 turned every social interaction into a life-or-death ethical dilemma, highlighting inequalities of wealth and poverty; gender, class and race; global power and powerlessness.

Notably, this generation grew up in accelerated sociotechnical environments. Digital natives, their understanding of the world has been shaped by visually intensive, networked, global media that has exposed them to intense social dynamics, fraught political debates, diverse perspectives, and viscerally raw depictions of current life and history. Their media—from Tumblr to TikTok—reveals connections between people and ideas and time. In the process, their way of adapting is relational, not individualistic. Older pundits routinely ignore or minimize our entanglements with one another and our environments, but students who are protesting, like so many of their peers, cannot. To them, our interdependencies are undeniable. Why would they adapt in ways that ignore those interdependencies?

It’s not as though they have a choice. Most traditional turning points in their lives—relationships and sex, school life, graduations—have been marred or prevented by crises that extend far beyond their personal environments or control.

As a foundation for envisioning the future, the hard truths of the past 25 years would depress even the most dedicated positive thinker. Escalating rates of mental distress, anxiety, depression, and self-harm are the source of legitimate and grave concern among parents, educators, and social scientists. But rates of despair and despondence have been rising for decades, during which time experts have pinned the cause on everything from late-stage capitalism and environmental toxicity to unregulated technology and (also unregulated) women’s liberation. If this generation suffers more, it could very well be the compression effects of acceleration and of exposure to the many indicators of what can feel like imminent collapse.

Sometimes, however, distress is the appropriate response to crisis. It is a resilient response. In the traditional paradigm, optimism and stick-to-itness are paramount. But there are names for optimism when it exceeds its usefulness and leads to denialism: illusion and delusion among them. Younger people’s emotional distress signals instead the cognitive flexibility required to employ pragmatism, optimism, and pessimism strategically. Their protesting is, in fact, adaptive optimism. What after all is a protest if not the hopeful belief that you can change the future?

Student protesters also demonstrate another key resilience attribute: cognitive flexibility, which allows them to resist stereotypes and oppositional thinking, such as, for example, a victim/perpetrator binary. Students go out of their way to acknowledge the complexity of the Israel/Gaza conflict, recognizing that the current situation is shaped by historical, political, and social factors that defy simple, black-and-white categorization.

Consider, for example, that across justice movements—for Black Lives, against gun violence, for women’s rights, for peace—young people show that they are able to think in terms, as Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg puts it, of our being “implicated subjects.” They are more honest about the ways we are enmeshed in harms by virtue of being socialized in, belonging to, and benefiting from systems that perpetrated and continue to perpetrate injustices. In the case of the current campus protests, they want to stop being implicated in a specific ongoing injustice and hold power accountable.

While media and administrators seem to cling to an ideal of faux “normalcy” in which injustices were ignored, these students are not. They are intent on repair, not restoration. They are well-versed in holding many truths at once and aware of how violence and oppressive systems make their way into not only institutions but interpersonal relationships as well. How else do you understand Jewish students holding Passover seders with classmates at university protest camps for peace and Palestinian rights and dignity?

These students are politically engaged, sophisticated thinkers who are using their life experiences and adapting to each other and to the planet in healthier, fairer ways: relationally, collectively, and purposefully.

None of this is to say that protesters and their protests are either absolutely ideologically or philosophically aligned. Mass movements are snarly, complicated messes, and no one person or group can define or contain them or people who attach themselves to them. There have been egregious acts of antisemitism on some campuses, and words and actions can, even if unintentionally, fall back on historically resonant dog whistles. However, pro-Palestinian students, many of whom are themselves Jewish, have been consistently outspoken in their denouncements of antisemitism while rejecting its evolving conflation with anti-Zionism.

As citizens who have grown up protesting, they are experts in exercising their free speech rights, almost always, peacefully. Already seasoned activists through repeated necessity, they strive to listen to others and to foreground historically marginalized voices. As a cohort, they evidence an ethics of care that leads them toward dialogue, not debate.

The truth is that critics of this generation are not addressing a problem of children who can’t cope and aren’t resilient, but one of children who refuse to conform. These students are highly resilient—they’re just resilient in a way that makes them ungovernable.

______

Soraya Chemaly

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. She is the director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and an advocate for women’s freedom of expression and expanded civic and political engagement.

SOURCE: The Nation magazine

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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/

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No one can understand what is happening in the land of Palestine, not even those who have followed the sanguinary vicissitudes of the peoples who have lived down there for so long. They face each other with hatred and suspicion, not just men and women, children and old people, but the very dust of the roads and the mud that covers them on rainy days, the asphyxiating heat and the stench of the sultriness.

The ‘official’ terms of the controversy are well known. The Israelis chased the Palestinians off their land, but this happened so long ago that some of the people born in huts in the camps are now fifty years old. Ridiculous arguments between States have resulted in pieces of land being returned to the people who were driven away, but it is impossible to live in them. In Israel if you don’t work you go hungry. The colons of the second Zionist wave got rich through the exploitation of a cheap Palestinian work force and the free use of fields in territories that should now constitute the new State of Palestine. But not only does all that fail to grasp the essence of the problem, it does not even begin to describe it. Perhaps it made sense at the time of the first popular insurrection of the people of the ‘territories’, that of the stones. Now things are moving towards an increasingly ferocious ‘Lebanisation’.

Neither party wants to retreat as this would lead to internal conflict, a destructive civil war that would almost certainly give the adversary victory on a military level.

And so they continue to attack each other in a never-ending cycle. Each side uses the weapons they have at their disposal: the Palestinians blow themselves up with their own bombs; the Israelis bomb houses in the territories from planes. There are the pacification maps, the internal agreements, the UN guarantees and Bush’s empty ‘sorrow’.

The problem is developing at its own pace, one that can only be grasped by someone who has familiarity with such situations, and it is becoming chronic. Hatred becomes acute when one lives in conditions such as those of the Palestinians, with prospects like theirs, i.e., none at all. There is no hope for their children or for the future of the place where they were born. And it is not true that this hatred, so ferocious and incomprehensible to us, is nourished by integralist extremism. How is it that most of the young people who blow themselves up with their own bombs have completed their studies, have a degree or diploma — sometimes obtained abroad — are family people, have children. What they don’t have is hope. They realize that there is nothing for them but a prospect of hatred of an enemy that imprisons, bombs and tortures. On the other side everyone lives in fear of being blown up as they go to work, dance in a disco, lie asleep in their beds. Here again, blind hatred that sees no alternative is pushing people to demand that the government use more force in the repression. Even the most illuminated of the Israeli labour party formed in Mapai in 1968, (one of the Zionist forces to support the first settlements) have kept quiet for fear of losing their electoral base. Many see the Likud (right wing party which means literally ‘consolidation’) as the only force capable of leading the country against the Palestinians.

To speak of peace under such conditions is just another way to wriggle out of things with clean hands and a dirty conscience.

Organised massacres of Palestinians such as those by the Christian-Maronites at Sabra and Chatila in September 1982, or (Black) September 1970 organised by King Hussein of Jordan which lasted until April 1971 resulting in 4,600 dead and 10,000 wounded, are still possible. However, if carried out by Israel or one of its armed intermedieries they would lead to a complete destabilisation of the area. As I write, Israel has attacked some presumed Palestinian posting in Syria; the present time is one of the worst.

There is no prospect of peace in sight. The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalised insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them and of proposing peace based on collaboration and mutual respect to the Palestinian people directly, without intermedieries. But for the time being this perspective is only a dream. We must prepare for the worst.

Still now, with no title at all

There is one thing about the struggle of the Palestinian people that has touched and fascinated all those who have approached it: on the other side of the barricade are the Jews, the persecuted of all times.

There is nothing strange about this, the persecuted have often become persecutors. Just think of what happened to the early Christians in the space of three centuries after they gained power and systematically began to repress all dissonant voices. There have been many such cases of about turns throughout history. Today’s prisons are built on the temples of the past. No political force in recent times has been able to resist throwing itself into ruthless repression as soon as it reached power, no matter how travailed its history. But the voice of reason is not enough for us to gain an understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Jews have always been at the centre of attention and given rise to either suspicion or sympathy, usually the former. Thrown out from wherever they happened to be as a consequence of insinuation and dreadful accusations, they always gained the sympathy of anyone with any feelings — anyone, that is, who is against pogroms, mass murder, the massacre of innocents and summary judgements based on impressions and hearsay. The mental rigidity of the Jews, their vision of life based on religious righteousness that sees the rest of the world as impure or sinful, has often put such sympathies to the test. But the enormity of the historical debt owed them, which in the second world war grew to the point of becoming a methodical procedure that surpassed anything that had ever been ever dreamed of till then, revived these sympathies and constituted a new force of international cohesion capable of supporting the case for Jewish settlements in Palestine.

Israel became a focus of international support for many reasons. The massacre in the Nazi concentration camps, the socialist and libertarian character of the early settlements, the theories of the first kibbutzim based on libertarian communism, the original peaceful cohabitation with the Arabs in response to the latter’s traditional hospitality. Then interests emerged, particularly at the end of the Second World War. They were based on the world’s division into two opposing blocks, with American interests on one side and Soviet ones on the other. It was a question of economic interest in a geographical area which was rich in oil fields, thereby attracting the attention of the great imperialist States.

The Israelis accepted their role as gendarme of the western project of world dominion, and began keeping an eye on the movements of the surrounding Arab States. The latter often fought each other about the management of the immense revenue from oil and became players on the international chessboard, at times supporting, at others contrasting, the opposition of the great States. It was the Zionist movement along with the great Jewish-American and international, but mainly American, lobbies that pushed the Jewish people along this road in the land of Israel. They lead to an extremism hitherto unequalled in the whole of political-religious history. The lobbies, which were capable of conditioning American politics, particularly during the long years of Republican power, forced the United States to push the small but fierce Israel into the role of policeman of the Middle East.

All this rekindled anti-Semitism at world level, leading to an indigestible collection of anti-Jewish theories. In this concentrate of stupidity we find such historical revisionism as the theory that the holocaust never existed, or that of Arab nationalists are incapable of considering Israeli people as possible brothers and pacific cohabitants of the same territory. For their part, the latter have survived a thousand years of persecution and massacres yet have not benefited from past experience. They have become hostages in the hands of a theocratic State, one of the worst kinds of organisation to emerge from the mind of man. Fear of being cast into the sea to take up the path of exile yet again has thrown them into the arms of internal and external meddlers: Zionist schemes at local and international level, and the strategies of US world dominion.

An evil crescendo has been set in motion that nothing other than a revolutionary process will be able to halt. No discussion is possible and anyone who has experienced the concrete and theoretical reality of the Jews, even for short spells, can confirm this. No theoretical proposal will ever be able to undo the mechanism of encirclement and fear. That situation has remained unchanged, even since the fall of the Berlin wall and the thaw that came about after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the twentieth century. Arab nationalist claims in general and those of the Palestinians in particular cause too much fear, and there is no lack of those who support the facile but treacherous idea of ‘let’s throw them all into the sea’ on both sides.

The experience of the Palestinian State, or of the ‘Palestinian authorities’ as some prefer to refer to it, also demonstrates this impossibility. They failed to propose cohabitation based on reciprocal respect along the lines of the libertarian communes, a sentiment that has not completely disappeared in a certain Israeli left. This corresponds in a slightly different way to the tradition of hospitality and freedom of the Arab peoples — in the first place the Palestinians. Instead they have taken the road mapped out by the politicians of the PLO, in particular Arafat, true killer of the Palestinian people’s real desire for freedom and artificer of a phantom State fit only to guarantee the personal power of a little man afflicted with delusions of grandeur.

The dice has been thrown, based on the fear that has intensified in the Israeli field. An extension of the civil war in course right to the centres of Israeli power could push things beyond the present level of conflict. Each side is afraid of the other. The Israelis fear Palestinian demands that would threaten their privileges (cheap labour, houses expropriated from Arabs who were forced to leave, State benefits, etc.). The Palestinians fear the Israelis who want to get rid of them, and want to throw them off their land (and in large part already have done), forcing them into exile in the concentration camps of the Lebanon and Jordan. Fear is exacerbating the conditions of the conflict. Palestinian suicide bombers packed with dynamite blow themselves up in Israeli markets, buses and schools. The exalted Israeli religious Right Wing in power have shown that the weapons with which they intend to face ‘cohabitation’ with the Arab world — exploitation, control, repression, — are just as bad.

It is impossible to turn the clock back. Too many dead in each family, in each family group, in every sector of social life. Too much blood, too much pain. All that cannot be eliminated with a handshake, or some Camp David. In spite of the existence of the Israeli Left, yesterday in power, today in opposition, the most emarginated class of Israelis, the Sephardi (Jews originally from Africa therefore with a darker skin colour but still of Jewish religion), are taking refuge in extreme Right Wing positions rather than favouring talks and agreements based on equal rights with the Palestinians. They are afraid they will lose the right to stay in Israel and be forced back to the countries they came from, where most of them would meet certain death. So it is not difficult to understand why the most extreme members of the Jewish religious organisations are of Sephardic origin and constitute the most ferocious henchmen of the army and police employed in the repression.

On the other hand, there are the new Palestinian police — the politicians of the PLO. These ill-omened offshoots of the new State have taken up positions in the government of a people tormented by forty years of exile and persecution, and are putting power in all its forms into effect. They torture, kill, judge and sentence their own people without hesitation. Comrades in struggle who participated in extremely risky actions up until a few years ago have become judges, prison guards, policemen, army commanders, bodyguards, secret services agents. In the territories liberated by concession of the Israeli government, the PLO has become the repressive force of a State that has not yet reached the maximum of its governing capacity, but which has already embarked on the road of all States. The roles are reversing, power is renewing itself but the methods remain the same. But for the millions of Palestinians still in the camps, the permanent exiles who have had their land and identity taken from them, this way of doing things is called betrayal. Hence their fear of seeing themselves imprisoned in concentration camps for another half century, betrayed by their own representatives (something that is very painful, I can tell you), as well as being under the attack of Israeli raids and drawn into a political game which they do not understand and whose possible outcome they fail to see.

Once again the future is being conditioned by fear on both sides, pushing them blindly forward in a clash that is getting worse. The insurrection of the Palestinian people scares the politicians of Gaza and the West Bank. More than anything it scares Arafat, as he is unable to control it. It scares the Israeli government, but also scares the Israeli people, and this is the important thing. Seeing themselves under attack in their own homes where anyone likes to feel safe, they are appealing to their governors and asking for stricter controls and a more systematic repression. The circle is closing in.

It is not possible to make forecasts and anyway they could always be refuted by unforeseen events.

To abandon a people’s dreams of freedom as they are being attacked and destroyed by a theocratic State leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth. Can so much blood, so much sacrifice, so many dead, all have been in vain? Were we fooled into choosing which side to support in our more or less radical intervention more or less in first person, once upon a time, and are we still deluding ourselves today? Can it be that the problem in finding the courage to attack the mechanism of the Israeli war (the Jews again, or a poor persecuted people subjected to the expansionist and military aims of a group of criminals in power?) is that it has been faced the wrong way? Have the efforts of the past only led to the shiny buttons of the new Palestinian police or the ferocious sneer of a Sephardi Jew screaming ‘throw them all into the sea!’? I don’t know.

This booklet does not attempt to give any answers. I thought it would be more interesting to simply take up the problem once again.

I have aired these doubts in my heart over the past ten years in which many of the following pieces were written, sometimes looking up at the night sky and singling out stars of times gone by one by one. Their light continues to shine unperturbed upon the woes of men.

The crux of a problem that cannot be solved

Justifications of a theocratic State

When Great Britain began to address the Jews towards Palestine in 1917, you could already see in the declarations contained in a memorandum by Lord Balfour how the interests of international Zionism were far more important than the fate of ‘70,000 Arabs with all their desires and prejudices’.

That moment marked the beginning of the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land and the constitution of a ‘national Jewish homeland’, reconstructed on historic and religious traces. By 1935 the Jews were already 400,000 compared to 900,000 Arabs. When Israel as such was constituted in 1948, the clashes, persecution and mass exodus of the Arabs began. All Jewish immigrants were promised not only nationality, but also one of the houses abandoned by the Arabs in their flight.

The new repressive politic imposed by the State of Israel came to take the place of the preceding one of havlagh (limitation) and this needed moral justification, also in order to convince many of the Jews who still felt the Nazi repression on their skins.

This justification was found in the concept of shoah (catastrophe). Not only that suffered at the hands of the Nazis but also that which traverses the whole history of the Jewish people. In this way, the most recent catastrophe, the extermination by the Third Reich, was linked to the birth of the Israeli State: shoah vetekumah (catastrophe and rebirth).

Another myth was also put into circulation again, that of heroism (vagevurah) whose symbol was the insurrection of the Warsaw ghetto. It was used to justify rebellion against a new possible catastrophe (the return of the Arabs to their homes), and the concept of shoah vegevurah, catastrophe and heroism, emerged.

These elements came to be combined within the Zionist movement in many ways. Fed by extreme right wing propaganda and religious fanaticism, they resulted in the homicidal mixture that was to sweep away the egalitarian enthusiasm of a considerable part of the early immigrants in the land of Israel.

The Arab refusal

Once freed from the Turks, the Palestinian Arabs did not want to be dominated either by the English or the Zionist newcomers. But this refusal concerned (and still concerns) the management of their lives by a State, be it British or Israeli. They wanted to form a Palestinian community composed of the various Arab realities in the region. But they had nothing against the insertion of communities different to their own, as happened in 1920 with the Armenians who had escaped Turkish persecution. What they did not want, and do not want, was an Israeli (or British) State to dominate them.

For this reason the Palestinians were not opposed to the settlement of the Jews, at least not until the latter took the form of a Zionist political movement aimed at establishing the Israeli State. And the greater Arab opposition became, the more the Jewish State project became obvious as it emerged from behind the egalitarian theories of free federated agricultural communities.

Internal opposition

There has always been opposition within the Zionist movement, including a tendency that wants to constitute a kind of libertarian socialism in the Middle East, particularly in Israel, and this still exists today in some form or another. This tendency is against the constitution of the Jewish State. It originated from the idea of a possible collaboration between Arabs and Israelis, suggesting a clash that was more real than the abstract one based on nationalist opposition (and producer of such dire consequences). It was a question of making a distinction between the model of a collectivised, free society (at least in perspective) based on the productive structure of the kibbutzim, and the oppressive model of society based on State capitalism of the Soviet kind. In fact a free, selfmanaged, anti-State producers’ federation is still the only way that a solution to the problem in the Middle East could be reached.

Insufficient knowledge of the problem

Little is known about the Palestinian problem in Europe, or the Israeli one for that matter. Little is known of the many aspects of all the sectors involved in the political and social clash in course from Iran to the Lebanon, from Syria to Egypt; just as little is known about the two peoples facing each other in Palestine and Israel.

News about the Palestinians is always tainted with ideological prejudice. What we know has been supplied by official Palestinian representatives who talk and act like a State government, so are not very reliable.

The arrival of the Jews was undoubtedly a diplomatic and military operation, but it should also be pointed out that before the war the Palestinians were under Turkish domination so they were not totally against this arrival. At first it seemed it might help resist the domination led by the party of young Turks. Of course, that does not justify the behaviour of the Israeli State and its need for military expansion and violent occupation. But it does help us to understand the desire of the Palestinians to free themselves from all dominion, whatever that might be, yesterday the Turks, today Israel.

Today the common ‘Semitic’ element has been emphasized a great deal, but we must understand that this means little beyond the fact that these peoples are related linguistically. That is also negligible today, as modern Hebrew is pronounced with attenuated guttural sounds, therefore has become westernised. Those who pronounce it with the classical guttural forms (close to Arab), for example the Jews from the Yemen, are considered ‘peasants’ and backward.

Our knowledge of the Jews is also superficial. We know very little about Jewish culture in Italy. More attention is paid to Hebraism, but this is narrow and cultural more than anything, almost exclusively the work of great Jewish authors such as Heine, Roth, etc. or Freud, who have recently been rediscovered in this sense. The rest is hidden. The Hebrew religion has been repressed and locked up in sacred places. Now, as far as Jewishness is concerned, religion being inseparable from culture, it derives that the latter has also been repressed. We know very little about the relationship between religion and political power, the function of the rabbi, the core of Hebrew religion that claims so much space in the consciousness of the Israeli people. It is not by chance, for example, that the Misnah and the Two Talmuds have never been published in Italy.

The idea that we have of the Jew is therefore often that which has been provided by anti-Semitic iconography.

The equivocation of the occupation

One of the first and most successful Israeli military operations was called ‘fait accompli’ and, considering it in the light of what happened afterwards, it shows the mentality of the early pioneers clearly: men, women and children who had little to lose and much to gain. They felt (and some still feel), proud of the fact that they were willing to let themselves be massacred, yet, in reality they have now become the slaughterers. The horror of the passage from one side of this terrible barricade to the other doesn’t even touch them.

It should be pointed out that the Israeli people have acquired a natural right to live undisturbed in their territory, no matter what their origins as a people or of the territory itself. This is one of the main points of the present analysis and, I think, of anyone struggling alongside the Palestinian people without for this becoming an enemy of the Israeli people. It is from the consolidation of such a natural right that we can consider an occupation that took place, en masse, around 1947, and differentiate it from that which took place later in the territories of West Bank and Gaza.

Israeli State propaganda tends to unite these two occupations, thus allowing the heirs of Zionism to adopt an attitude of founder fathers and continue to spread the equivocation of Eretz Israel. Present day Zionists, who had considered themselves relegated to nostalgia by history, now find themselves colonisers. What is the difference between the occupation of Jaffa and that of Hebron according to these people?

Apart from Zionist intentions (one part of official Zionism), to build the centralised State immediately it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference. The original occupations were determined more than anything by the arrival of the Luftmensch, wandering men forced during exile to do marginal work or take up badly paid professions, who had reached their ‘promised land’. They could, in fact, have limited themselves to living alongside the Arabs, cultivating the land in communities and libertarian socialist collectives. In spite of all the problems related to the influx of a great mass of foreigners, this was nevertheless an occupation of workers who, alone, dedicated themselves to working the land, then extended production to other sectors of human activity.

The occupation of Gaza the West Bank is quite different. The new occupiers do not have the excuse of their fathers’ ideals, no matter how disputable that might have been. They were attracted by the prosaic seduction of large apartments at low prices only twenty minutes from Jerusalem or one hour from Tel Aviv, unlimited cheap labour (the inhabitants of the Arab ghettoes) and the chance not to work or be Chaluzim (pioneers) any more but to become colonisers, exploiters of other people’s work, that of poor people with no resources and no future.

The justification

All this is justified through recall to the situation of necessity. Ein Brera: we have no other choice! This ideology is now supported by the Israeli government. It is also shared by the left of that political formation, along with the ideology of pessimism, a fundamental aspect of Jewish culture which we do not understand because we are not familiar with it. It is a question of historical pessimism, of being convinced that a primordial curse weighs on the people of Israel, so no matter what they do they will suffer hostility on all sides and be left in complete isolation.

Of course, this ideology derives from the millenarian isolation of the Jews and the persecution they have suffered. But in reality it makes the politics of the Israeli State extremist and irresponsible, and makes the Israeli State itself even more dangerous than any other.

The economic situation

The State of Israel has sustained the highest military expenditure pro capita in the world for decades. This means a lot. Prices rise vertiginously every year, the balance of payments is billions of dollars in debt and in 1994 it was more than half the gross national product. The State budget nearly always equals the national product, when it does not go way beyond it. The State of Israel can only face its commitments thanks to foreign capital.

The inability to pay for its imports has made any autonomy of management impossible, hence the total dependence on the USA. Things were different before, but after the war of June 1967, and then again starting from that of October 1973, dependence increased. The inflation in 1977–1978 used up practically all the country’s resources.

On the basis of its Zionist culture, Israel is obliged to give a homeland, as well as a basic standard of living (social security, medicine, etc.) to all those who go there as Jews. That carries a huge cost, quite out of proportion to its actual economic possibilities. Ideological motives dominate economic choices. The need to maintain the country’s security is another reason why there are no strictly economic policies. Always on the brink of war, they cannot take economic measures that are too rigid and would reveal the class structure of Israeli society. This exists but must be kept under ‘ideological control’. Military expenditure accounts for about 30 per cent of the whole of production, whereas for other industrialised countries this does not exceed 18 per cent in extreme cases. The army accounts for 15 per cent of the national product and 20 per cent of the work force. Every man between 22 and 55 years of age is obliged to do one month per year in the army reserve units, a practice which leads to incalculable damage in terms of industrial and productive costs.

As well as being helped by the United States, Israel receives funds from the Jewish Diaspora. It is estimated that these amount to about 500 million dollars a year. Then there are the payments of the international Israeli loan, which comes mainly from the United States.

Social differences

Although Israel is a theocratic State with very strong ‘ideal’ and ideological motivations, considerable internal divisions exist, based on class discrimination.

The main distinction is that between the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. The former, also referred to as ‘blacks’, in comparison to the ‘whites’, are from Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Tunisia, Syria, the Yemen, etc. They suffer profound racial discrimination at the hands of the Ashkenazi Jews from the West, who feel strengthened above all by the fact that they suffered the catastrophe of the holocaust.

The Sephardis increased in number after being forced to flee their countries of origin following the exacerbation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Of a culture that is profoundly different from the Western one, they were more inclined towards the socialisation of production and the acceptance of communitarian values. But they arrived at a time when these values, which had existed for a long time in Israeli society, were rapidly being supplanted by the demands of militarisation and forced urbanisation. They were therefore implanted in the cities, underwent a rapid forced Westernisation and ended up also being discriminated against at a cultural and linguistic level.

They now constitute the poorest strata of Israeli society, and are the most extreme in their hatred of the Arabs, particularly the Palestinians, from who they fear retorsion along the lines of the aggression they suffered in the countries they left behind. Their greatest fear is that if some agreement is reached with the Palestinians they might be sent back to their countries of origin where they no longer have any roots and would immediately be enclosed in concentration camps or massacred en masse. The dominant ideology being based on religion and mysticism, a social uprising of the advanced industrial kind would be unthinkable: mass demonstrations, clashes with the police, mobilizations, etc., are not like elsewhere. That does not mean that opposition does not exist within the present situation in the occupied territories.

There have also been various attempts in the field of clandestine structures, for example the Ma’atz which carried out sabotage to give echo to protest in the poorest areas. Illegal activities in the traditional sense of the term have also increased a great deal in recent years. The same can be said for petty crime and hooliganism in the stadiums, imitating the large metropoli.

One characteristic of the poor areas of the capital is precisely a sense of frustration and the feeling that life is meaningless, especially as far as the young are concerned.

Everything seems quite contradictory. That does not mean that it would be impossible to stimulate a mass struggle capable of taking up the original values of libertarian socialism once again. Perhaps it is necessary to take another look at the teachings of theoreticians of communitarian Hebraism such as Martin Buber.

A practical attitude

But in a situation of very hard struggle such as the Palestinian one, we cannot limit ourselves to proposing the books of Buber or Kropotkin as a solution to the problem. It is necessary to do more.

I think that the enemy number one, the main obstacle to overcome, is today the State of Israel. It is for this that it is indispensable to support the struggle of the Palestinian people.

I also think that a potential enemy of the Palestinian people and of the Israeli people, are the PLO and the Palestinian State in formation. For this I have never supported the PLO and their statist positions.

It is therefore necessary to be against both the Israeli State and the Palestinian one.

It is necessary to support the constitution of a federation of workers’ communities, both Palestinian and Israeli, free to federate themselves as they wish, to give themselves programmes, to make their own organisational and productive choices, beyond the rough interference of the big States, in particular the USA.

Practical and ideal, as well as a productive and cultural collaboration is necessary, between the Palestinian people and the Israeli one, to put an end to a conflict of nation and race that has no reason to exist in that, in these lands, there is room for both people, with their differences of race, culture, religion and traditions.

It is necessary to be at the side of the Palestinian people, but also to be with the Israeli people, especially the most disinherited and poor of them, who an international politic of huge interests is pushing to reciprocal massacre.

[‘I nodi di un problema senza soluzione’, published in ProvocAzione no.19, February 1989, pages 6-7 entitled ‘Palestina’]

A strange idea

There is a fairly widespread idea in circulation that tends to justify the repressive action of the Israelis, seeing it in the context of the whole movement of control and repression of the Palestinian people all over the Middle East.

The Palestinians are massacred a little by everybody, Arabs included, why should it only be the Israelis who should refuse to defend themselves and put an end to it?

This is a classic thesis, one that is used when one wants to push someone away from involvement in a precise struggle, in this case that against the Israeli military machine as it is being used against the Palestinians. In itself it could be said that this thesis could even be shared by the Mosad, without a shadow of argument.

In the cultural craze (that’s a manner of speaking) of wanting to get to the bottom of things, it isn’t realised that this thesis basically justifies the massacre in the same way as colonialism was once justified by saying that the ‘savages’ ‘if they had been left to themselves, would have killed each other’. Even if this did, and still does, contain some elements of truth, it is used like a defence for colonialism and serves only to hide genocide and exploitation under an aura of false humanitarianism.

Some comrades who surprisingly support this thesis see rebellion anywhere except in the occupied territories. For them, the insurrection of a whole people against the daily massacre of young boys, women and children, against the destruction of their houses by the Israeli army, against torture, extermination camps, etc., is only a nationalist struggle, a way like any other to send the people to die for the homeland, therefore not in any way relevant in terms of revolution.

One could just tell these lovers of truth to ‘go to hell’ in no uncertain way, considering it pointless to touch on an argument that, as it is there before everybody’s eyes, does not require to be spelt out in three letter words.

As far as I am concerned, in a couple of direct and I hope simple words, the situation is as follows. — There is a State (Israel) aggressive and militarist like many others but which wants to kill a whole people (the Palestinian one). There are politicians (Arafat etc.) who have presented themselves of their own will and set themselves up as representatives of this people with the sole aim of constituting a State which could quickly become just as militarist and aggressive as the first. A possible solution would be the dissolution of the Israeli State and the prevention of the birth of the Palestinian State, all parallel to the formation of free communes and other structures selfmanaged by Palestinians and Jews together all with a right to the land and, principally, reciprocal respect in the name of freedom.

This is certainly a simplistic and also utopian way to think, but I don’t believe that, as anarchists and given the situation, one could come to support anything else.

To seek definitions and details in what is an extremely contradictory context, and, even more, to seek to find responsibility on both sides in order to lighten Israel’ position is bad taste to say the least, in my opinion.

Let’s put aside the ‘cultural preoccupation’ for a moment, and perhaps we will see things more clearly. The massacres that the Israelis are carrying out to perfection are there in front of our very eyes. Whoever tries to cover them up, to justify them or even only underestimate them, shares responsibility for the massacre. In the same way the revolt of a people on its knees is there before everybody’s eyes.

Although the present and future enemies of the Palestinian and Israeli people are many, there can be no doubt that its necessary to do something to help the revolt of the Palestinians against Israeli militarism. To do something means to move, to act here, immediately, everywhere, striking Israeli interests and not stand arguing until the last Palestinian is killed.

[‘Una strana tesi’, published in ProvocAzione no. 16, September 1988, pages 6-7 entitled ‘Non chiudiamo gli occhi’]

The Insurrectional Struggle in Palestine

What the Israeli State is doing in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank is quite in keeping with the logic of wars of conquest that soldiers learn in their training courses everywhere.

It would be quite normal for anarchists to unconditionally denounce what is happening, were it not that they find themselves in an area that is culturally strange to them.

If we were to talk about the situation in South Africa, for example, everything would be a foregone conclusion. But it is quite a different matter to denounce what the Israelis are doing. The reason is clear. The Jews suffered the project of extermination put into act by the Nazis, so by definition they deserve our sympathy.

No one is denying them that sympathy, which is also our own. Here it is not a question of the Jews but of the Israeli State and, naturally, those of its subjects who are lending themselves to the extermination of the Palestinian people that is taking place.

The fact that there is a popular insurrection in course in the territories and that at least one Palestinian is killed each day does not help to make the situation any clearer. We have simply got used to it. When we see the figures as a whole, things change.

During this last year [1988] 405 Palestinians were killed whereas a source of the Israeli ministry of defence talks of 392 killings. Just think, even taking the Israeli figures as good, it is a question of nearly one death a day. For the Palestinian wounded they are talking about 20,000, whereas the above mentioned ministry talks of 3,640.

At least ten wounded a day. On the other side, bearing in mind the data of the Israeli defence ministry, 11 Israelis have been killed, with 402 colons and 703 soldiers wounded. The figures speak for themselves.

To these figures should be added (according to Israeli sources) 20,000 arrests, 4,000 imprisoned without trial, 5,521 prisoners in concentration camps. 138 habitations destroyed by dynamite in reprisal, 32 expelled, 137 days of curfew in one year, with an uninterrupted period of 42 days, and this is only for 1988.

On the other hand, the insurrection has cost Israel 250 million dollars in additional military expenditure, 750 million dollars loss of the gross national income, 14 per cent less tourism, an overall loss of over 25 per cent of the national income.

The insurrection is putting Israel in serious difficulty. And beyond the strictly economic or political situation there is also, you might say, the question of image. Israel is having recourse to means and procedures that are damaging the sympathy and solidarity that the Jews had gained as a result of their suffering and repression at the hands of power over centuries. By becoming oppressors they have become ‘nasty’ and this means a lot today.

One day in December 1987 the revolt exploded after four Palestinian commuters were killed and seven wounded when their minibus was upturned by an Israeli heavy military vehicle. The streets filled with boys and youths. This is what came to be known as the Intifada. In the lead, on the barricades, were the Shebab, the boys born in the shanty towns and concentration camps under the military oppression of Israel after 1967. From that day onwards, from these first four dead, the insurrection has continued unabated.. [Seeing the situation now before going to press in 1998 thing haven’t changed, the Intifada continues unabated.]

The means used by this insurrection are the classic ones that so many political know-alls had declared out of date, given that we are in the virtual post modern era. Revolt can only start off from what is available, in this case, stones. Then sabotage, using rudimentary, simple means, followed by the boycott of Israeli cigarettes and soft drinks, followed by civil disobedience and strikes.

For its part, the Israeli State is hitting back hard. The same goes for the colons who are shooting demonstrators and carrying out numerous acts of vandalism in the villages.

Defenceless Palestinians are beaten to death. Four boys from the village of Salim near Nablus were buried alive by Israeli soldiers. Poisonous gases are used regularly with the result that over 1,800 Palestinian women have been forced to have abortions. Water and electricity are cut off in the insurgent villages. The spontaneous demonstration that took place after the killing of Abu Jihad in Tunisia was stopped immediately by the Israelis: sixteen dead. The telephones in the territories are cut off. It is forbidden to cross the border. Petrol and diesel pumps are blocked. The olive harvest is blocked. Plastic bullets, already tested in Ireland by the English occupying army, have been introduced and are used regularly.

Over the past few months [1989] another subtle form of destruction has been discovered. Mysterious phosphorus devices in the form of chocolate bars or toys have been left lying around in the occupied areas by Israeli soldiers and colons in order to wound children. As soon as they are picked up the objects explode. There were five such cases of wounding in Nablus in the month of December alone . On November 10 [1988] 24 houses were razed to the ground by Jiftlik bulldozers in the Jordan valley after the inhabitants were invited to gather up their poor belongings in carts. One week earlier, fifteen blocks in Taibe were dynamited. The inhabitants were all deported.

It is like seeing an exact replica of the Warsaw ghetto. Often history repeats itself, even turned upside down.

For his part, Shamir has publicly declared that he intends to give ‘new impetus’ to the settlement of the colons in the occupied territories.

In spite of the evidence provided by these facts, there are still people, even anarchists, for whom any excuse is good enough to justify Israel’s repressive action. It would be well for comrades to see things as they really are so that we can decide what needs to be done, here and now.

[‘Lotta insurrezionale in Palestina’, published in ProvocAzione no. 18, December 1988, page 3, entitled ‘Repressione e lotta insurrezionale in Palestina’]

The Palestinians continue to die

The fact that Palestinian people continue to die every day is no longer news anywhere in the world.

A few lines are drowned in the sea of new problems, some of which, unfortunately, register massacres of even greater dimension in other parts of the world. Man’s favourite sport continues to be that of killing and war.

Not being able to take an interest in everything that happens in the world, one often turns one’s attention to a particular situation and tries to do something at the level of information if nothing else. That is, one tries to redress the damage caused by the misinformation of the press.

As far as the Palestinian question is concerned, we must emphasize the importance of an insurrectional struggle that is putting one of the strongest armies in the world in serious difficulty.

This obstinate will to freedom has been distorted by Zionist propaganda, which is natural. But it has also been misrepresented by the propaganda of all those who, although they say they are lovers of freedom and truth, do not realise that those facing armed tanks or who find themselves closed within a ghetto and submitted to continual bombardments, do not have much time to reflect on great principles of truth and freedom. In the first place, they must attack in order to survive. They must defend themselves because they are being killed. They cannot wait for the high priests of cultural research to find the way to explain the deeper reasons that lie behind the movement of the tanks.

Reports on the Palestinian problem have often been of this kind, articles aimed at taking a distance and pointing out reciprocal rights and wrongs aimed at diverting the possibility of a solidarity struggle here and now into the simple and simplistic depths of cultural discussion. Collaborationist and pacifying positions are not lacking, even in Palestine. Tepid rethinking that will to do anything in order to leave things as they are and allow the Jews to widen their settlements even more and let the Palestinians carry on living in the ghettoes.

But in the field of the real struggle the Palestinians continue to die, while on the other side, behind the insurmountable armour of their tanks, the persecuted of yesterday are applying the same methods as their old persecutors: destroy the houses of suspects, torture in the prisons and concentration camps, deport, kill in the streets, and so on.

How the Palestinians consider collaboration with the enemy is shown in the treatment reserved to those who collaborate with the Israeli army. In the space of a few days, at the end of August [1988], four were killed because they were informers in the pay of Israel. A few days later, a fifth was hacked to pieces with an axe. Drastic measures, certainly, but which give an idea of what these people are suffering.

When you get to certain levels, even feelings of pity and humanity begin to disappear.

[‘I Palestinesi continuano a morire’, published in ProvocAzione no. 16, September 1988, page 8]

Against the Israeli colonisers

A spontaneous revolt of Palestinian students and workers has broken out in the Gaza strip in the occupied territories [1987] against the Israeli colonisers. In particular it is addressed against the proprietors of the industries and the managers of the economy of occupation and, of course, the enemy army. In a short time barricades have been erected and stones thrown against the Israeli military and civilians.

Soldiers and civilians (the colonisers of the occupation) have responded with weapons, firing shots that were defined as intimidatory. The result: one Palestinian dead and two wounded. A student was killed when she was carrying out a road block against the Jewish residents in the area with another fifty girls from a women’s college of Manfulati.

[‘Contro i coloni israeliani’, published in ProvocAzione no. 9 of November 1987, page 16 entitled ‘A Gaza i Palestinesi insorgono contro i coloni israeli’]

The horror of growing accustomed to horror

Growing accustomed to horror is far more striking than horror itself. Indignation quells and remains silent, and everything seems normal. This is the case of the repression against the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

One reason for this slow but constant habituation is the fact that the Palestinian revolt, that of the stones and improvised weapons ‘is no longer news’.

Another is the acceptance, on more than one side, of the reasons for the conflict. Those on the side of the Palestinians are against those who are on the side of the Israelis. Many hope, sometimes in good faith, that things will work out in time and everything will resolve itself.

No matter how these ‘things’ come to an end and what solution is chosen, nothing in the world will be able eradicate the horror of the past few months [1989], the horror of martyr turned executioner, persecuted turned persecutor. No matter how clever the defenders of Israel are — and as we know these include a number of anarchists — we cannot forget the Palestinian baby killed by gas in the refugee camp of Khan Yunis by Israeli soldiers. We cannot forget the five year old child killed in Nablus by plastic bullets or the 14 year old killed a few days earlier while he was playing in front of his house, again shot by the Israeli occupying army. We cannot forget the colon death squads which go out at night and murder the young Palestinians considered responsible for the rebellion.

Under such conditions the only thing that does surprise us is the strange insistence on trying to cover up responsibilities. We can see how this happens at a political level, but we don’t see how it can happen at the level of comrades who should show more sensitivity in their defence of the persecuted, leaving aside subtle distinctions in designating responsibility.

[‘L’orrore dell’abitudine all’orrore’, published in ProvocAzione no. 17, November 1988, page 4, entitled ‘L’orrore’]

No to the Palestinian State!

The PLO have constituted a Palestinian State on the wave of the popular insurrection in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

Many undoubtedly see this as something positive, but we can only see it as a step backwards, a diversion from the direction that the Palestinian struggle has taken in recent months.

The PLO bureaucracy has intervened in the struggle with the complicity of the Islamic States who have high hopes for a Palestinian State in the Middle East. In this way a serious impediment has been put on the possibility of the struggle continuing to develop in an anti-State direction, the only direction that takes into consideration the needs of the Jewish people who have already settled in that area.

The presence of a Palestinian State, however unlikely that might seem today, could not fail to lead to diplomatic and internally reached agreements that would make any peaceful coexistence between the two communities (Palestinian and Israeli) impossible. Yet both of them have a right to live on their own land.

A Palestinian State could not fail to move in the direction of all States: that of military reinforcement, armed intervention, and the transformation of future diplomatic agreements into instruments of threat and retaliation.

The path recently trodden by the Jews is there to show just how easy it is to turn the exploited and oppressed into exploiters and oppressors by regimenting them into the service of the State.

The Palestinian people’s liberation struggle over the past forty years has had its dark moments, but even during the worst retaliatory actions such as that at Lod airport, it has never lost the quality of a popular revolt. Of course, the organisation was also just around the corner in the past, but always in a way that was purely instrumental and which could be discarded at any time. It in no way conditioned anyone in the name of a precise legal code to be established with the agreement of all nations.

We have no idea what the nations of the world, with the USA in the lead, really could do for the Palestinian people who continue to be tortured and killed. They will certainly not be able to affect the internal problems of the Israeli State, due to the very international law that makes all the States of the world sovereign, if nothing else. We will find that Israel has the unquestionable ‘right’ to continue to oppress the Palestinian people, just as the latter will have the undeniable ‘right’ not to be oppressed, occupied, destroyed, killed, tortured, etc.. Each will have its own ‘rights’, the defence of which will come through the force of their own (and others) weapons. Everyone knows what state of affairs that could lead to.

The newly constituted State could turn out to be a terrible obstacle in the Palestinian people’s long and difficult road to liberation, if for no other reason than because it is hard for those who suffer to understand such things. The constitution of an organisation such as a State is often seen as something positive. One feels stronger, one has contractual power with all the other nations of the world on an equal level. But is this not just a way to provide a semblance of negotiation, and in reality to continue oppression? What if Arafat’s passion to become head of State is no more than a diplomatic way of getting rid of the problem?

No one can say that this is not what is in fact happening. After all, the applause that greeted the Palestinian State in embryo has come from all sides, from foreign diplomats to organisations of comrades who certainly do not move in ministerial circles. What is the cause of this cordiality of intent? In the first place, the fact that both ministers and authoritarian revolutionaries are on the same wavelength: the size of the organisation is what determines its strength, and from this ‘strength’ comes victory. This kind of thing, which we could never share, does not make us feel the joy that so many are expressing for the birth of the Palestinian State.

But there is more. In our opinion, the Palestinian State will become an optimal diplomatic interlocutor.

Pressure will be made through diplomatic channels. There will be an attempt to make Israel understand what it does not want to understand, closed as it is within its State logic. But what do all the other States of the world really care about the lot of five million Palestinians?

The same goes for the authoritarian revolutionaries. What alternative can they propose? Direct intervention against the Israeli State? Direct support for the Palestinian insurrection in the occupied territories? Of course not! Now that the State also exists for these latest pioneers of ‘structure at any cost’, there is a way for them to organise their support for this shadow of previous examples. And so all their problems will be solved.

We do not believe that the Algerian decision will improve the lot of the Palestinian people, be it real or not. The only reality we can turn our attention to and support is that of hundreds of young people who are resisting the Israeli tanks that occupy their land by throwing stones. This reality has nothing to do with diplomacy or the State.

[‘No allo Stato Palestinese’, published in ProvocAzione no. 18, December 1988, pages 1-2]

After the horror, disgust

I don’t like quoting material and listing all the details of the repression that the State puts into act to put a brake on the rebellion of the oppressed. This is a typically Anglo Saxon affectation of little use from the point of view of ‘what is to be done’. This time, however, we feel we must make an exception. I think that a short list of the particularly atrocious means that are being used [1989] against the Palestinian insurrection in the occupied territories should throw any individual with a minimum of dignity into profound consternation.

Normal tear gas bombs such as those used in Italy are charged with chloroacetophenon, which is already dangerous at a certain concentration in closed areas. Those used in Palestine are charged with dichlorobezilidene, which is often lethal even in open areas if it reaches a concentration of 1K per 50 cubic metres. Bear in mind that children are most exposed to this danger, especially when they are in a state of malnutrition as many Palestinian children are.

The old tear gas canister of about two and a half kilos capacity has been replaced with the 606 Jumbo that uses four kilos of gas and by the 303 in rubber bullets which when fired bounce back spreading the gas and cannot be picked up. Now the Israeli army also has the 909 version that is fired up to 150 metres, uniting the effect of the gas to that of the kinetic impact of the bomb on the body of whoever it reaches. This being mainly a question of old people, women and children, it is easy to imagine the consequences.

Rubber bullets, already tested in Northern Ireland, are now being used regularly in Palestine, and over the past 22 months [June 1989] have caused over 30 dead. These are single balls of rubber that take the place of lead in 12 bore shotgun cartridges, that is 18mm calibre. Sometimes these rubber bullets have a metal interior, so are nearly always deadly at a distance of under 70 metres.

A machine of recent construction responds to the stones thrown by the Palestinian youths with other stones, shot in volleys in great quantities.

A contraption known as the ‘washing machine’ mounted on an armoured car throws out a spray of 200 litres of foam. This foam solidifies immediately, burying alive those struck by the jet.

Control reconnoitres are now carried out by radio controlled helicopters that can fly low without the risk that normal helicopters once ran of being struck down even by two well aimed stones.

A special ultra-light lookout plane has been designed to survey the countryside: a biplane costing just over 12 million. It flies at a speed of 180 km an hour and requires only 16 hours flight training.

Automatic pilot lookout planes are also used, i.e. radio-controlled air models upon which are mounted video cameras that send images to the operational centre. They move at a speed of about 75 km an hour and fly for not more than 25 minutes.

To these ultra-sophisticated means should be added the normal ones that went into action from the first moment of the clashes. One of the best equipped armies in the world is trying — moreover without succeeding — to crush a defenceless people who are rebelling by throwing stones. All the horrors of classical genocide have been used: mass deportation, concentration camps, indiscriminate massacre, destruction of individual houses or entire groups of houses, on the spot shootings, violence, rape, attacks on mosques, attacks on the Red Cross, prearranged massacres, the use of death squads made up of colons and plain clothes soldiers. The list could go on, but it would be a list deja vu.

Careful, dear comrades, at this time the historic conditions of all times are presenting themselves yet again, almost as though humanity, at least in the short term, (a few millennium), cannot escape its round of death. Many of those making historical distinctions today bring to mind the bourgeoisie who, before the Paris Commune of 1871, lined up behind Mazzini with his doubts then in the days of the massacre felt the need to support their thesis by coming out into the streets to gouge out the eyes of the dead communards with the points of their umbrellas. Just like those fine people living near Dachau at the time of the extermination of the Jews who presented an expose to the local authorities because the smoke from the ‘factory’ was killing the birds nesting in the surrounding trees. Just like those who are splitting hairs and talking of the ‘positive aspects’ of Nazism today.

The important thing to note, yet again, is that there is a time for in-depth examination and theory. But there is also a time when Minerva’s bird must go to sleep, and that is the time for action and the destruction of the enemy.

[‘Oltre l’orrore, lo schifo’, published in ProvocAzione no. 21, June 1989, page 5]

Let’s boycott Israeli products

Acts of solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people have been spreading recently. [1988]

The latest was that of the Coop council delegates in the Emilia and Veneto regions, who in a letter to the management on April 12 , asked for the acquisition of Israeli products, grapefruit, avocados dates, to be suspended. The management, faithful to their market mentality, replied, ‘To impose political choices and evaluations on the consumer through a preventive selection of products on sale would be a limitation of freedom of choice and expression (sic)’. Ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was the retraction of the factory council which, after a meeting with the management, withdrew its request for a boycott and, rather than pass on to more incisive forms of struggle, limited itself to handing out a leaflet asking the consumer not to buy the product. Basically, the firm’s position was accepted.

Someone else decided to choose different methods. Anonymous telephone calls reached the editorial offices of various newspapers informing them that a number of Jaffa grapefruit had been poisoned in solidarity with the Palestinians in struggle. The news created considerable panic in many parts of Italy.

It seems however that it was only a threat, given that analyses of the grapefruit revealed no trace of poison.

Let us imagine what would happen if one were to start to attack the interests of the Israeli State more seriously, not only its products but also the companies that support them in some way, the travel agencies, etc.

[‘Boicottiamo i prodotti israeliani’ published in ProvocAzione no. 13, April 1988, page 1]

A Molotov in Turin

If one thing can be noted concerning the Molotov against the ‘Luxembourg’ bookshop in Turin, it is the total uniformity of reactions to it. It really gives us pleasure to see how town, regional and State authorities, no matter what side their parties are on, replied in unison to condemn the ‘vile gesture of intimidation and intolerance’. It also gives us pleasure to note how the various radical associations and extremists of every shade including the autonomists of the Turin collectives (we don’t know if it was a question of all of them) and dulcis in fundo the anarchists also joined this angelic choir. From what appears in the newspapers, because all that we know at the moment has been from the ‘well informed’ papers, the ‘Berneri’ [anarchist] group in Turin also seems to have felt the need to condemn the ‘resurgence of Nazi racism’. And this is plausible, if one bears in mind the content of the communiques of the group ‘L. Fabbri’ of Forli and some Milanese anarchist groups that we are reproducing in the note below. So much uniformity of intent is truly comforting. For authorities and ‘revolutionaries’ to shake hands is something that shows there is hope for the future.

We, on the contrary, have a few doubts. There are some things that we don’t know, and we admit that. Other things we know with certainty, so we will speak out and not keep quiet out of conformity or fear.

What we don’t know are the actual words of the communique. The fact that it was signed — if what the newspapers reported is true — with a new anarchist signature, ‘Gruppo (o Gruppi?) anarchici rivoluzionario’ [Revolutionary Anarchist Groups] (some papers speak of ‘revolutionary anarchists’) certainly made indispensable the accompaniment of even a brief sketch of analysis of the reasons behind the gesture — which exist and which we will talk about here. The idea of simply making a phone call using such a signature is the least credible part of the whole affair. We don’t know if the reference to the PLO (some speak of ‘long live the PLO’) is true or not, and if it is, then this would become another element of doubt. What anarchist would say such a thing? Can you believe that a comrade does not know that the PLO is a fully functioning government, (with its left and right) that manages a future State and directs intelligence operations that are among the most advanced in the Arab world? Of course not.

Given these admissions of ignorance, there are some things we do know. We know perfectly well that the struggle against the excessive power of Israel and its project to exterminate the Palestinian people (who have little to do with the PLO) is not ‘a fact’ that is only taking place in that far off land. That is something that concerns all of us, all, that is, who have the fate of man (and people) including the Israeli people (who have little to do with the interests of the Israeli State), at heart. And this leads some of us to want to intervene in deed, not only with more or less symbolic gestures or with a battle of declarations more or less condemning the fascists who dominate the Israeli State. We are filled with indignation by the attacks by the Israeli police and army on children, women and old people, a defenceless population struggling to survive armed with only stones from ghettoes that are only a distant reminder of what was once their place of daily life, just as the comrades who drew up the above declaration certainly were. There, that indignation is at the basis of our positive consideration of the action. Yes, positive, even if we are the only ones to say so openly (because as far as we know many comrades have declared themselves to be personally in favour of the action). We are not afraid to admit that the destruction of a pro-Israeli bookshop does not upset many people in the face of such events.

Of course, we don’t know if these comrades are anarchists or not, or whether they are more or less aware of the history of anarchism and the reasons and theories of anarchists (many comrades, especially the very young ones, are anarchists before they even become aware of many of the historical and theoretical questions at the root of anarchist action). What we do know is that the objective under attack seems right to us. Whoever defends the interests of the Israeli State at the present time should be attacked, possibly with an opportune explanation of the reasons why. On the other hand, anyone who defends the interests of the Israeli people — which are undoubtedly also our own interests — at this delicate time, seeing them as no different to those of the Palestinian people, must be able to do so and be able to explain how, from a class point of view, these interests differ from those of the Israeli State. To simply exalt Jewish ‘culture’ and religion, elements that are at the basis of and perpetrate the existence of the State of Israel today, merely renders service to the assassins who are not only massacring the Palestinians but are also tyrannising and mystifying the Israeli people.

To get an idea of the climate in Turin we note that following the attack on the ‘Luxembourg’ bookshop police raids were carried out against the ‘El Paso’ squat. Moreover, some comrades were stopped that night while fly-posting about El Paso’s video program, and taken to police station where they were held until 7am.

Here is the Forli text: ‘Following the news of the attack on the ‘Luxembourg’ bookshop in Turin claimed by a so-called group of ‘revolutionary anarchists’, anarchist group ‘Luigi Fabbri’ of Forli feels it a moral duty to take a position against this attack and the claim that accompanied it. Against the attack, because they find it senseless and anti-libertarian to use this kind of violence against positions that are different and contrary to one’s own. Against the claim, because it considers it is against the principles of anarchism to adhere to the militarist politics of the PLO. At the same time it expresses solidarity with the Palestinian people who presently find themselves oppressed by the militarism of the Israeli State. But such solidarity must not be confused with feelings of anti-Jewish racism or acts of unconditional violence against every manner of thinking that is different to our own. To words we respond with words, beyond any practice of censure and repression.’

Forli, 15 April 1988. Andrea Papi, for anarchist group ‘Luigi Fabbri’.

Here is the Milan text: Following the attack carried out last night against the Luxembourg bookshop in Turin belonging to Angelo Pezzana, and considering that, according to the media, responsibility for the attack was claimed by a ‘group of anarchists’, the present Milan initiative sent Angelo Pezzana the following telegram. ‘We express our solidarity in the face of the vile attack on the Luxembourg bookshop, yet another sign of anti-Semitism and intolerance against which anarchists have always fought beyond any ideological differences we have with you in the battle for the freedom of speech’.

Editorial group ‘A Rivista Anarchica’ Utopia Bookshop, Centro Studi Libertari, Anarchist circle ‘Ponte della Ghisolfa’.

[‘Una Molotov a Torino’, published in ProvocAzione no. 13, April 1988, page 5]

New Palestinian initiatives

A new form of attack has been used in the insurrection that has been going on for over seven months in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. As well as the persistence of clashes with the Israeli occupying army, more than 20 fires have been started against Israeli crops and woods. In spite of frequent ferocious controls by the Israeli colons, several hundred hectares have been destroyed. A seed oil factory and an irrigation plant have also been completely burnt out. Finally, a textile factory in Tel Aviv has been torched. All this began in the middle of June.

A few weeks before there were attacks against electricity plants and high voltage pylons. These attacks caused blackouts in the most important cities of Israel: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Nablus, Bethlehem and in the Gaza Strip itself.

For the nature lovers who get upset by news of forest fires and the destruction of innocent plants, we would like to point out that there is news from the Israeli side too. The Palestinians in revolt, armed with only stones and a few Molotovs, are now faced with toxic gas which, according to International Red Cross figures (an organism that is certainly not on the side of the Palestinians), has caused dozens of victims.

[‘Nuove iniziative palestinesi’, published in ProvocAzione no. 15, July 1988]

How one becomes those of yesterday

The vicissitudes of Mein Kampf continue to stupefy. Following the Bavarian Land’s attempt to block the publication of Hitler’s book in Denmark, it seems that in Israel the first translation in Yiddish by a publisher specialised in university texts is about to come out in Israel.

Young people should have first hand documentation, say the editors of Academon editions. And Hitler’s text certainly supplies this documentation. Contrary to what those who deny the project to totally exterminate the Jews are now saying, the book tells of what the Nazis actually put into practice with detailed precision. But that could constitute interests that are too narrow and barely credible, especially when you take into account the fact that the Jewish managerial class is extremely learned and knows many languages, especially German. They could easily inform themselves without having recourse to a translation in Yiddish.

Another reason could be the need to respond to a demand for the ‘book’ at mass level. This demand is not limited to that of the cultured Ashkenazim in the Jewish State, but includes the more modest and exploited Sephardi class who constitute the mass pushing for the maintenance and development of wild colonisation of the occupied Palestinian territories.

In the extraordinary mixture of ideas that exists today, there is nothing strange about the fact that future readers of Mein Kampf will precisely be Jews, black ones at that.

[‘Come si diventa quelli di ieri’, published in Canenero no. 16, February 24 1995]

Not Just Buttons

A police force is always a police force for the simple reason that a State, even one in tatters such as the Palestinian one, is always a State.

Now, for whoever in his time has struggled for the ideal of the liberation of the Palestinian people (each in his own small way may have given some contribution), the thing takes on a particular significance. To think that comrades in struggle, a struggle that once spread like an epidemic more or less everywhere in Europe and beyond, are now donning the shiny buttoned uniform, a bad imitation of the English cops, is quite indigestible.

But policemen do not just wear uniforms, they don’t just polish their buttons; they control, repress, beat and on occasion shoot and kill without giving it a thought.

Gaza is not a large city, it has few tarmac roads and, as in so many other parts of the Arab world, those there are look like little village lanes. Arafat’s policemen are now present in the area where the Israeli Shin Beth were once stationed. Not just policemen, but the court, the prison, and the secret services. All small, not very efficient, but it’s the thought that counts.

What has happened to the Intifada?

It goes on, of course, against the bosses old and new. So boys and girls are arrested, taken to the multifunction building of Palestinian State repression, interrogated by condescending investigators and judged by improbable judges. They are also children, just a little more grown up, born in the concentration camps. What can they say under the illuminated strategic direction of the great Leader?

In the same way that it took us years to convince ourselves that the Israelis were torturers even though they had just come through the extermination camps, now goodness knows how long it will take to see that the Palestinians, comrades once upon a time, can become torturers today.

Reality evolves, and in evolving the masks men hide behind in order to recite their roles change. But often the role behind the mask also changes, without anyone noticing.

[‘Non solo bottoni’, published in Canenero no. 20, March 24 1995, page 2]

The Palestinian Police

In Gaza the king is bare. The insurrection of stones and desperation is now turning towards the new Palestinian police force which has been armed by Arafat to maintain peace and order in the interests, in the first place of the Israeli bosses.

Policemen are always policemen. The old fedayeen are becoming aware of this to their cost. And along these dusty roads where many of us left our hearts, the cry is desperation as never before.

[‘La polizia palestinese’, published in Canenero no. 5, November 24 1994, page 7]

From Marx to the Uri

Many things are changing in Palestine. Many others have stayed as they are. Poverty and hatred are rife as always, especially hatred of the occupying forces, that is of the soldiers of Israel still present in the Territories.

What could be more natural than to hate invaders? Only politicians who have sold out to the enemy and contracted the possibility of an internal government and a puppet of a State rather than the continuation of the struggle, could think differently. Many Palestinians, are not prepared to accept cohabitation based on the defence of the interests of the strongest.

That explains the spread of resistance, which presents itself almost uniformly under the insignia of Hamas, inside the same newborn State of Palestine. This is certainly the most consistent armed group of the present time. It is doted with considerable means, as became evident in the explosion a few days ago [1995] that blew up a whole arsenal.

There’s nothing easier in that region than to find a young boy between twelve and sixteen, born and brought up in the poverty and violence of the concentration camps, who is disposed to listening to arguments against Arafat and his project of a free Palestine coexisting with a free Israel. Nothing could be easier than to push these boys to carry out a suicide bombing.

That is what those of the Izz al-din al hassam, the armed wing of God, who are not boys but religious fanatics, are preparing the former for — a holy death in the war against the infidels.

Twenty-five years ago, in conditions that were certainly not any better than those of the present time, the struggle of the Palestinians was based almost entirely upon a different kind of indoctrination, the Marxist one.

At that time intermediaries with long beards promised them help in the form of money and weapons; now Islamic priests are promising eternal life in a paradise full of Uri.

[‘Da Marx alle Uri’, published in Canenero, no. 22, April 7 1995, page 2]

The Obvious Aspect of the Unthinkable

The foothills in the eastern part of Jerusalem permit a certain coolness which is often difficult to find elsewhere, down town and in the narrow streets of the centre. Naturally, it is the rich who live there.

The expansion towards the east is therefore that of the upper-class settlers. The poor Sephardi don’t live on the hills. Now even the Palestinian residents don’t live there any more. In fact the process of expropriation is widening further and further. Many of the Arab villages of the perimeter, especially in the northern and eastern outskirts, have been included in the urban belt by the mayor of the city and are considered to be an integral part of Jerusalem, so subject to expropriation. This procedure is often facilitated by accusing the original residents of belonging to, supporting or at least knowing, Palestinian extremists.

This is similar to a technique once used by the Nazis in Germany to throw Jews out of their property. The vast majority of Israelis (irony of the sort this hyper-conservative majority is not only composed of Ashkenazim but also, and I’d say mainly, of Sephardi, i.e. the poorest sector of the Jewish population) agree with this policy of confiscation and annexing. They are convinced that they will thus be able to put an end to the Palestinians’ dream of considering Jerusalem their capital.

For his part, Moshe Zimmerman, head of the department of German studies at the Jewish university of Jerusalem, has declared that most of the Jewish boys who have grown up in Hebron in the West Bank, therefore in the ex-occupied territories now under Palestinian jurisdiction, are convinced that they belong to a superior race, in exactly the same way as the Hitler youth did.

The professor documented this information using research carried out on various songs and poetry that a number of children of Hebron composed in honour of Baruch Goldstein, author of the massacre at the tomb of the patriarchs some months ago. [1995]

Mosche Zimmerman, who recently edited the Hebrew edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf , replied to those who accused him of favouring the spread of the Nazi ideology, that racism had already been spread among the Jews through Bible readings by the extremists of Zionism.

[‘L’aspetto ovio dell’impensabile’, published in Canenero no. 25, May 5 1995, page 9.]

The Miracle of the Worse

The use of summary trials by the Palestinian judiciary that has begun to function in Gaza is now current. Torture and terrible prison conditions are also everyday facts that people cannot get used to. Everything seems to be turning out to be useful to maintaining the ghost of power that Arafat has found himself with. A shred of power which, like all power, always functions the same way: by imprisoning, torturing, killing.

I know that many will find this hard to believe. What is left of the revolution of their dreams? What about the sacrifices and so many dead? Was it all in vain?

Of course, for those who deluded themselves that the construction of a Palestinian State was the easiest way, or the lesser of two evils, to the liberation of the Palestinian people, the delusion must be a hard one. Not so for the present writer who, having had the possibility to deepen his knowledge of the composition of Arafat’s leadership, has long been denouncing its conservative ideology and its practice of control and repression.

Dressed up in his uniform of ‘guerrilla behind the lines’, old Yasser is practically bare today. He has nothing left to put on the scales but the excessive stupidity of a few components of the Hamas. Unable to see how they will be able to do without Iran and the integriste Islamic international, they have continued with the same obtusity throughout the decades in the same way as other Palestinian forces in the past who could not see how to do without Marxism (and also the help in weapons and money that came from the countries of the East) used to do.

He could take the road of increasingly ferocious repression. In this way Arafat would end up isolated from his own people and favour the development of integrisme, the other side of the coin being the sad fanatical end to any possibility of freedom and peace. Or he could become a more and more automated gendarme of the Israelis as they get him to do all their dirty work.

What would remain of Palestinian culture and the open, free mentality of a people who, not too long ago, welcomed the first settlements of the Jews in a friendly and hospitable way, inviting them to work together in cohabitation? This mentality and disposition of spirit still exists in Palestinian ideas and culture today, but for how long? The job done yesterday to destroy all cohabitation and impose their absolute dominion on their ancient hosts, is being continued by those who simply want to upturn this situation and impose their own absolute power.

Any battle between aspiring dominators passes over a mountain of corpses. In such cases the hangman is always at work.

The Reasons for Integrisme

When we acquired the ideology of progress in the eighteenth century we ended up with a substandard product: the illusion that this progress could only be the work of lay beliefs that had cast religion aside. In other words, the thinkers of the Enlightenment with Voltaire in the lead, believed that by eliminating religious faith war, hatred, persecution and massacre would also be reduced.

One could see a return to this premise, reinforced brainlessly, in the whole so-called culture of the left around the end of the sixties. It went from wild anticlericalism and atheism to a kind of dialogue with the progressive forces of Catholicism and Protestantism. This typical cultural illusion was the result of nationalist scientism. At the beginning of the sixties I pointed out that neither simple atheism or a anticlericalism are sufficient when they are no more than expressions of blind rationalism. It is necessary for man to evolve his refusal of God with his own personal responsibility and individual engagement in the struggle against authority. The State and God as Proudhon rightly said, go hand in hand and help each other. But this responsibilisation of the individual did not materialise and God was transferred from heaven to earth with all his baggage. He was denied in the name of science or reason, or even worse in the name of party or State. In some places religion was abolished by ministerial decree.

The progressive illusion presented this as a step forward in the ineluctable road of theoretical development. Better to have museums, libraries, swimming pools and conference rooms in place of churches. Better, without a doubt, because churches are not only places that impart teaching that is injurious to human dignity, but are also occasions for reinforcing the most authoritarian and repressive forces. Very well, but if religion were to be suppressed by ministerial decree in the name of automatic thinking and we were to see this as positive because it is moving in the direction of freedom, i.e. moving towards a future that cannot fail to be anarchist, then we are mistaken.

Unfortunately it is by no means certain that history is moving towards anarchy. Bovio’s phrase should be seen within the positivist ideology of his time. The struggle against religion must be carried out along with a struggle against the State. This cannot be delegated to a new kind of Bismarckian ‘kulturekampf’. It would turn out to be a tragedy like the first. The feelings of the oppressed would easily find the way to religion intended as comfort of the humble, hope of a better life, at least in the beyond, and, enhanced with an aura of martyrdom, the task of priests (of every kind) would be simplified. Nothing better for the resurgence of integrismes, with all their consequences of rigid conditioning, people who see the madonna, mass demonstrations, etc.

That is why a struggle against God and the Church, atheism and the consequent anticlericalism, must always start off from a correct class viewpoint. It must start from an analysis of economic reality that cannot be considered as something extraneous to be delegated to history that necessarily moves in the direction of progress. Intellectuals have always made this unsubstantiated claim. They think that they can limit themselves to a specific atheist or anticlerical critique, while it is up to others to interest themselves in concrete revolutionary action. That demonstrates the poverty and cowardice of intellectuals and those who, not being intellectuals due to their superficial dilettante studies, let themselves be fascinated without understanding.

Barbarism is not a thing of the past, it does not belong to a museum of horrors that we have put behind us, it strides alongside us. It is not only resurgent integrisme, neofascism or anti-Semitism, but is the new world order. This barbarism is mainly based on a discrimination that is becoming more and more evident, not only between countries, but also between classes within each State. A blind belief in a science that is incapable of saving man and perhaps even the planet is the barbarism that has quietly contributed to the accumulation of atomic weapons and lethal gases with the same inventive capacity with which it has produced new medicines and diseases. Ideas that support an animistic subterranean mechanism that has been digging away on account of the poor and exploited throughout the course of history is also barbarism. These are beliefs that cannot check spreading integrisme. All the great masses, especially in the Islamic and eastern countries, but also in Italy, who are reaching a vision of the world economic situation following the political modifications of the past few months, could fall victim to their own hopes and other people’s swindles. The Algerian lays, with their corresponding moderates in other Islamic countries, cannot confront this wave of integrisme with ideological chatter, they can only do it by improving people’s economic conditions. Often this is not done because international interests and objective conditions prevent any possibility of it happening.

Religious integrisme is also developing in eastern countries following the changes that came about in the ‘actual’ communist States, something quite different to communism as we mean it, but that’s another question. Here, the thrust of Wojtilian integrisme is pushing various local versions to reappear including, indirectly, the Islamic version and the ensuing nationalist tensions are of considerable importance. There is also an awakening in Italy of integriste Catholicism in local movements that could grow and eventually link up with the Catholic movements.

A possible increase in religious integrisme should not be underestimated. We must develop effective instruments of critique in order to avoid the determinist equivocation that has always ended up furthering the constitution of State dictatorships (fascist and communist), or that of a scientific rationalism which has brought the world to the present conditions of impoverishment and destruction. We are up against a rebirth of religion not only in mass manifestations which indicate a state of ill-being, but also a reinforcing of the power of the various Churches, with all the negative consequences that the latter are always capable of.

That is why it is always good to begin to struggle right away without waiting for someone else to do it in our place.

Behind the Ghost of Carpentras

Anti-Semitism has expressed itself in various ways, both theoretically and in deed throughout the centuries. It has been built into historical and philosophical reflection aimed at showing the reasons for the hatred of a people considered a non-people, and expressed in practices of annihilation, pogroms and genocide.

This irrational movement of fear and uncertainty concerning the Jews has taken two forms throughout history. The first, more ancient and articulate, is religious, the second, more schematic and recent, is racist. If the outcome of these two aberrations has often been identical, the starting points or the use of certain means of attack and destruction against the people of ancient Israel now spread all over the world, were not.

I know that there is a Catholic ‘blood theory’ that was developed immediately after the Spanish ‘conquest’ with the aim of unmasking, conversions to Catholicism that were considered instrumental. But, within the ambit of Christian theology this was always subordinated to the theory that supported the idea of the ‘great coup’, i.e. the killing of God. On the other hand, the racist thesis developed in more recent times put forward pseudo-scientific claims in order to justify the need to destroy the Jews. Not only Jews, as in the same thesis it was also considered necessary to reduce people who were not Jews but were considered inferior, like the Slav peoples, to subhuman status. It has been said that the Nazis unleashed the third world war with the invasion of Russia because of a clash between methods (for example the presence of political commissars in the army, mass elimination of prisoners, etc.) and aims, i.e. vast movements of peoples, submitting masses of people to a condition of slavery, etc.

But only the Catholic anti-Semitic tradition has reserved particular attention to Jewish cemeteries. Behind the macabre, pointless and stupid gesture of Carpentras stands the whole Catholic culture of the past two thousand years. The practice of disinterring the dead was normal for Catholicism, and was used in the case of heretics whose corpse was disinterred and impaled on a suitable stand with the aim of proceeding to its trial before the tribunals of the Inquisition. Often, as Saint John Chrisostomo himself solicits, this was necessary in order to get rid of the corpses of converted Jews from consecrated places. There was subsequently proof (with what means you can imagine) of the instrumentality of the abjuration, their confession having been aimed at avoiding persecution. In this case the disinterred corpses were thrown en masse into a common grave beyond the sacred land and covered with limestone. As far as I can remember such practices of disinterment are also supported in the terrible letters of Saint Girolamo, one of the worst fanatics of Christian and Catholic hagiographics, and in the far more calm and thoughtful writings of Saint Ambrose, teacher and charmer of Saint Augustine.

Without going too far back in time, there is documentation of a sad debate held during the Second Vatican Council, where the proposal to remove the prayer ‘Pro perfidis judacis’ from Friday mass was met with many objections and gave rise to a kind of organic treatment of modern Catholic anti-Semitism

What is a Jew?

It is not easy to answer this question, nor do these old reflections claim to do so. The question, precisely because it can be developed in many ways, turns out to be badly phrased, at least for the rational mentality that we all carry with us like a shopping bag.

It is easier to answer questions like: what does the Jew do? What is his religious, political, cultural, social, sexual behaviour like? Many have amused themselves by attempting to answer all these questions. Sociology is the science that has an answer for every stupid question.

Yet, deep down, there is still a certain uneasiness in many of us. Old and not so old reading matter, especially novels with personages from Rebecca to Rocambole are there to suggest a particular figure to us. We can almost see this figure, follow it in our mind’s eye. The way this disquieting picture presents itself creates a certain apprehension. The Jew does not emerge very well from this sketch. For goodness sake, we are democratic, possibilist and anti-racist before anything else. We are also progressive. In a word, we are good people of the left, respectful of equality and ready to openly defend the oppressed with all our strength. Yet there is a subtle feeling of uneasiness inside us. The fact is that we understand why the Jew has always been degraded, humiliated, hunted down, killed. We understand, but we don’t know how to explain it exactly.

There must be something about the Jew. That is the conclusion we come to. And it is this conviction, something obscure and never quite revealed in detail, that underlies anti-Semitism.

I don’t hate Jews. I even find it hard to imagine how it was possible first to theorise, then put into practice, their systematic extermination. My blood runs cold when I come across some barely legible anti-Jewish piece of writing, yet I can’t get rid of this uneasiness.

I know perfectly well that Jews are men like everyone else, that they share the same passions as the rest, make the same mistakes. There are rich and poor Jews like everyone else in the world, intelligent and stupid, according to how original chaos decided in the absolute lack of rules and predestination.

I know all that, but I don’t feel comfortable all the same. Jews are mean. Come on, let’s be serious! What kind of talk is that? I put it aside. There’s no doubt that this is stupid nonsense, but I hear it around me repeatedly, on the tram, or in the emphatically democratic elaboration of gossip known as mass media. This generalisation strengthens my idea (who knows when I heard this about being mean for the first time), it must go back to my childhood. Jews are mean. For goodness sake! Enough of this rubbish. And yet, there’s no bad joke anywhere that doesn’t make reference to this. Comrades make no exception, except in cases where they gruffly raise their heads, unsmiling. They are just being politically correct, but that’s another story. And the Scottish, and the Genovese? They are also mean. Who has not had such an experience in life? Nearly everyone, and nearly everyone will tell you that they have found, equally distributed, spendthrift Genovese and mean Genovese, and will laugh at the joke ‘if a Genovese throws himself out of the window, follow him’. But nobody laughs if the same joke is made about a Jew. Here there is something that stops us.

It would be wrong to think that these preoccupations are unimportant. In fact, they are part of the weaponry of ridicule that has been put into to effect for centuries by anti-Semitism, along with stories about a God-killing people and the Jews’ hatred of the world that is not Jewish like themselves. There is no reasoning behind these statements, and on the other hand, no reasoning would ever be able to refute it entirely.

To say that the Jews are not a race is to say something so obvious as to be absolutely stupid. We can simply look at the heterogeneity of the components that make up Israel today to see that immediately. Yet not only anti-Semites but many people who do not have any specific ideas about Jews but are just generally suspicious of them, as always happens with those one doesn’t know, consider them a separate race. Separate, that’s the point.

Even the Jews themselves don’t consider themselves a race, but they do indeed consider themselves to be something separate. Try to say that the Jews are the same as everybody else and you will see that. Although for some this is simply a banality, for others it is a gross mistake, and the Jews themselves are among them. In a word, the Jew does not consider himself to be like other people. First of all, before being a human being he is always a Jew: he is a Jewish human being.

This fact is linked to his Jewish religion and, in particular, to the peculiar force with which tradition is expressed in this religion. The main, profoundly comic, thesis of anti-Semitism is that a German Jew could never understand Goethe because he is extraneous to the Germanic spirit, or for the same reason a French Jew could never understand Racine. Yet exactly the opposite thesis seems to me to be more founded, that which says, here for the first time as far as I know, that anyone who is not Jewish cannot imagine the spirit of Hebraism.

Just because the Prussian anarchist revolutionary Rocker studied Yiddish to organise the London Jews does not mean to say that he understood the problem of Hebraism.

And so the thesis maintained by Sartre in his time that the Jew is a man whom others consider to be Jewish, is partly true.

Isolation, the ghettoes, the exclusive attribute originally granted by the Christian church of being allowed, to deal in money, others’ contempt, all that does not make up the Jew. This is just what anti-Semitism uses to build ‘its’ imaginary figure of the latter. The rest they do themselves, and it is this rest that we have to bear in mind.

They say that the Jew cannot constitute a religious unit because his story over 25 centuries has been studded with continual dissolutions. They say that instead of effective links, i.e. relationships that materialise in actual communities and not just in the fictitious solution of some political State or other, there have always been sentimental bonds between groups. At times these have been quite fantastic, ideal links. Compared to a strong religion like Christianity that was capable of facing the reforms and fractures with the East without losing its essence and strengthened itself both as a whole and as a political force, Hebraism has become more and more spiritual in an intimist religion with a strong symbolic force. This permits the life of political groupings around it, borrowing them from its own surly integriste totalitarianism.

These analyses are mainly mistaken. They are mistaken in that in the various Diaspora, from Babylonian captivity to Persian domination, up to the Roman conquest, then throughout history in various local historical situations, the Jews have always kept a separate identity. This identity has been saved almost exclusively due to the religious filter. According to some, western analyses with an evolved political viewpoint such as that of the perspicacious Machievelli, instead of weakening the various communities strengthened them, but in their own way. The original Christian movement had already made a radical distinction between Jewish migratory groups and those in Judea and the prevalence of an extremely intimist religious form, considered weak by the usual political analysts. This was so weak that it turns out to have been capable of going through the whole of the Middle Ages and conveying great wealth of ideas, art, experience of life, theological and mystic reflections, a heritage that permeates the whole of Hebraism in spite of migratory repartition.

Gradually tradition takes the place of national heritage as such. The German Jew felt German and was shocked by his radical enucleation from the social body carried out at the hands of the Nazis. But this feeling German belonged to a kind of separate, public sphere, and in more intimate, far stronger sphere he felt Jewish.

In fact, right from the first phase in the constitution of the Israeli State most Jews never felt a lack of an effective historical base. On the contrary, they experienced an immediate, uninterrupted link with the places of the promised land. They only grasped the sign of the return and the prophecy maintained, the great confirmation of how much this was an inevitable sign of God in the same way as the catastrophes of the Diaspora and the Holocaust were also signs of the particular relationship of God with his chosen people.

Here it is interesting to say something about the rationalist revolt that lasted from the middle of the last century to the early decades of this one. This is the haskalah (culture) movement. The clash between this movement of poets, musicians, mathematicians, scientists and historians and the supporters of the Jewish tradition was hard and led to publishing aimed at rationally examining events of everyday life. They also took their critique to within the walls of the ghettos, at times with a crude but effective realism. The thrust towards a better, more just, spiritually enriched world contrasted dramatically with crude descriptions of the grey reality of the ghetto made up of humiliation and a flattening of religious tradition. We can understand this contrast better through the satire of Jehudah Loeb Gordon, Joseph Pel and Ischq Ertel, who attack the superstitious and ridiculous sides of the cult. The review by Peres Smolenskin, “Ha-Shachar”, “The Morning”, sketches the panorama of the Russian Jewish ghettoes and attacks not only aspects of religious fanaticism, but also the disturbing sides of their model of daily life. Yet this satire did not reach the crux of the question, it did not touch the presumed ‘revelation’ of the absolute God who leads Israel to victory. No critic ever dared push himself so far. Even the atheist writings of Roger Martin du Gard prefer to attack Christianity, particularly Catholicism, but never touch the Talmud. In the numerous anticlerical writings of the Jews the rabbi is never taken into consideration.

Already, with the intensification of the pogroms at the end of the last century, especially in Russia, this critical literary vein began to dampen its style. A re-evaluation of the traditional values of Hebraism began to take over, and it is easy to understand why: in the face of repression and catastrophe the Jews find themselves united yet again, precisely in the Holocaust.

The heirs of the haskalah were thus the initiators of the Hibbat Sion Love of Zion movement which was to adopt an increasingly nationalist outlook. One of the main ideologues of Zionism is the Ukrainian Ahad ha’am (Asher Ginzberg) who in his book Al Parashat Derakim (At the Crossroads), founded Zionism in its spiritual and theoretical aspect. Being a continuation of critical rationalism this nationalist vein also includes a critique of Jewish daily life, even using a certain humour concerning the average Jew’s way of thinking, underlining the tics and many of the paradoxical aspects that I mentioned earlier.

Unity continued to grow from strength to strength in the land of Palestine. Not just political unity, which perhaps did not correspond with the hopes of the early colons, the only ones who deserve this name, but community-based, social and religious. This last point, which has never been fully examined by the so-called lay writers of the movement of the national rebirth, has now become absolutely prevalent.

It seems to me to be more exact to say that the Jew is he who considers himself Jewish and therefore acts and behaves on the basis of his Jewish consciousness. In this the religious motive has an essential, if not dominant, place. To reinforce his conviction of being Jewish is also, and this is not of a secondary importance, the behaviour of others who, in considering him such adopt certain attitudes towards him that give the original aspects the consolidation of a real social status.

To take the Jewish condition from the Jew, his life in that tradition, his feeling of belonging to an ideal and religious rather than national community even when he does not physically find himself in the State of Israel, would be to alienate him. And to do that could be just as disastrous an operation as that which attempts to reduce the differences between men in the name of a badly understood egalitarianism.

Equality is an idea based on justice, freedom and truth. Like all ideas which really are such and are not just the fruit of opinions put in motion by the game of daily information, it must continually be made one’s own. There is no final definition, position to be taken, or programmatic declaration. In a word, there is nothing that can absolutely close him up in a formula that is valid once and for all. Nothing can make the Jew become equal to me. I am not Jewish, I lack that strong experience, that intimate connection with something that is other than the possible religious experiences that I have in my non Jewish world. And I cannot substitute this lack with the simple decision to read the texts of the Hasidim or the myths of the cabbalah. The exceptional fact, and I think that every Jew would agree with me, is that I am not Jewish.

The Kibbutz Movement

The kibbutz movement spread like wildfire with the increase in the arrival of Jews in the land of Palestine after the end of the second world war. What had begun as an experiment became a serious attempt to restructure society on the basis of linking up new organisational models. These models used theoretical and practical experiences of the past, but found themselves faced with quite a new problem due to the considerable dimensions that it was beginning to take.

In this way the communitarian village was born, productive communities proposing an integration of agriculture, industry and crafts. These communes united in a confederation, thereby overcoming the problem of isolation, one of the points considered by Kropotkin to be a reason for the non-functioning of communes.

A number of theoretical and practical experiences precede this communitarian village, but much was improvised by the colons who, at least in the beginning, also tried to make the Palestinian Arab people participate fully in their initiatives. Dreams abound in this early stage. Utopian fantasy also: a new society seems to be dawning, based on new family and personal relationships. A new human being, a new world perhaps, were the more or less declared objectives.

The first pioneers, the Chaluzim, had something of the sort in mind both in theory and in practice. But right from the start there was a contradiction in this network of free communities that wanted to extend over the whole territory. Even then it was possible to see the appearance of the national idea, the reconstitution of the Jewish State on a territorial and national basis, sowing the seeds of every future evil.

The fact that many of these Chaluzim had socialist aspirations is not as important as has often been maintained. The theories of Owen and King were also present along with those of Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer, who were far more important for this specific question. But that is not the point.

The kwuza, village communities, were thus destined to be absorbed by the State and to follow, albeit in a different way, the tragic destiny of the Spanish collectives. Kropotkin’s theories on the Russian mir and artel, the reading of Marx’s and his attempts to explain the functioning and destiny of the agricultural communities (important are the replies to the questions of Vera Zasulic), were not sufficient to resolve the problems posed by the new reality. State englobement became inevitable when the kwuza stopped creating new interests and producing a real communitarian life rich in problems but capable of finding solutions. By adapting to simply carrying out daily tasks the initial impulse gradually burnt itself out. As soon as the Chaluziut began to be self-satisfied, i.e. a little elite which claimed to be the original colonisers, defeat was not long in arriving.

This broke out with the increment of the crisis in the whole settlement in the land of Palestine. The country of the alija the ascent, became the country of the enrichment of little groups with no ideals. Alongside the original Chaluziut, who still had a clear vision of their own socialist motivation, another incomplete Chaluziut gradually emerged that simply wanted a better standard of living in the land considered to be ‘of their fathers’. The racist division between Ashkenazi and Sephardi became more and more evident and important as the arrival of black Jews increased. As the communities grew and differentiated themselves, they became more and more detached from their original ideals.

Not that these new arrivals did not fulfil their obligation to work. On the contrary, the Sephardim were often the most radical in their commitment made (also when they become policemen they are among the most rigid and adhere closest to the rules). But their main interest was their own survival, here and now, in the best possible way. They also had to avoid the risk of failure which would have forced them to return to their land of origin where only death awaited them. At first there were ideals of communitarian federalist socialism in many of these productive structures, let’s say of a new stamp. These were coordinated nationally, saw the participation of the Palestinian Arabs and were without the presence of a State, but were soon to disappear.

We must not think that this condition only applies to the Kibbutzim; the moschawim industrial working colonies, found themselves in a similar situation. Many of them have abandoned their original, individualist composition. This is not in order to establish a deeper agreement with and become socially federated with other similar forms, but on the contrary so as to establish a direct relationship with and therefore direct subsidy from, the Israeli State.

Of all that went before, only the ashes remain.

[1986]

Communes, from experimentation to survival

Here at the end of the eighties there has been a move towards communes as an alternative lifestyle running parallel to increasing difficulties in the social struggle. The road to revolution seems to be blocked, with no victory of progressive and revolutionary forces over conservative State reaction in view. So these communes are not just considered ideal situations, they claim to satisfy fundamental personal and collective needs, or have ethnic and cultural motivation. In a word, they have become a point of reference for many, away from the traditional division between the personal and political.

It cannot be denied that behind these alternative desires there had been a growing need for diversity. As hopes for a profound change in the social structure disappeared, there was concern not to let oneself be submerged by rampant restructuring and spreading desistence. Consequently there has been a tendency to continue the struggle by respecting one’s own basic needs.

Talking of the Comunidad del sur, Ruben Prieto says, ‘These new societal formations organise social action to selfmanage funds, production and consumption, as well as various services, or come together on the basis of particular needs. Through all this, in a way marginal (but at the same time opposed to dominant values and the power apparatus) ferment, one can see the emergence of a new credible and verifiable utopian discourse. In their most radical realisation, communes aim to promote individual identity and free organisational forms, a re-evaluation of autonomy, participation and creativity, and lack of faith in any project of development based on the technologies of capitalist development, with a strong accent on the culture of daily life, action from the base to the vertex and the particular to the general’. R. Prieto, ‘La Comunidad del sur’ in ‘Volontà’ n. 3, 1989, p.56)

It is possible to draw very general principles from this passage that anyone could agree with precisely because they are not specific. Basically, what should characterise a commune that is separate from State interference should be its diversity, i.e. the diversity of its aims, not its simple existence as a commune separate from the rest of the social system. What we are saying might seem banal but it actually touches on the most important aspect of the problem. The question today is not so much whether to live in a commune or not, something that also has its difficult side — and its going against the prevailing model of normality. It means living in a different way, living one’s life differently. It does not mean that one simply lives the same life as the slaves of capital at a different, often worse, pace, making individual efforts that often amount to super-exploitation under other names and ideologies.

I think that the problem of communes needs to be gone into in depth. For example, the next step could be to look at the problem from the outside. The commune is all very well, but for what? Now we are reaching the crux of the matter. A productive, agricultural or city commune, could become a survival community. By working at it this objective could more or less be achieved. But what objective exactly? The reproduction of oneself as a working animal, producer, that’s all, only the other side of the ghetto. There must be an ideal in our motivation, something more than a mere call to struggle against the State and society. It is vital that this pulsion, this utopian thrust, be inherent in the communitarian dimension if we choose such an instrument. We must have chosen this instrument because through it we want to come out from society and upset others with our diversity — all others, even those who know nothing about communitarian organisation. But our diversity cannot simply be summed up in belonging to a commune because such an existence is nearly always so miserable as to incite pity rather than set an example. It must therefore be something else.

The following passage by Buenfil shows how far one is from the problem raised here: “The ecological society will necessarily be egalitarian and decentralised, not hierarchical. It is in this context that the project of new kinds of social groups, communes and communities, civil voluntary associations and networks of cooperatives exist. Up until now it was thought that it is best to carry out such experiments in the country. Instead we must start to conceive them in the cities, as collectives, consumers’ and artisans’ cooperatives, new tribes, bands, area associations, workers’ councils, holistic schools and clinics. In this way it will be possible to build a parallel society that replaces the competitive nuclear, ecocide, militarised, super-industrialised and imperialist society pacifically (A. R. Buenfil, “I tempi delle comuni” in Volontà no. 3/1989, p. 108–109. )There, this passage being ideological, superficial, philosophically necessitated and stupidly mechanistic, it amounts to the most limited and insignificant that can be said on the subject at the present time.

All that not being possible, there being nothing to put peacefully in place of society, or the State that defends it militarily as though it were an old woman whose chair one was trying to steal. We are left with the question: what should the diversity of communitarian life consist of, given that it cannot simply be the commune itself, which is not diversity at all? The communes of the past century and their supporters were aware of this problem and addressed all their efforts in that direction. For example, free love became a problem within the problem, a utopia within the technical problem of keeping the community going.

[1989]

Untitled

I

Too much light that night. We needed the darkness of accomplice short-cuts, solitary paths, to lift one’s hand, to find the courage to lift one’s hand and make darkness in one’s heart.

II

How quell the hatred if there is only them, other than the forgotten lies and weakness? Wondrously spellbound, move forward with trembling lantern, full of curiosity, learning, knowing. But it is the song of the frogs that takes me back into the mud, from where I have not moved for a long time, waiting, like the snake.

III

Recurring liturgies expand time in the ceremonial, awaiting the miracle that transforms steel into love. An idea of beauty, from the single drops of nitroglycerine. Silence. I put the pieces carefully back into the sheaths, it will be for another time.

IV

The black wing of the crow has glittered enough. Now that the light is coming I see the far off window clearly, a breach in the almost destroyed building. A shadow mourns the death of his friend, then he gets up and looks at the sun low on the horizon before dying in turn.

V

Too slow, she ended up sitting on the ground, adjusting the little dress over her infirm legs. It seemed she wasn’t breathing, immobile amongst the fallen leaves of the high branches. The shador hid the irrevocable tears.

VI

In the end we remained alone, waiting. We had to telephone, before it was too late. The other was silent, looking at the lighthouse not far away, the lighthouse of dreams, closed from all sides. High sunlit walls underlined the jarring lack of light. Life was dying in there; if life is hope there was none left in there. Only the logic of the torturers.

VII

Good causes are not recognised. If you look them carefully in the face, they are no longer good. They suffocate with justification that had not been requested, they beg to stay on the surface, not to push the knife in, or cry.

VIII

Backs to the wall, surrounded on all sides, at the bend in the road after the bridge, not a chance, and they are happy.

Postface

The two latest decisions of Netanyahu’s Israeli government were to extend the Jews’ settling from the East to places West of the city of Jerusalem occupied by the Arab Palestinians, and to continue to favour the settling of new colons in the occupied territories.

On the purely political level of international politics, these two decisions were resolved in net violation of the Oslo agreements, which does not surprises us in the least. There is not one agreement with the United states and the European Union, that Israel has not failed to comply with it in its strategy of its own reinforcement and the destruction of the Palestinian people, and here we will make no particular note of it here.

But these two decisions, at a time when world political signals seemed to be advising Netanyahu to soften his falcon politics, lead us to understand, better than any theoretical discourse, what this government is about, what price the Israeli State is disposed to pay to keep true to its own military and religious programmes.

The only move that the powerful United States have managed to make (the Jewish lobby in that country remains strong and continues to condition this kind of decision) was that of bland dissent from this war politic, declaring themselves extraneous to it (at least in words) and suggesting to the European Union to do something to dissuade the Israelis from going ahead, without however taking too extreme measures such as an embargo like that put on Libya and Iraq.

In fact, at this moment The West Bank and Gaza are under a statute of dependence on Israel and, from the economic point of view, they have transformed themselves into an a bottomless pit that costs far more that what the collaborating European States, and Israel itself, on the financial level, should be disposed to paying.

But Israel cannot budge even a centimetre. Its whole politic, especially over the past few years, seems to the eyes of the so-called objective observer, to be suicide, and in fact it is, but it is not so for a Jew.

No need to comment on the mistake of thinking that things would be any different if in place of a right in Israel there was a left. It would be the same, perhaps in a less rigid way more fitting to the weak position of this anomalous State on the chessboard of international equilibrium.

That clears the chatter of those who consider possible an alternative to the Israeli situation, while leaving the unshakeable theocentric characteristics of this State standing. Off the two: either the theocentric Israeli State disappears, giving life to another federalist kind of formation that is open to the possibility of a communitarian cohabitation with the Arab Palestinians and eventually with other peoples, or the Jews will be moving towards a catastrophe once again.

But perhaps the shoah is precisely what they are waiting for, according to the forecasts of their profits. How can you disavow them?

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