Introduction

From the River to the Sea

Curated By

Unlearning Capitalism

A curated directory of educational resources for radical political education focused on building a better world beyond capitalism.

About this Collection

About this Collection

In the wake of the Al Aqsa Flood operation carried out on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian struggle for land, freedom and self-determination on the territory of historic Palestine was brought forcefully back to the attention of the world. The naked brutality of the response in Gaza from the Zionist occupation and its US/EU imperial benefactors served as an awakening call for millions of people across the world: this was the true face of the "west". 

For the global majority who have been fighting for their freedom from colonialism for centuries this violence came as no surprise; for them, "western values" had always come with violence. For Palestinians specifically the struggle for dignity on their own homelands extended back to 1949 and even farther beyond. 

This collection introduces the Palestinian struggle against Zionism through its origins, the history of the Zionist entity and the continuing resistance to occupation in both Palestine and the broader West Asia region to this day.

Read this collection online: https://unlearn.capital/collections/from-the-river-to-the-sea

12 articles · 5 books · 1 video

This ebook is about 126 pages long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. gaza has remade the world

14 pages

https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/gaza-has-remade-the-world

Return to Bandung

By Pranay Somayajula

The Gaza genocide has fundamentally reshaped global power dynamics, shattered illusions about Western liberalism, and accelerated the rise of the Global South.

2. "Resistance Has Become Thinkable Again" — Torkil Lauesen and the Global Perspective on OCT 7

16 pages

https://comrawire.substack.com/p/resistance-has-become-thinkable-again

[comra]

Lauesen analyzes how October 7 reshuffled global power dynamics, showing resistance against imperialism has become thinkable again despite Israel's military victory.

3. The Forgotten Front

7 pages

https://resistancearchives.substack.com/p/the-forgotten-front

The Resistance Archives

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine shaped Palestinian liberation through Marxist-Leninist ideology and armed struggle, challenging both Israel and Western imperialism.

4. Gaza: The Resistance Lives, The Prison Doors Open - On the Road to Liberation and Return

10 pages

https://samidoun.net/2025/01/gaza-the-resistance-lives-the-prison-doors-open-on-the-road-to-liberation-and-return/

Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network

Palestinian resistance forces defeated Zionist/imperialist objectives despite genocide, securing prisoner release and ceasefire through sustained struggle.

5. Acts of Return: How the Al Aqsa Flood Shattered the US Fantasy of "Full Spectrum Dominance"

30 pages

https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/al-aqsa-flood-full-spectrum/

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

The Al Aqsa Flood operation shattered the US fantasy of 'Full-Spectrum Dominance' in West Asia, demonstrating limits to imperial control and empowering Palestinian resistance.

6. On Hamas and the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination: Explainer

4 pages

https://voiceoftheproletariat.substack.com/p/on-hamas-and-the-palestinian-struggle

Voice of the Proletariat

An explainer defending Hamas and Palestinian armed resistance under international law, countering Western narratives about October 7th and arguing that Israel's occupation constitutes genocide and apartheid.

7. Despite Everything: Cultural Resistance for a Free Palestine

24 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-cultural-resistance-palestine/

The Tricontinental

Palestinian artists and cultural workers use literature, art, and theater to resist occupation and assert identity in the face of ongoing oppression.

8. Resistance, Struggle, and Anti-Imperialism in the Global South

2 pages

https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/resistance-struggle-and-anti-imperialism-in-the-global-south/

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

Examines historical anti-imperialist movements in the Global South and their relevance to contemporary liberation struggles, particularly Palestinian resistance.

9. The Sword and the Neck – Reading the Al-Aqsa Flood: Book Review and Interview

7 pages

https://voxummah.com/2026/03/the-sword-and-the-neck-reading-the-al-aqsa-flood-book-review-and-interview/

Vox Ummah

By Shabbir Rizvi

This book review analyzes Yanis Iqbal's work that defends Palestinian resistance through historical materialism, challenging liberal arguments against anti-colonial struggle.

10. Nada Elia: 'Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished.'

4 pages

https://progressive.international/wire/2023-05-25-nada-elia-zionism-cannot-be-reformed-it-must-be-abolished-/en/

Progressive International

By Nada Elia

Nada Elia argues that Zionism is an inherently racist ideology that cannot be reformed and must be abolished to achieve justice for Palestine.

11. Kwame Ture's Anti-Zionism: The Meeting Between Pan-Africanism and Palestine

6 pages

https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/kwame-ture-s-anti-zionism-the-meeting-between-pan-africanism-and-palestine/

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

By Momodou Taal

Kwame Ture connected Pan-Africanism with Palestinian liberation, viewing Zionism as colonialism embedded in global imperialism.

12. "Our Allies in the World Are the Free People, Whether Progressive, Marxist-Leninist, or Islamic": Palestinian Resistance

2 pages

https://voiceoftheproletariat.substack.com/p/allies-regardless-of-ideology-palestinian-resistance

Voice of the Proletariat

By Park Jee-hoon

A Palestinian freedom fighter asserts that Palestine allies with all free people worldwide, regardless of ideology, including Marxist-Leninist and Islamic, standing united against the Zionist imperialist project, while the post highlights social media censorship of such resistance content.

Other Resources

Other Resources

This collection also includes other media types such as books, videos, podcasts, and more.

Books

The Thorn and the Carnation

Resource Not Added

By Yahya Al-Sinwar

Yahya Al-Sinwar's novel blends memoir and fiction to recount Palestinian life under occupation, from childhood in Gaza refugee camps to rising armed resistance, captivity, and the liberation struggle.

My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary

Resource Not Added

By Leila Khaled

Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled recounts her childhood in exile, the harsh realities of refugee camps, her awakening to class and national consciousness, and her path toward armed resistance and hijacking.

Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine

Resource Not Added

By Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

The Palestinian struggle against Zionism and imperialism demands a scientific political thought, class analysis and a protracted people's war led by workers and peasants.

The Sword and The Neck: Reading the al-Aqsa Flood

https://www.iskrabooks.org/books/p/the-sword-and-the-neck

Iskra Books

By Yanis Iqbal

Iqbal's book critiques bourgeois idealism in contemporary left philosophy, from Said's exilic detachment to Žižek's pessimism and Balibar's relativized nonviolence. It calls for a reorientation of philosophy toward concrete actions of Palestinian liberation, arguing that theoretical frameworks must be deconstructed to reveal class imperatives.

A Document of General Principles & Policies

Resource Not Added

By The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas

Hamas outlines its founding principles, defining Palestine as an Arab Islamic land, affirming the right of return for refugees, and defending the October 7 operation as a legitimate resistance act against Israeli occupation and aggression.

Video

The Foundations of Zionism, with Sabri Jiryis and Fida Jiryis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAZZnUyp1Q8

The Electronic Intifada

By Sabri Jiryis

Palestinian scholar Sabri Jiryis discusses his book on Zionist history and analyzes the US-Israeli conflict with Iran.

gaza has remade the world

From the River to the Sea — gaza has remade the world

gaza has remade the world

Article 1 of 12

Return to Bandung

By Pranay Somayajula

Originally published at https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/gaza-has-remade-the-world

The first demonstration I attended to protest against the genocide in Gaza—a vigil and ceasefire rally organized by progressive Jewish groups in Washington, D.C.—took place in October 2023, just a few days after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the beginning of Israel’s bombardment. Around a thousand people assembled in Farragut Square and marched a few blocks south to the White House, where the crowd surrounded the building and smaller groups of us blocked off each of the entrances. The intention of blocking the building’s entrances, rather than maintaining the public spectacle of a single large crowd gathered outside the gates, was to send a message to White House staffers as they tried to enter and exit, demanding that they end their employer’s complicity in the genocide.

When all was said and done, it was little more than yet another purely symbolic expression of civil disobedience, the sort of tactic that has been increasingly (and rightly) critiqued as the genocide has worn on for being overly performative and largely ineffective. At the time, however, we were spurred on by the possibility—however remote—that the people working inside the building we were blockading, the people with the power to put an end to the carnage that was just beginning to unfold might look out the window and pay attention to us. Back then, of course, Joe Biden was still in office, and as disillusioned as I and most of my fellow travelers on the left already were after three years of feckless Democratic Party leadership, we still held on to a glimmer of hope that perhaps, if only we were able to mobilize enough public outrage and opposition, we might be able to exert sufficient pressure to shift the administration’s policy of unwavering support for Israel.

Two years later, the situation has changed so drastically that it feels trite to even point it out. We all know by now how things played out—the refusal by Biden (and later by his anointed successor, Kamala Harris) to heed the public outcry and exert any meaningful leverage to stop the genocide, the relentless demonization and smear campaigns against anyone who offered even the most milquetoast criticisms of the Zionist entity, the brutal repression of student protesters during last spring’s wave of encampments. We know also what happened next, how Biden’s toothless liberalism and promises that “nothing would fundamentally change” ended up meekly giving way for the triumphant resurgence of Donald Trump—the bloody, putrid expectoration of a decrepit empire in its final death throes—and the subsequent ascendance of fascism at a pace that has caught even the most cynical among us off guard.

All of this, of course, has taken place against a backdrop of escalating carnage in Gaza and across the Middle East. As I am writing these words, two years and a day since the genocide began, media outlets are reporting that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the “first phase” of what appears to be the most comprehensive ceasefire plan yet. Whether that ceasefire holds, and what comes next as negotiations continue over the longer-term horizons of Trump’s proposed ‘peace plan’—a plan that, if implemented, would entail the complete demilitarization of the resistance, the denial of Palestinian self-determination, and the installation of a neocolonial ‘transitional authority’ dominated by Western elites and war criminals—remains to be seen. But even if this latest development does prove to bring about a lasting cessation to what is only the most recent episode in a 77-year history of Zionist settler-colonial brutality against the Palestinians, there can be no undoing the devastation that has already been wrought.

That devastation is so complete and so incomprehensibly horrific that it is impossible to offer more than a cursory sketch of it here. Since October 2023, conservative estimates indicate that Israel has murdered some 67,000 people in Gaza, more than 80 percent of them civilians. 92 percent of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, along with 89 percent of water and sanitation infrastructure and 92 percent of schools. The most recent months of the genocide have seen Israel sadistically and systematically weaponize starvation against Gaza’s besieged population, leaving more than half a million people facing “catastrophic” famine while desperate Palestinians are gunned down indiscriminately at aid distribution sites that have been turned into killing fields. And as if the desolation of Gaza weren’t enough, the repeated expansion of Israel’s onslaught to target the wider Middle East has put the fundamentally imperial nature of this war and genocide on full display. Earlier this year, Israel launched a U.S.-backed war of aggression against the people of Iran, and in the span of just three days in September, it bombed six countries across the region—Lebanon, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen—all but two of which had already been attacked by the Zionist entity multiple times since the start of the genocide.

As we pass the second anniversary of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, when Palestinian resistance fighters heroically tore down the walls of the Gaza ghetto, as well as the second anniversary of the genocide’s beginning, now is a moment to reflect on everything that has happened since then—especially as it seems that a lasting ceasefire has finally begun to take hold. Upon such reflection, it is clearer now than ever before that the events of the last two years have fundamentally reshaped not only the world around us, but the way we as human beings look at and move through and respond to it. Gaza, in other words, has remade the world. The rest of this essay is dedicated to making sense of exactly how that remaking has unfolded, and where we go from here.

• • •

We have all, in one way or another, been forever altered by the genocide in Gaza. Whether we care to admit it to ourselves or not, we are all a little more hardened, a little more cynical, a little less trusting in the platitudes about humanity’s inherent goodness that we were taught as children to believe. The routinization of mass slaughter as just another facet of our daily lives, the overwhelming constancy with which we have been inundated with graphic images of suffering and atrocity—not to mention the disturbing ease with which the vast majority of us, in the face of this inundation, have been able to continue living happily during the war—has contributed significantly to this profound sense of alienation from our collective humanity.

But even as the genocide has indelibly touched our individual and collective psyches at the most fundamental level, it is equally true that, in ways that it is perhaps still too early to fully discern, the larger world we inhabit has been forever altered as well. After two years of genocide, the so-called ‘liberal international order’—already severely tarnished by decade after decade of Western (particularly American) leaders unilaterally forcing their imperial hegemony onto the rest of the world with smiles on their faces and guns in their hands—has been shattered beyond all hope of repair. In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Gaza genocide has proven to be for the 21st century what the Nazi Holocaust was for the 20th.

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Before I develop this argument any further, a note on Holocaust analogies: there are some who will read what I have just written and find it obvious to the point of banality; there are no doubt many more who will be scandalized and even outraged. Even amid the sea change in public opinion regarding Israel that has taken place since October of 2023, there still remains a taboo in mainstream discourse against pointing out the obvious—that Netanyahu’s Israel has spent two years deploying against Palestinians the same exterminatory logics that Hitler’s Germany once deployed against the Jews of Europe, with deportation trains and gas chambers replaced by AI-powered drone systems and precision-guided munitions as the preferred instruments of mechanized mass slaughter. To do so is to risk charges of rank antisemitism, of downplaying and even outright denying the Holocaust—but after two relentless years of livestreamed genocidal barbarism, we can no longer afford to entertain such bad-faith accusations. If ‘Never Again’ is to be more than an empty slogan, we must have the moral courage to call a spade a spade.

My intention, then, in drawing this admittedly controversial comparison is not to provoke shock for its own sake, nor is it to reify the exceptionalist logic that treats the Holocaust as the universal reference point for evil in its purest form—what the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, in his powerful London Review of Books essay “The Shoah After Gaza,” calls “the measure of all crimes.” Rather, it is to highlight the unique function that the carnage in Gaza, like the Holocaust before it, has come to serve as an epoch-defining atrocity, shattering widely-held illusions and shining a light on realities that many would rather not face. The horrors of the Second World War, and in particular the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, brought about a profound rupture in Europe’s self-conception as the cradle of Enlightenment civilization (a self-conception that had, for centuries, underpinned the European project of spreading that civilization throughout the colonial world at gunpoint). A generation of European thinkers were spawned who sought desperately to make sense of the decimation of the image of the enlightened, civilized West, to understand how such a West could have produced such barbarity. In the process, a deeply distorted view began to emerge, reinforced by popular culture and political discourse, which placed the Holocaust on a dubious pedestal of exceptionalism—exceptional not only in the sense of being a unique and incommensurable evil, but more importantly in the sense of representing a particularly bloody deviation from a pre-existing standard of civilization that Europe had supposedly enjoyed.

In the introduction to his seminal 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (himself a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis as a teenager) sums up this exceptionalist narrative—a narrative which he forcefully rejects—as follows:

The etiological myth deeply entrenched in the self-consciousness of our Western society is the morally elevating story of humanity emerging from pre-social barbarity . . . In view of this myth, long ago ossified into the common sense of our era, the Holocaust can only be understood as the failure of civilization (i.e. of human purposive, reason-guided activity) to contain the morbid natural predilections of whatever has been left of nature in man.

Nearly a century after the end of World War II, this exceptionalist narrative of ‘Holocaust-as-rupture’ continues to loom large in our collective imagination. Even at the time, however, this view was powerfully challenged by anticolonial thinkers who watched it all unfold from the vantage point of Europe’s colonies, recognizing in Europe’s civilizational debasement the same barbarity that the West had long inflicted on the colonized world. Perhaps the most famous—though by no means the only—such critic was the Martinican poet and anticolonial leader Aimé Césaire, who wrote of Nazism in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism:

[Europeans] hide the truth from themselves . . . that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Many others among Césaire’s anticolonial contemporaries, from the Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru to the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore, offered similar indictments. What this contestation over the Holocaust’s origins and its implications for Western modernity reveals, then, is that rather than representing a rupture in or deviation from that modernity, the Holocaust served to expose the fundamental hypocrisy and brutality that had always festered at the heart of it. As Bauman puts it in Modernity and the Holocaust, “every ‘ingredient’ of the Holocaust—all those many things that rendered it possible—was . . . fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world.”¹

If the Holocaust in Europe shattered the illusions that underpinned Western civilizational identity in the early decades of the 20th century, then the holocaust in Gaza, three-quarters of a century later, has had a similar effect on the illusions that underpin our understanding of the international order in these early decades of the 21st. For decades since the end of World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the trans-Atlantic alliance of Western Europe and the United States has sought to position itself as the protector of liberalism on the world stage, championing the international promotion of democracy, human rights, and political freedoms while pursuing ever-greater degrees of global integration. The events of the last two years, however, have revealed the complete and utter moral bankruptcy of a ‘rules-based international order’ whose rules are set and enforced by the same Western powers that have continued without fail to provide moral, political, financial, and material support for Israel’s genocide. The fact that European leaders (the United States, in classic American fashion, still insists on sticking to its guns) are only now beginning to grow publicly uncomfortable with the sheer barbarity of the Zionist entity’s genocide, issuing tepid statements of quasi-condemnation and halfhearted gestures toward recognition of a Palestinian state, is—to put it lightly—far too little, far too late.

And just as the Nazi Holocaust was no aberration, but was in fact “fully in keeping” with the fundamental logics of European civilization, so too is the Gaza genocide fully in keeping with the fundamental logics of our current global order. Zionism seeks to exterminate the Palestinians not because of some primordial ‘ancient hatreds’ that cleave along ethnic or religious lines, but rather because Palestinian resistance to settler-colonial occupation and erasure poses an existential threat to the imperialist world system of which the state of Israel has always functioned as a key outpost. This is why Western countries, and in particular the U.S., have remained so resolute for so long in supporting Israel—they recognize, as we all should, that the current genocide is really a proxy war, waged by the United States’ most important vassal state, to defend and uphold the crumbling edifice of a world system in which the West’s imperialist boot can remain firmly pressed against the necks of the darker nations.

To say that Gaza has remade the world, however, means more than merely pointing out that it has shattered widely-held illusions about the world we live in. In giving the lie to the mythology of the liberal international order, the events of the last two years have also proven transformative for the collective empowerment of the Global South, and contributed significantly to what the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research calls the “churning of the global order.” The ‘new mood’ of assertiveness and self-determination that Tricontinental executive director Vijay Prashad has identified among Southern nations has taken root in large part as a response to the growing moral isolation of the West as a result of the genocide, and the complete delegitimization of Western powers’ claims to be legitimate arbiters of human rights and global justice.

Of course, the antecedents of these shifts—the structural contradictions of neoliberal globalization, the rise of China as an alternative leader on the world stage, the growing push for multilateralism and South-South cooperation—long predate October 7th. There can be little doubt, however that the genocide has dramatically accelerated these transformations. From South Africa accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice to China explicitly affirming Palestinians’ right to armed resistance to Southern states taking the enforcement of international law into their own hands through the formation of the Hague Group, Global South countries have used the genocide in Gaza to confront Western hypocrisy and hegemony in ways that would have been all but unthinkable just a few years ago. And lest we fall into the trap of treating these developments as if they are taking place merely at the highest levels of state policy and foreign relations, it’s worth remembering that every ‘official’ expression of Global South solidarity with Palestine has been accompanied by grassroots mobilization on the part of the masses, who have rallied in the thousands and millions across the Global South to pressure their governments from below.

Underpinning this outpouring of solidarity is the recognition that the devastation unleashed by Israel on Gaza does not exist in a vacuum—that what is being done to the Palestinians today could well be done to the rest of the Global South tomorrow. Few world leaders have been more outspoken on this point than Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has repeatedly used his platform in international fora to draw attention to this chilling reality. In his speech at the December 2023 COP28 climate summit in Dubai, for example, Petro called the genocide in Gaza a “rehearsal for the future,” warning that “the unleashing of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian people is what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate crisis.” Nearly two years later, in a July 2025 speech at the Hague Group’s emergency conference in Bogotá, Petro repeated his warning, declaring that “Gaza is simply an experiment by the mega-rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how you respond to a rebellion of humanity.” And just a few weeks ago, in his September address to the United Nations General Assembly, Petro connected the genocide in Gaza to the escalation of imperialist aggression in Latin America, emphasizing once again that “they will not just bomb Gaza, not just the Caribbean as they are doing already, but all of humanity that demands freedom.”

• • •

When reflecting on the events of the last two years, there is of course an inherent danger in speaking about the Gaza genocide and its implications for the overall state of the world in such sweeping and conceptual terms—namely, that doing so risks further dehumanizing Palestinians by treating their very material suffering as a sort of symbolic blank canvas onto which all manner of abstract conclusions can be projected. For those of us engaged in the intellectual work of trying to make sense of war and genocide, it is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that we are talking about real human beings who have suffered—and continue to suffer—real and unimaginable loss and devastation. In an August 2025 essay for the LA Review of Books, Mary Turfah argues powerfully against precisely this sort of sanitized abstraction, writing:

I will admit that I don’t care, not right now, about reordering the world, in salvaging it at all. The beginning and end of my concern is stopping the genocide in Gaza, whose people—like all people—exist not as a moral lesson or a symbol, but as people.

I am, of course, profoundly sympathetic to this position. At the same time, however, I remain firm in my belief that we cannot afford to miss the forest for the trees. The reality is that the genocide in Gaza, as I have highlighted extensively above, is the symptom and not the disease. It is the logical outgrowth, and indeed the inevitable conclusion, of an imperialist world-system that is structurally designed to facilitate the merciless exploitation of the global periphery and the international working class by a small handful of elites in the imperial core—and to punish with extreme brutality any people that dares to challenge that system.

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In other words, we have no choice but to care about reordering the world, no choice but to pay attention to the very real shifts in the global order that have been engendered and intensified by both the genocide itself and by the Global South’s reactions to it. To argue, as I have maintained here, that “Gaza has remade the world” is to argue that Gaza has further sharpened the internal contradictions of the capitalist-imperialist world system, hastening their development and bringing us closer to the final crisis that will lead to that system’s inevitable collapse. What will follow in the wake of that collapse—socialism or barbarism, a liberated world or an annihilated one—is by no means a foregone conclusion. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that Gaza has started to remake the world, but that it is ultimately up to the revolutionary masses, in the Global South and the imperial core alike, to determine what form that remaking will ultimately take.

All of this is to say that even as we celebrate the news of a ceasefire in Gaza, it is incumbent upon us to remember that this is not the end of anything, but rather just one link in a long chain of historical developments that are accelerating and intensifying with each passing day. With this in mind, must remain steadfast in our commitment to a revolutionary politics whose horizon is nothing less than the liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed peoples—a liberation that can only come with the complete overthrow of the entire capitalist-imperialist world system. Anything short of that will inevitably lead us back to where we find ourselves now, picking up the pieces in the wake of yet another genocidal calamity—perhaps in Palestine, perhaps somewhere else.

• • •

In August 1971, the Black revolutionary martyr George Jackson completed his manifesto Blood in My Eye while incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. Just days later, he was murdered by prison guards while attempting to liberate himself from captivity. (Notably, after his own martyrdom, authorities found a handwritten copy of the poem “Enemy of the Sun” by the revolutionary Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim in Jackson’s cell. The poem was later mistakenly published in the Black Panther Party’s newspaper under Jackson’s name, in what the Black Studies scholar Greg Thomas calls “a magical ‘mistake’ that would cement a certain Black/Palestinian connection for decades to come.”)

In Blood in My Eye, Jackson wrote of the life-and-death urgency of revolution and liberation for oppressed people everywhere, exhorting the reader:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.

More than half a century later, these words still ring true. In the decades since Jackson wrote Blood in My Eye, generations of people around the world have continued to die needlessly, continued to live “poor butchered half-lives” as a result of the same systems that Jackson dedicated his tragically short life to resisting. The tens of thousands dead in Gaza are among their number, their names the latest additions to an unending list of those who have been martyred over the centuries by the West’s imperialist barbarity. We owe it to their memory, and to the memory of those countless millions who came before them, to carry forward the torch of revolution until victory and liberation.

In the words of the chant that has echoed at Palestinian protests around the world, from Ramallah to London to New York and beyond:

يا شَهِيد اِرْتَاح اِرْتَاح واِحْنَا نْوَاصِل الكِفَاح

O martyr, rest, rest, and we will continue the struggle!

culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox:

"Resistance Has Become Thinkable Again" — Torkil Lauesen and the Global Perspective on OCT 7

From the River to the Sea — "Resistance Has Become Thinkable Again" — Torkil Lauesen and the Global Perspective on OCT 7

"Resistance Has Become Thinkable Again" — Torkil Lauesen and the Global Perspective on OCT 7

Article 2 of 12

[comra]

Originally published at https://comrawire.substack.com/p/resistance-has-become-thinkable-again

The shockwaves of the Al-Aqsa Flood still rattle the world two years on. Israel’s war machine failed to crush the Palestinian will to resist. Across the world, the genocide has left many overwhelmed and disoriented. Where do we go from here? [comra] sat down with anti-imperialist veteran Torkil Lauesen, known for his sharp analysis of geopolitics and resistance, interpreted through a Marxist lens.

“It is not just about solidarity with Palestine, what frightens the power, it is the idea that resistance against imperialism has become thinkable again,” Lauesen said.

In this interview, Lauesen reflects on the new generation of anti-imperialists shaped by October 7, how the Al-Aqsa Flood reshuffled the world’s political order, and what it means for the enduring struggle toward Palestinian liberation.

In the 1970s and 80s, Torkil Lauesen joined a clandestine Marxist organization in Copenhagen, Denmark. They funneled record sums of money from militant operations targeting banks to liberation movements across the Global South, with a strong focus on Palestine. Arrested in 1989 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, Lauesen used his time behind bars to study political science.

Today, he is recognized as a leading thinker on how imperialism operates in the modern world and how it can be dismantled through internationalist struggle.

[comra]: The world before and after October 7 feels unrecognizable. How do you assess the Al-Aqsa Flood operation’s impact on the Palestinian struggle and global power dynamics?

Torkil Lauesen: I like to view events from a long and global perspective. Furthermore, I am not a stateless Palestinian longing for statehood. As a communist, my perspective and goal are not just the national liberation of Palestine, but a socialist transformation, not only in Palestine, but through this struggle, for the whole Arab world. I am also well aware that it is easier to comment on the situation from a desk, safely located in Copenhagen, than it is when you are taking part in the struggle in the Middle East. I do not live in a war zone, where I would have to worry about my safety or where my next meal is coming from.

So, seen in a global perspective, the event of October 7 was a rather small operation, breaking out of the “open prison” called the Gaza Strip, and attacking the Israeli settler state for a day or two. However, the October 7 attack created an avalanche of events, an indication of how unstable the world system currently is.

First of all, the brutal response. It could not have been unexpected, remembering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut in 1982, to crush the resistance movement. It must have been a difficult decision to launch the attack on October 7. Was the resistance movement expecting a general uprising among Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the ’48 Territories themselves? Had they hoped for military support from the surrounding Arab countries? Were they expecting China or Russia to intervene politically and block the Israeli response? If so, I would say that this was overly optimistic. China, Russia, and the surrounding Arab countries do not currently have the will or the means to directly confront an Israeli army backed by the US. Were they expecting that popular support in the West would pressure governments to abandon support for Israel? If so, I would say they were not being realistic.

The attack was a one-off event—a steam boiler exploding due to the pressure generated by decades of oppression. It was not a long-term strategy. The resistance movement will not be able to continue this kind of warfare, as its base in Gaza has turned into rubble and will be under direct occupation.

Does it mean that it is a total setback? I do not think so.

Israel has won a military victory in Gaza and Lebanon and in the confrontation with Iran. However, Israel has lost the war politically and morally. The US did not have the will or the ability to control its “mad watchdog” in the region. As a consequence, not only Israel but also the US and the West in general are losing credibility in the rest of the world.

The vast majority of the world’s nations and populations view the State of Israel with contempt. Gone is the sympathy for the Jewish settler state, outside of governments in the EU and North America. Their continued support has unmasked the hypocrisy of the Western powers’ talk of human rights and international law, for all the world to see.

In Palestine itself, Israel has sown the seeds for a new resistance movement more dedicated than ever to the struggle for liberation. How will Israel rule Gaza and the West Bank in the future? The task will be both economically and politically challenging. The Zionist settler state that once appeared solid and steadfast has proven to be fragile, crumbling from within and under growing pressure from the outside.

Here in the Global North, we have seen the rise of a new anti-imperialist movement, not seen since the Vietnam War, now based on solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. It is met by a Western discourse from the political establishment and mainstream media, which argues that “Yes, you are allowed to feel sorry for victims, but you cannot support the resistance movement to the atrocities, as they are terrorists.” This discourse hides the colonial reality of the conflict.

And the conflict is not just the colonial relation between Israel and Palestine, but the enforcement of a global imperialist structure beyond the geography of Gaza and the West Bank.

The State of Israel is an essential part of the architecture of a global order dominated by US hegemony. That is why Israel is portrayed as a friend in the West, with shared values and culture—as a European outpost—against the “barbarians” of the Middle East, as the founder of Zionism, Herzl, formulated it in the late 19th century.

The State of Israel ensures that the states of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East remain fractured and weak, thereby securing control of the trading routes between Asia, Africa, and Europe—the Red Sea and Suez Canal. Israel is a garrison state, a battleship on the ground. However, the State of Israel is not without cracks. It is the military violence in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria—in the whole region—that holds together a society that is fractured around ethnic, ideological, and class lines. Israel needs to continue this violent mode of governance; how else can it rule over Gaza and the West Bank? The violence is not a mistake or deviation from the liberal norms of “the only democracy in the Middle East”. It is the DNA of the apartheid settler state.

Israel is structurally indispensable for Western hegemony. To resist Israel, then, is not just to confront a settler colony. It is to confront a wider imperial grammar, which translates the act of resistance into terror. That is why Palestinians are denied the right to resistance, and support of the resistance is criminalized in the West.

The resistance struggle is necessary to end occupation, oppression, and exploitation. It is the refusal to be reduced to just victims. The insistence on resistance is also a manifestation of the political imagination of another world order, which is why it must be reduced to criminality.

“The international community” of North America and Europe registers the Palestinian resistance movement on lists as terrorists, in spite of the United Nations General Assembly having, in several resolutions, declared the right of a people under occupation to resist, also by means of armed struggle.

It is not just about solidarity with Palestine, what frightens the power, it is the idea that resistance against imperialism has become thinkable again. The Palestine solidarity movement has become a school in which people are learning about the colonial thinking of Western politicians, the hypocrisy of their talk about human rights, international law, the role of the mainstream “free press,” and so on. When resistance becomes thinkable and develops into a strategy, it is no longer geographically confined.

So, the Palestinian resistance should not only be measured by its military capacity. Israel will not be defeated in a military battle, but by the will to resist, as the US lost the war in Vietnam. Yes, the Israeli response to the resistance has inflicted huge suffering and casualties, as the response to the anti-colonial resistance in the 1960s and 70s caused millions to be killed in Algeria and Vietnam, for example. But the struggle created cracks in the imperial structure and expanded the horizon of another world order.

To a certain extent, the Palestinian resistance has proven the thesis of the Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp: “We know it’s the human factor, and not material resources, which decides the outcome of war.” In spite of Israel’s enormous superiority in terms of intelligence and weapons systems, the resistance movement in Gaza was able to build up its forces and launch its attack without being detected. Furthermore, it has been able to resist the response: total war from the Israeli war machine, fueled by massive arms shipments from the US.

There are important differences between the Palestinian and Vietnamese resistance struggles. The Vietnamese defeated first the French colonialists, then US imperialism, using the strategy of “people’s war” and the guerrilla tactics adapted by Ho Chi Minh and Võ Nguyên Giáp from the Chinese revolution. The Palestinians tried the same strategy, but lacking a secure rear base and the geography of vast jungles and mountains needed for such warfare, they were first driven out of Jordan in 1970, then Lebanon in 1982. To compensate for these geographical deficiencies, the resistance movement in Gaza constructed a comprehensive tunnel system and developed a new strategy of urban warfare against the Israeli army. This has enabled the resistance to survive under the most difficult circumstances for a long period—but it is not a long-term people’s war, and there is no North Vietnamese home base.

In Gaza, the homes of two million people are turned into rubble; there are no hospitals, no schools, no water, electricity, or sewage systems left. Over 50,000 have been killed, more than 100,000 injured, and forever physically handicapped, mentally devastated. People are locked up in a catastrophic environment, without the means for their own survival.

The Palestinian resistance must develop a comprehensive strategy for the struggle ahead—the struggle to create a secular state where different ethnocultural groups can live side by side. It will confront the politically weakened, but still militarily strong, settler state, however, depending on the continued support of the US. Such a strategy needs to coordinate the struggle not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, the ’48 Territories, and the Palestinians in the diaspora. It needs to be embedded in the anti-imperialist struggle in the region and in the global confrontation between declining US hegemony and the rise of the Global South.

[comra]: You predicted the Gaza war would accelerate US decline and fuel a multipolar world. Today, that shift is visible, yet many would say Palestine now stands on the brink of extinction. How accurate was your prediction that a multipolar world would tilt the balance in Palestine’s favor?

Torkil Lauesen: I do not think Palestine is on the brink of extinction, and I still think the development of a multipolar world opens up new possibilities for the struggle. Imperialism is in crisis. The West has lost its economic superiority in both quantitative and qualitative terms. As South-South trade and political cooperation increase, the West’s financial dominance is challenged. The ruling class is bewildered; they can no longer rule as they did in past decades. They are turning from globalization to narrow nationalism, which is dividing them. The turn to renewed military geopolitical struggle is not a symbol of strength, but weakness.

The Palestinian struggle should benefit from the decline of the US in global economics and politics and incorporate this into its future strategy. The struggle for Palestine exists in the context of the dramatic global process of transformation that is currently unfolding. In practical terms, the path forward involves coordinating the struggle with the surrounding Arab world and the Global South in general against imperialism. The attack of October 7 has pushed to “the West vs. the Rest” contradiction reflected in the UN votes on the war in Gaza. It is among the “Rest”—the Global South—that Palestine can find its strategic allies.

Progress in the struggle in the region depends on the continuing decline in US hegemony. For the time being, the US’s main adversary seems to be Russia. However, this is only on the European front; in economic terms, Russia is no match for the US, and in strategic terms, a right-wing nationalist Russia is no reliable ally of the Palestinian struggle, despite its rivalry with the US.

China, however, is abandoning neoliberalism and sliding to the left. China is pushing for a more multipolar world order from a position of economic and political strength. In recent years, China has given material and diplomatic support to countries in the Global South that are facing US economic and political pressure, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. China is establishing economic and political cooperation with more and more countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, such as India and Brazil. This will create new cracks and fissures in which the anti-imperialist movement can once again go on the offensive.

It is important to take advantage of the opportunities this situation presents. The Palestinian Left must revitalize its relationship with China to gain support for the Palestinian cause. In 2016, China voted to support a UN Security Council Resolution reaffirming the illegality of Israel’s settlements and “Condemning all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character, and status of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.” In July 2024, representatives of 14 Palestinian organizations met in Beijing and signed a new agreement on unity. The boycott movement should appeal to the Chinese government to stop investing and trading with Israel, leading a boycott movement similar to that against South Africa in the 1980s.

[comra]: October 7 sparked a surge of politicization and anti-imperialism, even in imperialist centers. However, the revolutionary beacons of the 1960s are long gone. How can this new generation of young anti-imperialists navigate this disorientation?

Torkil Lauesen: As mentioned above, the new anti-imperialist layer in “the belly of the beast” is learning quickly. It has moved from narrow solidarity with Palestine to a broader understanding of the global imperial structure. The old ‘68 generation, to which I belong, should assist this by handing over its knowledge, remembering that you cannot copy and paste experience across time and space; it has to be adjusted to the current situation.

The solidarity is facing criminalization, even targeting verbal support, as in Germany, where the shouting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an offense. Similarly, in the US, student demonstrations had led to the dismissal of students and professors from universities. In the UK, supporters of direct actions have been arrested by the hundreds. I think the repression will grow; the movement should prepare for this on both personal and organizational levels.

[comra]: The post-October 7 surge in anti-imperialist sentiment in Palestine differs from the 1960s movement: socialist forces no longer lead. How do you assess this shift, and what challenges or consequences does the absence of a socialist framework pose for today’s anti-imperialist generation?

Torkil Lauesen: I think this is a bit of a Western-centric view. For sure, “socialism” has been in crisis in the West since the mid-80s, and the “socialist spirit” has also been extinguished in part of the Global South. However, I think that the “socialist framework” for a future transition to a socialist world order is better today than in the 60s and 70s. Why so?

China, consisting of 1.4 billion people and now the leading global industrial power, has broken two centuries of Western dominance. In the 70s, the Third World demanded another world order; today, they are building it. In the 70s, the ruling class was able to launch a potent counter-offensive in terms of neoliberal globalization. Today, the ruling class is bewildered and split. The global South is on the offensive on the economic front. While the transformative power of the Third World in the 70s was based on the “revolutionary spirit”—the attempted ideological dominance over economic development—the current transformative power of the Global South is based on its economic strength.

China is not a socialist country; it is what we call a transitional state. But it has the intention to develop socialism. This is repeated again and again by a Communist Party, with 100 million members, holding state power. Politics is in command in China. It is not just words. Since the end of “the opening up neoliberal period” around 2015, China has been moving steadily to the left. China has specific plans and a vision for developing advanced socialism in the coming decades. The West has turned into a pessimistic and paranoid defense mode. Today, the transitional mode of production has been shown to be more effective and innovative than the capitalist mode. I think many countries in the Global South will look towards China for a new course of development.

[comra]: Let’s move on from discussing the Global North. Arab populations in neighboring countries appear paralyzed on Palestine’s national liberation. Why is that? Why aren’t we seeing major uprisings after one of the 21st century’s most shocking regional events?

Torkil Lauesen: Historically, the Palestinian struggle has been closely linked to the regional Arab struggle. Pan-Arabism was a strong current in the region in the 1950s and 60s. However, the progressive, petit-bourgeois Arab states of the past do not exist anymore. Instead, we have a Syrian state that was torn to pieces by civil war and now is a weird state governed by an Islamic militia, supported by the US and EU, and militarily controlled by Israel. Libya is also a state in crisis, torn apart by sectarian strife. After two imperialist wars, Iraq still needs US and NATO troops to maintain a pro-Western government in power over a divided nation in economic crisis. Lebanon has been thrown into political chaos by an incompetent and corrupt political clan system and is in deep economic and social crisis. On top of this came the war between Hezbollah and Israel in the context of the Gaza war. No real support can be expected from these states. However, the class struggle in these states is of vital importance.

The Palestinian struggle has received support from Iran and its local allies, such as Hezbollah. However, Iran has its own agenda in its confrontation with the US and Israel. It is important to be aware of the limitations in the alliance with Iran and Hezbollah.

The main driver in the liberation struggle in the Third World in the 1960s and 70s was the establishment of independent nation-states. It was mainly a national liberation struggle. Today, the main drivers in the Global South are economic and social liberation. This was the agenda of the Arab Spring in 2011. The Arab Left, however, was nonexistent or simply not able to provide the strategies and organizations to take these uprisings from demonstrations on the streets and squares to more effective and coherent forms of struggle. Now is the time to expand the agenda of national liberation and place emphasis on the elimination of poverty, labor struggles, social issues such as housing, health, education, women’s liberation, the rights of ethnic minorities, and the rights of sexual minorities—in short, socialism.

The Arab reactionary forces, mainly located in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, have become even more important allies for the US, particularly in its confrontation with Iran. However, in March 2023, with China as mediator, Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations, which contributed to a de-escalation of the conflict in Yemen.

Furthermore, Saudi membership in BRICS+ and the possibility of selling oil to BRICS+ partners in local currencies instead of dollars have irritated the US. Finally, the Gaza War has interrupted the process of normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which seemed likely to result in an agreement like the Abraham Accords, which Israel signed with Bahrain and the UAE, respectively, in September 2020, later joined by Morocco and Sudan. The signing of a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia would, according to Trump, usher in a new chapter of Arab–Israeli collaboration, forge a strong regional bulwark against Iran, and advance a “durable resolution” to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—“The dawn of a new Middle East.” The current split between the interests of Arab reactionaries and the US is to the advantage of the Palestinian resistance, but we should not have any illusions. The Arab reactionaries are still a strategic ally of imperialism and are definitely still an enemy.

The Arab response at the state level to the war in Gaza has been marked by cowardice and narrow interest, by the elite in power, bound by regime security and fear of popular revolt. However, at the popular level, there is a new grassroots Pan-Arabism forged through shared outrage and shared refusal of the remnants of colonialism. It still needs to be organized; however, a reawakening of Arab political consciousness, not from above but from the ground up, might be a game-changer. The liberation of Palestine will be an isolated event, but embedded in a transformation of the region.

[comra]: The Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” has faced major military and political setbacks. The Palestinian resistance has also shifted—from socialist-led movements to today’s Islamist-nationalist leadership. What can we expect for the future of resistance movements in the region?

Torkil Lauesen: The Axis of Resistance was never a coordinated command structure. It is a loose, tactical network of forces in opposition to the US-Israeli hegemony in the region. Despite Hezbollah’s defeat in Lebanon and Iran’s loss in the confrontation with Israel, the success of the latter should not be overexaggerated.

Israel has not achieved total victory in Gaza after years of intense war, despite its overwhelming force. This shows the limits of the settler-colonial project. It can destroy Gaza but not rule it. It can displace the Palestinians but not eliminate them. Israeli military violence has defeated states and scared other states into passivity, but it has also raised dispersed, decentralized and transnational forms of resistance and solidarity with Palestine.

So, the resistance will not disappear but change its form. Resistance, as Palestine has taught us again and again, is not reducible to its institutions. It changed its form after the events of “Black September” in Jordan in 1970, relocating to Lebanon. It changed its form after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Beirut. The task is to develop a strategy to sustain resistance for the long term and generate forms of struggle that do not end in one blow or another.

What is the imperialist planning that the resistance is up against? One scenario is the expulsion of the population from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan, making Gaza part of Israel, together with the annexation of the rest of the West Bank by settlers.

Another is to initiate a “two-state peace process,” leading to the establishment of some kind of Palestinian state that would not challenge Israel’s position as the region’s ruling power. It will consist of some scattered pieces of land, without the institutions needed to control or protect itself. The problem with that plan—besides Israel’s total refusal—is to find a legitimate Palestinian representative for such a “Mickey Mouse state”. Popular support for the so-called Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank is very limited. If and when we see construction of such a project, we will see a massive influx of Western NGOs and capital from the Gulf states, trying to establish and prop up just such a Palestinian representative.

[comra]: What could be done to develop a strategy to counter these plans?

Torkil Lauesen: The Palestinian proletariat is the main force of the revolution; however, we need a concrete class analysis with a focus on how the different classes can contribute to the struggle. Such an analysis must include the lumpen proletariat, which is a significant part of the Palestinian population. How can they be mobilized and organized? How can they contribute to the struggle?

The same goes for Palestinians in the diaspora. They have to be an integral part of the strategy. The analysis has to take into consideration what part of the world they live in, their class status, and their aspirations in life. They can support the struggle materially and politically. They can organize the anti-apartheid and boycott struggle internationally. They can help to connect the struggle in Palestine with other revolutionary struggles around the world to strengthen practical and political cooperation internationally.

But where to begin? Resources are limited, and disorientation is widespread. Pessimism is understandable. But it is also grist for the enemy’s mill since it seems to confirm that resistance is futile. I believe there is reason for optimism. We see changes at the global level not seen in a hundred years. The decline in US hegemony and the economic, political, and ecological crises of capitalism open up possibilities for change.

The problem is the subjective forces. In the 1970s, millions were mobilized in the struggle against imperialism by a socialist revolutionary spirit, consisting of a vision of the goal and a strategy to reach it. The task at hand is to provide the same for today’s struggle. There is currently a lively debate going on in Palestinian circles about the future organization of the resistance and how to envisage a future Palestine.

The people of Palestine want to be free of oppression, and they want a solution to their social and economic problems. Whatever we do, the struggle will continue. The Palestinian people will rise up repeatedly against oppression—they have no other choice. For now, some seek answers in political Islam, others hold out hope for liberal democracy in combination with a capitalist welfare state, while others are just confused and disillusioned. The PLO is without its former strength. The PA regime on the West Bank is discredited. Islamist forces have far greater support than the Left, which has been reduced to a small minority.

This does not mean that the struggle for a socialist Palestine is hopeless. The question is how to proceed with this struggle in the short and long term. On the one hand, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other progressive forces risk being tactical pawns for Hamas if they back their political line just for the sake of unity. On the other hand, the weakening of the Zionist state is a precondition for any progressive development. To achieve this, the immediate goal could be to establish a democratic secular state. I think such a demand has potential not only in Palestine but in the Middle East more broadly. The recent uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq show that people are fed up with sectarian politics, where clans, corruption, and nepotism rule in conjunction with neoliberal economics.

This does not mean that the Left should be shy about promoting a socialist agenda—on the contrary. In the struggle for a secular state, the Palestinian Left should not give in to conservative norms; it should develop a program for a specifically Arab socialism.

One thing is certain: the struggle continues. The experience of the Palestinian anti-imperialist struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s remains an integral part of the memory of the global anti-imperialist movement. The PFLP is held in high esteem. Many are waiting for the Palestinian Left to rise again and lead the struggle in the Arab world.

Revolutionary anti-imperialism can be resurrected in the years to come, as the intensity of class struggle around the world once again calls for radical alternatives. At a time when US hegemony is in decline and global power relations are complex, we will see unexpected and rapidly shifting conditions for the struggle. We must prepare for such events by developing a new strategy for the liberation of Palestine.

The Forgotten Front

From the River to the Sea — The Forgotten Front

The Forgotten Front

Article 3 of 12

The Resistance Archives

Originally published at https://resistancearchives.substack.com/p/the-forgotten-front

The Palestinian struggle is often flattened into a simple binary: secular nationalism versus political Islam. But this leaves out an important third force, one that has shaped the movement in profound ways. The revolutionary Palestinian left is rarely understood in full.

Among the forces still fighting today against Israel’s genocide is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist organization that was once second only to Fatah in strength and influence. Its story is not a side note, but central to the broader arc of resistance. From armed operations to fierce critiques of imperialism and class, the Palestinian left helped shape the vision of liberation still relevant today. Yet liberal academics and even parts of the Western left have often ignored or misrepresented this legacy. If we want to truly understand the Palestinian cause, and the global struggle against empire, we need to take the theory and practice of the Palestinian revolutionary left seriously.

The roots of the Palestinian left grow from the trauma of loss and exile. In July 1948, during the Nakba, 30,000 Palestinians were forced out of Lydda in a brutal death march with no food or water. Among them was a young medical student named George Habash. His sister died during that march, an experience that would shape his entire life.

Habash later enrolled at the American University of Beirut, a place where radical thought flourished. There he met Wadi Haddad, and together they founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) in 1951. Their belief was simple: Palestine could not be liberated without first liberating the Arab world from colonial domination and local ruling elites. They believed the path to Jerusalem ran through Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Amman.

The ANM was inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose defiance of Western power electrified a generation. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, the ANM saw him as the embodiment of what pan-Arabism could achieve. For them, Zionism was not just a local injustice. It was a forward base for imperialism.

The ANM grew quickly. It recruited refugees, exiled intellectuals, and young militants. It smuggled weapons, resisted refugee resettlement schemes, and built underground cells across the region. During the 1958 Lebanese uprising, it fought alongside progressive and nationalist forces. Still, it remained committed to the idea that Palestine would only be freed after the unification and liberation of the Arab world. That belief would not survive the next war.

The Six Day War in 1967 shattered the foundations of Arab nationalism. Israel swiftly defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, occupying the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. The Arab nationalist regimes had promised victory, but instead, they delivered disaster.

This defeat, known as the Naksa, or setback, forced a reckoning within the ANM. The belief that state-led pan-Arabism would deliver liberation was dead. In its place came a more radical conclusion: the revolution would have to come from below. In December 1967, the Palestinian branch of the ANM merged with Youth for Revenge and Ahmed Jibril's Syrian-backed Palestine Liberation Front to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The PFLP rejected the idea of waiting for Arab governments, and instead committed itself to armed struggle. In its early days it still retained some nationalist assumptions, but the political climate of the late 1960s soon pushed it toward Marxism-Leninism. Influenced by China’s model of protracted people’s war, the uprisings in Europe, and the writings of Fanon, the PFLP began to see the Palestinian struggle as part of a global fight against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

As the PFLP grew, deep ideological and strategic disagreements emerged, leading to multiple splits. In 1967, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) broke away, followed in 1968 by Ahmed Jibril’s formation of the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC). In 1969, with Habash in prison, a faction led by Nayef Hawatmeh split off to establish the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), seeking a sharper critique of Arab regimes and a clearer commitment to class struggle. In 1972, yet another division led to the creation of the Popular Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PRFLP).

These splits were painful. They drained the left of experienced leaders, sowed ideological confusion, and marked the start of a fragmentation that would continue to weaken the Palestinian left’s cohesion and influence.

Beyond ideological tensions, strategic errors also hurt the PFLP. During the 1968 Battle of Karameh, Fatah stayed and fought off an Israeli assault, gaining widespread popularity. The PFLP, under temporary leadership, chose to retreat and criticized the battle as reckless. In hindsight, that decision was politically costly. Fatah became the symbol of resistance, while the PFLP struggled to recover the same level of popular support. That same year, the PFLP boycotted the Palestinian National Council meeting, allowing Fatah to consolidate leadership under Yasser Arafat.

Unlike Fatah’s broad appeal to unity, the PFLP asked deeper questions: who was the revolutionary class? Who had the most to gain from struggle?

For the PFLP, the answer lay in the refugee camps, in the poor, in those who had nothing left to lose. The bourgeois exiles and landowners could posture as nationalists, but their wealth made them prone to compromise. The PFLP argued that liberation must be led by the dispossessed.

Still, it did not discard all non-proletarian forces. It saw that under settler colonialism, even sections of the educated petty bourgeoisie could play a role if they too had been stripped of privilege.

The PFLP was often criticized for refusing to engage with the Israeli left or labour movement. Critics accused it of being sectarian or overly rigid. But the PFLP responded that the Israeli working class was part of the settler project. It had materially benefited from the occupation and overwhelmingly supported it. Solidarity without de-Zionization was not solidarity.

The PFLP did not reject internationalism. It rejected fantasies that ignored the colonial nature of the conflict. For them, normalization disguised as dialogue was a betrayal. National liberation was class struggle.

While rooted in theory and committed to organizing among the Palestinian poor, the PFLP also believed that revolution required confrontation on a global scale. Its most well-known actions were its international operations, which aimed to shatter the silence surrounding Palestine and expose the complicity of global powers in the occupation.

One of the earliest and most iconic examples came in 1969, when Leila Khaled hijacked a Trans World Airlines flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. She asked the pilot to fly over Haifa, her birthplace, before diverting the plane to Damascus. No passengers were harmed, but the operation captured global attention. Khaled became a symbol of resistance, her image broadcast around the world as a face of Palestinian defiance.

The following year, as part of the Black September conflict, the PFLP carried out a coordinated series of hijackings, seizing multiple planes and directing them to Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan. The planes were evacuated and later blown up in front of the international press. Khaled and the other fighters ensured that all passengers were safely released, but the political message was loud and clear: the Palestinian people would not remain invisible, and the world could no longer look away.

These operations were never meant to be isolated stunts. They were part of a broader strategy to internationalize the struggle. The PFLP worked with groups like the Japanese Red Army, the German Red Army Faction, and other anti-imperialist movements across the Global South and Europe. In 1972, the PFLP took over the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, using the operation to demand the release of Palestinian political prisoners. Other attacks targeted embassies and economic assets tied to Western powers supporting Israel.

These actions drew fierce condemnation from Western governments and Arab regimes alike. Some accused the PFLP of prioritizing spectacle over substance. But others understood their purpose. In a world where Western media ignored the occupation and the suffering of Palestinian refugees, the PFLP’s international operations forced the issue into headlines, courtrooms, and political debates.

To many liberation movements across Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the PFLP’s operations were not acts of desperation but bold affirmations of a people refusing to be erased. The actions underscored the front’s belief that Palestine was not a separate issue, but one front in a global war against colonialism and capitalism.

Critics within the Palestinian movement sometimes argued that the operations diverted attention from grassroots struggle. The PFLP acknowledged these tensions but stood by its strategy. Internationalism, for them, was not about abstract solidarity. It was about action.

Drawing from Maoist analysis, the PFLP identified the primary contradiction as the one between the Palestinian people and the Zionist-imperialist enemy. Internal class differences and ideological debates were secondary. That did not mean those debates were unimportant, but they could only be meaningfully addressed after the main enemy was confronted.

This approach helped preserve unity but also created tension. What happens when the main national leadership begins to collaborate or compromise? How do you maintain unity without becoming complicit?

The PFLP tried to hold the line. It condemned Fatah’s compromises but avoided open conflict that would divide the movement. Habash believed in resisting both the enemy and betrayal, but without turning the struggle inward. This tension remained unresolved as the PLO moved toward negotiations and later the Oslo Accords. The PFLP refused to follow.

The PFLP is no longer the powerhouse it was in the 1970s, but its principles continue to resonate. As more Palestinians grow disillusioned with elite diplomacy and failed peace deals, the PFLP remains one of the few voices still calling for liberation, not just statehood.

Other leftist forces like the Palestinian People’s Party have moved into the arena of electoral politics, embraced two-state frameworks, and criticized Oslo while still operating under its structures. In 2021, talks to build a united left platform fell apart over strategy and political orientation.

The PFLP, for all its challenges, continues to reject normalization, reject Oslo, and insist on armed resistance and class struggle. Among many Palestinians, especially the young and the dispossessed, this message still holds power.

The Palestinian struggle is not just about tragedy and resilience. It is also about revolutionary clarity. The PFLP showed what it meant to connect national liberation with class struggle, to resist empire without illusions, and to believe in the ability of the oppressed to lead their own fight.

Its legacy offers more than history. It offers strategy, discipline, and a vision of liberation rooted not in slogans but in the material realities of colonized people.

As Habash once said on May Day: “Today we celebrate the International Worker’s Day. It is an occasion to evaluate the meaning of the day. The working class has begun to be conscious of the system which exploits it and has determined to struggle daily until abolishing this tyranny.”

That is the spirit of the Palestinian left. Not just to resist, but to analyze, organize, and win.

Gaza: The Resistance Lives, The Prison Doors Open - On the Road to Liberation and Return

From the River to the Sea — Gaza: The Resistance Lives, The Prison Doors Open - On the Road to Liberation and Return

Gaza: The Resistance Lives, The Prison Doors Open - On the Road to Liberation and Return

Article 4 of 12

Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network

Originally published at https://samidoun.net/2025/01/gaza-the-resistance-lives-the-prison-doors-open-on-the-road-to-liberation-and-return/

The Palestinian people in Gaza have filled the streets, celebrating, defying the Zionist drones and bombs that continued overhead, upon the announcement of a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement in Doha, Qatar. With every shout, every cheer, every waving Palestinian flag and every firework in the air, it was more clear than ever that amid all of the horrific, genocidal destruction and the tens of thousands of martyrs’ lives taken by the Zionist regime and its imperialist sponsors, backers and directors, it has utterly failed in its goals, and that it is the people and their resistance who remain, strong, honourable, and promising a future in which the genocidal Zionist project is fully defeated throughout Palestine, the Arab nation and the region. Throughout this great struggle against genocide, the prisoners have been at the heart of the cause and the resistance, with the Palestinian people committed to achieving the freedom of the prisoners and continuing to struggle in the most horrendous of circumstances.

Gaza and the Prisoners: At the Heart of Struggle

While the full details of the ceasefire agreement and the prisoner exchange have yet to be fully released, many of the clauses are very clear, including the full withdrawal of all Zionist forces from Gaza, the reopening of the Rafah crossing, the entry of trucks of aid and reconstruction supplies, and the exit of wounded Palestinians for treatment, after an aggression that particularly targeted hospitals and the Palestinian health system. And, alongside the people of Gaza, who have resisted the most extreme form of genocidal assault for the past 465 days, the Palestinian prisoners, living under severe torture, are also at the heart of this agreement, with the Resistance securing the release of all women and youth under the age of 19, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners with life sentences, and many more hundreds of prisoners with life sentences in the upcoming second phase of the exchange, as well as ending the repressive system in the prisons that has been instituted since October 2023. The most oppressed, marginalized and tortured sectors of the Palestinian people are at the center of this agreement, and at the center of the priorities of the resistance.

US Imperialism: Director of Zionist Genocide

It is very clear, given the role of the United States and incoming President Donald Trump in seeking to actually achieve a ceasefire prior to the presidential inauguration on January 20, 2025, for the first time since October 2023, that the US, as the leading imperialist power, directs the Zionist entity. Not only did the US never attempt to achieve a ceasefire, it was the primary director of the escalated genocidal assault on the Palestinian people, alongside the Zionist colony implanted in Palestine. Of course, it was joined in this aggression – on the Palestinian people, the Arab nation, the entire region, and indeed, all of humanity, by its fellow imperialist powers – Canada, Britain, Australia, Germany, France and other European Union members – but it has been apparent to all, as the US ships billions of dollars in deadly weaponry to the Zionist regime and implanted a faux “aid pier” only to support an attack killing hundreds of Palestinians in Nuseirat camp, that the US ordered the genocide and could stop it at any time.

Of course, the US is not acting now to preserve Palestinian lives, but for domestic political concerns and to focus its attention on imperial interests elsewhere. But the fundamental nature of this assault as an imperialist-zionist genocide, carried out with US weapons and intelligence, is not only etched firmly into history, so too is the reputation of “Genocide Joe” Biden, “Killer Kamala” Harris and the Democratic Party, in presiding over the incineration of tens of thousands of precious Palestinian lives and the destruction of every university and hospital in Gaza.

The Armed Resistance Defends the People and the Land

However, it is equally clear to all that it is due to the glorious resistance of the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, that the bombs will no longer be raining down upon them. Amid the most unimaginably difficult conditions, amid the most dire circumstances, the Palestinian resistance – led by the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas, joined with Saraya al-Quds of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and together with multiple resistance forces including the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the PFLP, the National Resistance Brigades of the DFLP, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades of the resisting sectors of Fatah, and their fellow resistance fighters in Palestine – continued to fight and to strike severe blows against the Zionist soldiers, the genocidal occupiers, until the last moment. Jabalia camp, the spark of the great popular Intifada of 1987, remained full of the fire of the resistance despite the genocidal destruction of the US/Zionist war machine, bringing down their tanks and soldiers with unparalleled courage, creativity and brilliant strategy.

From Gaza to Lebanon to Yemen and Beyond

And, of course, the Palestinian resistance has fought throughout alongside the brilliant and heroic resistance of Lebanon, led by Hezbollah, which has repeatedly defended and liberated the land of Lebanon from the occupiers – and the northern settlers remain dissuaded from returning to the land the occupy in northern Palestine to this day, and of Yemen, its people, government, armed forces and Ansarallah movement, which shut down the supply lines of genocide in the Red Sea, denied the path to US aircraft carriers, and continued to fire its missiles into the heart of the occupation’s “Tel Aviv,” and making clear that the bombs, sanctions, attacks and threats of the Zionist and imperialist forces would never dissuade them from standing with Palestine. The Yemeni example illustrated very clearly the unity of popular action – as the streets filled with millions every Friday in the greatest marches for Palestine in the world – with firm armed resistance and military action. And of course, they were joined by all of the forces of resistance in the region, stretching from Iraq to Iran, and the world, against the genocidal enemy.

The resistance, with the greatest honour, dedication and love of Palestine, has fought tirelessly to defend the Palestinian people — and indeed, humanity itself — from the genocidal Zionist/imperialist forces. This resistance has held the most oppressed in Gaza under siege, in the prisons under torture, at the center, and its achievements, its persistence, its refusal to back down despite everything, defeated the genocidal billions of dollars of weapons deployed against its people at the behest of imperialism and zionism.

Zionism Exposed Before the World

No one will ever again have illusions that the zionist regime is anything other than what it is, a colonial genocidal entity implanted in the region and in the heart of Palestine, a regime that is and will come to an end. The undefeated resistance that defeats the occupier, its great martyrs, its living leaders, its heroic fighters, are the great heroes of humanity. Despite the vast destruction and theft of human life that the Zionist/imperialist forces have caused, despite their war crimes, crimes against humanity and ongoing genocide, they failed to achieve even one of their military objectives. But they have never, and will never, crush the resistance, from the rubble in Jabalia to the torture rooms in their colonial prisons. Throughout all of their destruction, their aggression and genocide, they were unable to achieve their goal of separating the resistance from the Palestinian people. Instead, it only became ever more clear how deeply rooted the resistance is in the people, a relationship of thought and blood and bone. The armed resistance forces continued to recruit throughout the battle, with the al-Qassam Brigades and Saraya al-Quds replenishing their ranks with new fighters burning the tanks of the occupier.

Al-Aqsa Flood Changed the World

October 7, the great crossing, the Al-Aqsa Flood, changed the world. It became clear on that date that the Palestinian people and their resistance were capable of liberating Palestine, and that despite its technological and military resources, the Zionist regime had nothing but racism and imperialist interests to hold it together; and, indeed, that the regional forces of resistance were capable of liberating the Arab nation and the entire region from US imperialism. The imperialist forces and the Zionist colony were unwilling to accept this new reality, and met it with the only strategy they have – mass killing and genocidal destruction. As we have witnessed throughout the decades and centuries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and in the region, with Palestine at its heart, these forces have never refrained from mass murder in order to continue their theft of land, resources and indeed, the future of the peoples of the world. However, despite their vast destructive forces, they were unable to subjugate Algeria, Vietnam, Zimbabwe; they are unable to subjugate Cuba, Venezuela and Iran; and they are unable to defeat the glorious resistance in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen. Instead, their military objectives have shattered on the rocks of the resistance.

Genocide is Inherent in Zionism and Imperialism

This does not mean the danger is over. From Syria, to Lebanon, to Palestine and beyond, it is apparent that the United States seeks to control the future of the region and will not refrain from genocide in order to do so. It will seek to shuffle the cards to hinder the resistance once again and to use its sanctions, sieges, unilateral coercive measures and “terrorist designations” in order to achieve its goals through a politics of starvation and deprivation. Therefore, this moment must drive us to build a broader, stronger, movement against imperialism that is capable of standing beside the resistance forces of the region to confront and challenge imperialist genocide. We are aware that imperialist and Zionist forces will escalate their repression domestically as well; the banning and/or designation of Samidoun by Germany, Canada and the United States is but one example. However, we are also aware that we must be prepared to fight repression, defend those attacked, and build a stronger movement that can significantly hinder the imperialist assault.

Of course, the genocide in Palestine did not begin in October 2023, and it will not end with the implementation of this agreement. Genocide is the nature of Zionism; it is the weapon of imperialism. Since 1948 – and indeed, since the Balfour declaration and British colonialism in Palestine – Palestinians have been resisting genocide. This is, however, a new stage of struggle against the ongoing Zionist genocide, organized, directed and backed by the imperialist powers – as illustrated by their colonial bombardment of Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank as the ceasefire agreement was being announced.

Honouring the Martyrs

As we mark this moment, it is with honour to the great martyrs; every father, mother and child, every sister, brother and loved one taken by the imperialist-zionist genocidal force; the doctors, nurses, journalists, health workers, teachers, municipal workers, police, and aid workers targeted by the occupation regime as they worked to wipe out all of the systems of sustenance of Palestinian life and steadfastness. We salute the 55 martyrs of the prisoners’ movement in the dungeons of the occupier, amid reportedly hundreds or thousands more martyred in the torture camps such as Sde Teiman, after being abducted from Gaza by the occupation regime.

And of course, the great leaders of the Resistance, whose unparalleled legacy of struggle, sacrifice and commitment lives on in every struggling resistance fighter and in every hope for the future of a liberated Palestine, a truly sovereign Lebanon, a proud Yemen. Saleh al-Arouri, the great Palestinian fighter; Ismail Haniyeh, the icon of Palestinian national unity and self-determination; Yahya Sinwar, the legendary fighter and liberated prisoner who fought to liberate the prisoners, Gaza and all of Palestine; Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the great Arab leader and icon of decades of resistance, the maker of victory over the Zionists; Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, the heroic strategist of resistance; Ibrahim Aqil, Fouad Shukr, Ali Karaki; Abdel Aziz Minawi, the Political Bureau member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement assassinated in Damascus, and many more yet to be fully named and honoured.

As we join with the Palestinian people in celebrating this moment, we are fully aware that Zionism and imperialism cannot be trusted, and neither can reactionary Arab regimes working in concert with them. Time and time again, the Zionist entity violates its agreements and breaks its commitments, a lesson that is quite clear to the Palestinian resistance, the prisoners’ movement, and all resistance forces. It will be up to the people and the resistance – as always – to protect the people; and it is up to us, around the world, to meet the challenge to do everything possible to defeat all of the schemes of imperialism and Zionism to impose a “Pax Americana” on Palestine and the region. The Zionist regime is itself a genocidal project – the only way to truly bring an end to genocide in Palestine is to bring the Zionist colony “Israel” to its end.

The International Popular Cradle of the Resistance

At the international level, this is a critical moment not to step back and to de-escalate, but to intensify and deepen our efforts to build the international popular cradle of the resistance. Millions of people filled the streets, in the heart of the imperialist core, to demand an end to the genocide and justice and liberation for Palestine. It is clear to everyone around the world that the Zionist regime is a genocidal threat to humanity. The resistance surmounted the lies and smear campaigns waged against them in an attempt to justify genocide and stand tall today as true heroes of humanity. The Palestinian and Arab people in exile and diaspora rose up everywhere to organize, come together, and play their role in the struggle for Palestine’s liberation. Direct actions like those of Palestine Action, confronting the war machine, have shut down weapons factories and offices of Israeli arms dealers. Students changed the picture of campus life everywhere as they rose up in a global intifada. The growing popular and grassroots boycott illustrated international popular revulsion and refusal of complicity in genocide. And yet, we also have key lessons to learn: We cannot have a successful movement or serve as a partner to the resistance without being clear on the role of imperialism, and equally clear on the centrality of the resistance forces. We cannot allow our movement to be taken down the road of imperialist party politics, competing over who is in charge of the theft of Palestinian lives.

Accountability must be imposed upon all those responsible for the genocidal assault on Gaza, and upon the people of Palestine and the region. Their crimes will neither be forgotten nor forgiven; from the engineers and architects of genocide in the halls of power to the occupation soldiers who broadcast their torture and abuse on social media to the propagandists who lied to the world to market a genocidal regime, we must work at all levels to impose true accountability and justice upon the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes.

Just as the power of resistance was made clear to all, so too were the weaknesses of the movement more broadly: the effective silencing of the Arab masses throughout much of the region, through reactionary regimes armed and funded by US imperialism, the continued role of the Egyptian regime in maintaining the siege on Gaza, the arrests of strugglers and activists in Jordan and Morocco, not to mention the continuing normalization of the United Arab Emirates. Within the international context, this must become a moment where we organize, consolidate and deepen our organizations. We must not have a “short breath” for what is inherently a long-term struggle in order to truly play our role as an international framework of resistance.

Unity and the Necessity of Anti-Imperialism

Our strength and our unity comes from standing together against repression, and for liberation, not in allowing our enemies to cut us off from one another through a politics that seeks accommodation within genocidal imperialism, self-censorship and subordination. It is, at the core, the armed resistance, the Palestinian prisoners, and of course, the people of Gaza, who exposed Zionism and imperialism and brought down all of their military objectives, who are opening the doors of freedom for the heroic prisoners of the cause of Palestine, and who promise a Palestinian future that will be determined only by the people and not by its occupiers, invaders and enemies. This is an indelible stamp and a historical moment upon the road to liberation and return for all of Palestine, brought ever closer.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network salutes the Palestinian people and their Resistance and commits to continuing, intensifying and the struggle for liberation.

Glory and victory to the resistance, from Palestine to Lebanon and Yemen and everywhere in the region. The final defeat of Zionism and imperialism is coming. And Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.

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Acts of Return: How the Al Aqsa Flood Shattered the US Fantasy of "Full Spectrum Dominance"

From the River to the Sea — Acts of Return: How the Al Aqsa Flood Shattered the US Fantasy of "Full Spectrum Dominance"

Acts of Return: How the Al Aqsa Flood Shattered the US Fantasy of "Full Spectrum Dominance"

Article 5 of 12

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

Originally published at https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/al-aqsa-flood-full-spectrum/

Introduction[1]

In December 2024, after a year-plus of direct confrontation between the Zionist entity and the Axis of Resistance (the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, the Popular Mobilization Forces, the Palestinian resistance factions, and, formerly, the Syrian Arab Republic), the imperialists and their media apparatus moved into triumphalist mode, declaring victory on account a wave of assassinations targeting Hezbollah top command and the overthrow of the Syrian Arab Republic. But the Axis of Resistance initially developed on the basis of lessons accumulated from prior setbacks and waves of counterrevolution, and always those setbacks, from the June War of 1967 to the 1991 destruction of Soviet power, were accompanied by media triumphalism. The term “Six-Day War” to refer to the June War is itself a stroke of Zionist triumphalism. Conversely, the imperialists and their media do not often demonstrate an understanding that the very nature of the Zionist settler-colony–violent, expansionist, and supremacist–prevents its normalization among the masses of West Asia and North Africa. Serious study into the underlying weaknesses leading up to the fall of Syria, and its multitude of consequences for regional resistance, is forthcoming. This essay attempts something else: to gather and record lessons from the contemporary anti-Zionist struggle. The following contribution towards that goal argues that the crowning breakthrough of the past (going on) two years above all others has been to shatter the myth of invincibility the US empire has projected in West Asia–its ideology of uncontested domination–since the destruction of the Soviet Union. It further argues that the strategies and tactics used to attain that goal are based on a corpus of knowledge accumulating (tarakum ) at least since the founding moments of the Zionist state in historic Palestine. The conclusion examines the gravity of the Zionist state’s pursuit of genocide as a counterinsurgency strategy and the apparent trajectory of Zionism’s real source of strength, US imperialism.

Acts of Return: How the Al Aqsa Flood Shattered the US Fantasy of “Full-Spectrum Dominance”

In April of 2001, the Pentagon altered its Field Manual operational approach from “AirLand Battle,” established in 1982, to “Full-Spectrum Dominance,” a move intended to address the nature of threats to US power as they emerged in the 21st century. The overthrow of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991 opened the floodgates for this new doctrine in which the US military pursued, in the words of its own handbook , “dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains and information environment (which includes cyberspace) that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.” The 1990s saw several US initiatives aimed at the political neutralization of organized resistance to total US control. The 1993 Oslo Accords propped up a compliant capitalist class within a Palestinian nation newly deprived of the global counterweight of the USSR. Oslo’s domestic accompaniment, the 1996 Foreign Terrorist Organization List, sought to isolate further leftover “radical” elements of the Palestinian national movement. The events of September 11, 2001, occurring only five months after the initial promulgation of “Full-Spectrum Dominance,” provided the Pentagon an ideal pretext through which to expand the credo militarily. The resulting “War on Terror” began as an Executive Mandate discursively bulldozing the concept of national sovereignty. In practice, a new era of “mega imperialism” emerged, forged through land invasions, kidnappings and assassinations, including of critical journalists , and extreme torture, all unrestrained by borders, international law, and basic diplomatic norms. In more direct language, “Full-Spectrum Dominance” represented a bid for control so totalizing it could, drone-like, creep into psyches and shatter any psychological recalcitrance. On the military level, this doctrine sought to deny the very possibility of guerrilla warfare, “the basis of the struggle of a people to redeem itself.”[2] On the civil level, it expanded on decades of Pentagon Thought equating protest and organized dissent with military insurgency.

The Zionist siege of Gaza began in 2007 as an attempt to compensate for defeat. Unable to secure military bases in Gaza from resistance attacks, the Zionist entity vacated Gaza in 2005, hoping to redirect and redouble resources towards the colonization of the West Bank.This US-funded siege ultimately developed into a novel experiment in “Full-Spectrum Dominance,” testing how far a modern empire could go in perfecting physical enclosure, round-the-clock surveillance, strategic deprivation, and psychological defeat against a resistant population. Watchtowers, satellites, sensors, and snipers sought to turn Gaza from what resistance forces referred to as muharrarat, or liberated zones, into a concentration camp.[3] Imperialism’s resistors, it seemed, could be tucked away, hidden, contained–the Palestinian people of Gaza appeared to be trapped in a walled corner of the Mediterranean basin, forgotten by far too many. The Al Aqsa Flood operation of October 7, 2023, ushered in a new epoch. In a surprise organized to coincide with the Arab nationalist memory of the joint Egyptian-Syrian strike on Israel in the fall of 1973 to regain sovereignty over the Occupied Sinai and Golan Heights, Palestinian military resistance factions led by Hamas burst through the “security perimeter” of the Gaza Strip to launch an attack. Hamas’s al Qassam Brigades, along with the al Quds Brigades of Palestine Islamic Jihad, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the PFLP, and the National Resistance Brigades of the DFLP, eluded 24-hour GPS surveillance and sensor-powered machine gun turrets to overrun roughly 30 strategic Zionist locations, including military bases, police intelligence stations, and several kibbutzim dotted throughout the Gaza envelope. On the other side of the Al Aqsa Flood operation, a new thesis emerged: there are limits to imperial control. The Palestinian resistance overthrew US dominance in two key aspects: the psychological-ideological dimension; and the subterranean dimension. US imperialists see genocide – the planned, systematic, and technocratic elimination of the Gaza population – as the necessary strategy to restore their fantasy of “Full-Spectrum Dominance.”

The Accumulated Lessons Leading to Al Aqsa Flood

The year 2023 marked the return of the feda’i, defined as the displaced peasant capable of moving into and carrying out operations within stolen territories, thus going on the offensive for the liberation of land. Fateh named the military wing responsible for its first official feda’i operation on January 1, 1965, al-’Asifa, “the storm”; October 7 brought the flood after the storm. The basis for the victory of the Palestinian resistance over US imperial doctrine therefore began with a limited, eminently practical goal: to return to “Israel” - the territories pilfered from them at gunpoint, ruled by the military entity serving as the cornerstone of the US’s West Asia strategy. The military successes of the Al Aqsa Flood operation, and of the subsequent campaigns the broader Axis of Resistance have waged, depend on a long history of lessons accruing at least since the foundation of the Zionist state in 1948. Immediately following the IDF’s organized depopulation of southwest Palestine between 1947 and 1949, refugees in Gaza attempting to return home detected the immense psychological impact of their “infiltration” on the Zionist settlers residing in the frontier kibbutzim. Sometimes arms were not even necessary to elicit a sense of hysteria from the settler populations seeking racial quarantine. Zionist historian Benny Morris’s book Israel’s Border Wars: 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War documents how these early encounters began with what the Zionist authorities called “economic infiltration”: starving Palestinians who had been removed to areas such as Beit Hanoun and ‘Abasan walking their way back to their old (stolen) fields and groves for food. Morris writes: “The [Zionist] officials–especially those connected with the agricultural and settlement sectors–were particularly fearful that continued infiltrator attacks would undermine morale and precipitate individual or mass flight.”[4] Elsewhere, a Zionist regional council complained that Palestinian “infiltration” was “sapping settlers’ will to stay”–particularly in the frontier kibbutzim, which held an essential place in Zionist state strategic planning .[5]

When armed raids from Gaza began to be launched, it was initially a protective measure against the IDF’s “shoot-to-kill” policy against refugee “infiltrators” along the Zionist state’s frontier. The military aims of these guerrilla operations evolved in tandem with the Zionist entity’s attempts to use its frontier kibbutzim as quasi-military posts, their settlers serving as armed watchmen and women and as a layer of military interference–effectively as “human shields.”[6] The political purpose of the frontier settlements was to expand the Zionist zone of control and prevent the right of return: “The new settlements,” writes Morris, “were regarded as a necessary measure in the struggle against a possible Palestinian refugee return… the settlement of the sites would stymie infiltration by individual refugees bent on… cultivating and harvesting individual crops.”[7] Several of the kibbutzim the Palestinian resistance raided on October 7, 2023, were founded with explicit military intent. Kibbutz Be’eri was, according to the Time of Israel, “established in 1946 as part of a strategic plan to help the future state withstand an invasion from Egypt.” Nahal Oz was, according to Ha’aretz, “the first settlement to be set up by the Nahal Brigade, an army unit that combines military service with civilian settlement activity. Ultimately, the military outposts created by Nahal are converted into civilian settlements.” When Nahal Oz was erected in 1951, its founding “soldier-farmers,” armed sons and daughters (“scarcely out of their teens”) of “upper-income residents” of cities such as Tel Aviv and Haifa, aimed to “teach the Arabs there is a border” by “catching” refugees who refused to stay in their Gaza cage.[8] Settlers of Kfar Maimon have provided essential force multiplication for the final colonization of Gaza, going so far as to march into Gaza in 2005 and clash with Zionist soldiers and police in defiance of Ariel Sharon’s so-called “Disengagement Plan” (the transition from settlement expansion to siege).[9]

Settlement expansion had resulted in Palestinians’ starvation and destitution by destroying the Gaza region’s agriculture centered on barley and oranges; and when refugees dared to return to idle crop fields to re-cultivate them, the Zionist military captured these “infiltrators,” tossed them onto crowded trucks, and hauled them to concentration camps where they were often tortured. It was in response to border “infiltrations,” and not actual feda’yin raids, that the Zionist entity initially began its practice of “reprisal attacks,” targeting the entire villages of refugees who dared wander beyond the camps.[10] Focusing on the particular case of the Palestinian town al-Majdal, Kaleem Hawa effectively describes how the very creation of the modern “Gaza strip”–to be distinguished from Gaza as governorate or region of Palestine–was a Zionist act of mass imprisonment, the forcible caging of a people. The simultaneous Judaization and de-Arabization of al-Majdal occurred in carefully planned phases. Much of the town was shelled, occupied, and then “sacked and forcibly depopulated over the course of three weeks in 1948.” Between 1949 and 1951, “the Zionist forces enacted a stepwise course” of ethnic cleansing into “a small prison overlooking the larger one, which is to say Gaza, where the land’s inhabitants were deposited.” To supplement the population transfer, Zionist militias forced even some Palestinians who remained after 1948 into ghettos surrounded by barbed wire before finally transferring them to Gaza.[11] Amid such privation, the restoration of Palestinian dignity required return, and return required dismantlement of the frontier settlements which the Zionist entity erected to prevent it. In other words, it was the Zionist entity that gave their frontier settlements a military role, one which any serious Palestinian commando operation dedicated to liberation and return would have to address. It is why the resistance factions claimed footholds in the frontier settlements on October 7, seizing them as forward bases and staging grounds until the Apache helicopters and tanks of Israel arrived to fire missiles and shells at the fighters as well as the settlers in a massive activation of the infamous Hannibal Doctrine.

Those early “infiltration” episodes of the 1940s and 50s were often experimental in nature. Their lessons would eventually be codified as part of a comprehensive military strategy predating October 7, 2023. The 1971 pamphlet “Military Strategy of the PFLP” argued : “On the psychological level, the Israeli military always aims at reassuring the Israeli citizen that it is capable of protecting him, his life, his survival and his economic advancement through the suppression of any enemy.” The post-1967 “infiltrations” of the feday’in into Israel – which the PFLP specified as acts of return – deprived the Zionist entity of “the fruit of victory–peace of mind…”[12] The PFLP understood that the psychology of the settler is characterized by ruthless aggression, underlying which is an impossible quest for purity and invincibility so obsessive that it can paradoxically breed a demobilizing fear. The crossing of boundaries, the free movement of the native, fills the settler with dread. According to Morris, “some of the settlers had suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown… as the result of infiltration.”[13] It is this very psychological weakness that serves as the mooring thread of the “spider’s web” to which Hassan Nasrallah famously compared Israel in 2000. Hamas tapped into this insight throughout the Second Intifada, before the formal siege policy on Gaza began in 2007. Throughout the Fall of 2004, for example, Qassam Brigades commandos, amid routine Zionist rampages against Jabalia and Beit Hanoun and Rafah, “infiltrated” (returned to) Kfar Darom and Nahal Oz.

In fact, many military tactics Palestinian feda’yin attempted during earlier episodes of struggle that might have appeared as failures at the time, including many led by Marxist-Leninists and Maoists, have today become rather successful with the benefit of improved technology and command-and-control capabilities. The first Katyusha rocket attack from Lebanon on the Kiryat Shmona settlement occurred on January 1, 1969. In 2023, Hezbollah, after opening up a “support front” for the Gaza resistance on October 8, evaded Israel’s Iron Dome using low-flying anti tank missiles to target military locations throughout Northern Palestine. The barrages effectively caused settlers to abandon Kiryat Shmona and a number of other settlements in the area, turning what was in the 1960s an experimental and scattershot form of attack into a sustained, concerted strategy to apply counter-pressure on the Zionist entity as it rained down missile fire on civilian populations. In the 1960s, the Palestine Research Center published studies such as Atef Suleiman’s “Israel and Oil” (1967), which historicized and mapped out Zionists’ limited energy supply locations, verifying the entity’s status as an “electricity island” without a depth of energy support in the broader West Asian region, as Khaled Barakat wrote . Hezbollah continued and operationalized the tradition set by this mode of research by geographically mapping out Zionist military and energy infrastructure, as revealed in every new release of “Hudhud” drone surveillance footage.

The list of long-studied, battle-won tactics goes on, all channeled into a strategy of attrition. Ansar Allah continues to use its endogenously-produced drone collection to pursue Zionist-linked tankers troughing through the Red Sea, and now to enforce blockades on Ben Gurion Airport and the Port of Haifa, amounting to a technologically updated version of an “External Operation” against sites of world imperialism, expanding on Wadi’ Haddad’s doctrine: “Behind the enemy everywhere!” In Gaza, the Qassam Brigades blast invading infantry with roadside Improvised Explosive Devices, recycling the weapon from previous experiences of guerrilla resistance in the Arab region: against the IDF in South Lebanon (1982-2000); against the US military in Iraq (2003); and again, against the IDF in Gaza (2014). The Al Aqsa Flood Operation gave way to the Al Aqsa Flood Battle in which Qassam ground troops coordinate sniper strikes against loitering invaders; emerge from and recede back into tunnel openings to ambush and retreat; maneuver through mouse holes punctured through the concrete remnants of collapsed and hollowed buildings; and, with help from the Yassin 105 RPG, ignite into flame and ashes the Merkava tanks of the occupiers, exploiting a weakness the Egyptian Army discovered with its own RPGs and SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles) during the October 1973 offensive into the Sinai. “Hit-and-run” is the creed: “The fundamental characteristic of a guerrilla band is mobility.”[14]The PFLP proposed these methods back in 1971, for “small, mobile forces [working] in secret in dispersed areas… do not provide the enemy with a target large enough to enable him to concentrate in order to hit it.”[15] Fighters of the resistance as a whole–of Qassam, Al Quds, Abu Ali Mustafa, and Omar al-Qassem–continue to display these capabilities throughout the north and south of Gaza, in every region, from Beit Hanoun to Rafah. Almost two years into the Gaza battle, no matter how brutally the Zionists assault a neighborhood, or how certainly they proclaim a sub-region under total control, resistance operations re-emerge to re-affirm that Gaza has not been defeated.

US-Zionist dominance over the skies–a key tenet of the US’s “Full-Spectrum Dominance” and of Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge ,” functionally an extension of the US doctrine–faces unprecedented challenges. From the ballistic missiles of Iran to the Samad drones of Yemen’s Ansar Allah, aerial projections evade the expensive, top-heavy Iron Dome and David’s Sling air defense systems. Mastery of the underground belongs without question to the resistance: tunnel systems decades in the making snake and wind beneath the flatlands of Gaza and the mountain ranges of South Lebanon, the earth’s crust providing a protective shell over command-and-control bases. Tunneling has a long history in the annals of combat against the superior airpower of the US empire, notably within the underground facilities, weapons storage units, and offensive tunnels heralded by the North Korean People’s Army beginning in June of 1950. Palestinians adopted these models to their own terrain. Mohammed al-Aswad, known as “Guevara of Gaza,” was a key innovator , designing tunnels in the early 1970s through which fighters could maneuver house-to-house undetected. These innovations in hybrid war, combining guerrilla infantry with quasi-state weaponry, subvert and ultimately prevent the US from achieving “Full-Spectrum Dominance” in a region (West Asia) and subregion (Palestine) that, before 2023, appeared to be a relatively strong link in the chain of its empire. The Axis of Resistance, with the resistance in Gaza as its center of gravity, has prevented US-Zionist imperialism from seizing “the fruit of victory–peace of mind,” to reference the PFLP’s words once more. The US-Zionist counter-measure enacted to restore Full-Spectrum Dominance – namely genocide – has given way to a “race against time” for both major blocs of the war.

The US’s Attempts to Restore “Full-Spectrum Dominance” through Genocide

The battle of wills over the region between the Axis of Resistance and the US-led imperialist bloc presents two competing gambles for which time is the essence. The Axis of Resistance calculates that a strategy of gradual attrition (harb al-instinzaf, literally “war of draining”), designed to compensate for extreme military asymmetry, can gradually lead to the implosion of Zionist state and society. That is, the perpetual concerts of rocketry over Zionist settlements; the draining of Zionist infantry into land invasions costly in terms of life, limbs, and psychological well-being; the armed sanctioning of the entity’s commercial partners in the Red Sea and elsewhere; the global diplomatic and popular censure of the entity for its atrocities; and the enduring memory of October 7 itself could cumulatively spiral into irreconcilable internecine distrust and civil conflict, along with irrevocable net emigration of Zionist settlers and corporate divestment from Israel. This implosion of the Zionist project then could shift US imperialism’s cost-benefit analysis regarding its support, especially if and when the US should decide to invest more elsewhere–in the South China Sea, for example. For the past 21 months, the forces of US imperialism and Zionism have been betting that they can successfully commit genocide and mute resistance–for them, two sides of the same coin–before their internal crises become unsustainable.

It is not quite accurate to say that the US and the Zionist entity pursue genocide in Gaza in lieu of a military strategy; rather, the genocide is their military strategy. By making Gaza “unlivable”–or what US Army strategists have taken to calling a “feral city ”–the Zionist military hopes to render Hamas’s guerrilla capabilities moot. Asymmetrical military resistance depends on and serves a popular cradle.[16] After all, the very first “infiltrations”–a form of resistance par excellence–came not from organized armed bands, but from assorted homeless refugees, more so grown Handalas than Mohammed al-Aswads . Even Zionist journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who plays an essential role in Anglophone media helping US liberals to justify the Gaza genocide to themselves, spoke aloud about a fundamental problem with the “Gaza population” beyond Hamas, namely the ideas that might exist in the people’s heads. When pressed about Israel’s war methods involving apparently indefinite occupations and endless population removal schemes, Gur gave a rationalization perhaps more revealing than he intended:

“When you remove Hamas, half of the population is under 18. And Hamas ran the schools for 18 years. The idea of removing Hamas from Gaza, it is a much deeper and more profound problem... Hamas produced a situation in which getting it out requires essentially this kind of war... There isn't fundamentally a different kind of war if you want to remove Hamas from Gaza... To a lot of Gazans who hate Hamas, there is also a deep appreciation of [their] story of dignity."

On this conception, that the people of Gaza constitute their greatest obstacles, the US-Zionist military objectives in Gaza were methodical from the very beginning, as it were. Right away, the first week following the Al Aqsa Flood, Israel cut off food, water, and fuel to Gaza. On October 27, 2023, the invading forces pursued bifurcation of the Strip, targeting key camps at the north point (Beit Hanoun) and the center (Bureij) of the main thoroughfare, Salah al-Din Road. From there, Zionist ground forces fanned out in three locations in the northern half of Gaza–Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and Juhor ad-Dik–in a flanking maneuver designed to surround and then empty a significant mass of its population into the southern half, below Bureij. To supplement the mass dislocation stage of the genocide, the Zionist Air Force struck with blitzkrieg fury at sites of civil infrastructure throughout the Strip, an attempt to collapse social reproduction altogether: al-Quds Hospital (October 29), a UN school in Jabalia camp (November 4), Nasser Children’s Hospital (November 4 and 6), al-Shifa Hospital (November 11-23), al-Rantisi Hospital (November 13), Indonesia Hospital (November 20). That sample comes only from the first month of the invasion, well enough on its own to establish the pattern. Since then, every major hospital and university has been either attacked or destroyed, to say nothing of the destruction of hundreds of religious and food distribution sites.

Bifurcation was secured with Israel’s October 30 blockade of Salah al-Din Road. This move prevented Palestinian travel between the Northern and Southern halves of Gaza, packed a million additional people into makeshift tents in the South, and served as the basis of the “Netzarim Corridor,” a central occupation zone named after a former Zionist colony in Gaza. The mass displacement proved to be entrapment for the purposes of mass murder when, in May of 2024, occupation forces attacked with fire and fury the tent dwellings at the southernmost end of Gaza in Rafah. Remote control demolitions have taken out entire neighborhoods and apartment blocks in all parts of Gaza. In October of 2024, occupying troops attempted to vanquish the popular cradle that remained in the North, starting with a re-invasion of Jabalia, the historic stronghold of Gaza resistance since the founding of the Zionist state. Methods used there were consistent with the invaders’ behavior throughout their city-by-city, stronghold-by-stronghold advance on the strip, including two previous offensives on Jabalia: airstrikes on crowded areas; siege, followed by sniper shots fired at any civilians seen criss-crossing the streets; the burning of civil institutions such as schools and sports clubs ; and the kidnapping of men to be detained in concentration camps such as Sde Teiman, where sexual torture and medical experimentation are rife. (Shades of Auschwitz inescapably loom over every step of these operations.) Children, the symbol and wellspring of any society’s future, have been especially targeted for murder and mutilation, confirmed in even the most mainstream of US press by “65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics” who testify that Zionist soldiers routinely shoot children in the head. Again, note the pattern.

The use of artificial intelligence in Gaza provides the genocidaires with an organized, systematic, hyper-efficient pathway to elimination. In the telling of +972 Magazine, the “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” programs, which gather target data and pinpoint their locations respectively, generate out-of-control kill lists that supply targets deeper and deeper into the general population, until distinctions are blurred between a Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander and a socially adjacent civilian. The moral dubiousness of this technology therefore allegedly lies in the widening margin of error the Zionist programmers permit its assassination sprees. This explanation of runaway automated kill chains is unpersuasive in light of the progenitor programs from which Lavender and Where’s Daddy descend. Journalist Andrew Cockburn accurately traces Israel’s current AI programs back to the Pentagon’s Operation Igloo White unleashed during its war in Southeast Asia, wherein special sensors deployed across vast jungles relayed troves of data “to giant IBM computers housed in a secret base in Thailand.” Cockburn repeats the logic of +972 by arguing the flaw of Igloo White was that “at a cost of at least hundreds of millions a year, it was a total failure,” but he makes no mention of the Phoenix Program whereby the Central Intelligence Agency used IBM’s computerized surveillance and sorting technology to create a storehouse of identifying information about the lives of people along the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” tracking their movements and mapping their social relations throughout Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The CIA capitalized on this data to hunt down, torture, and assassinate non-combatants deemed supportive of the National Liberation Front–the popular cradle of the Vietnamese resistance. If one pares down +972’s tireless editorial framing about “collateral damage” to focus on the actual quoted demands of the Zionist higher command, the intention of Lavender and Where’s Daddy appear perfectly consistent with their Phoenix precedent: as one anonymous Israeli officer says, “We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’” The command, the desired outcome, could not be clearer. The rational conclusion is that the resulting deaths of Palestinians occur by design, not by accident or excess.

These AI programs organically link the Zionist entity’s infrastructure of war to that of the United States, which increasingly relies on similar technologies to identify and deport participants in Palestine solidarity movement. Such links proliferate system-wide, and more than simply providing blueprints or investment, more than simply providing the weapons, the US provides its own coordinates for targets in Gaza. A Politico disinformation report from November 2023 gives the game away, asserting that the Biden administration provided to Israel “GPS coordinates of a number of medical facilities and information on movements of aid groups in Gaza,” ostensibly in order to “prevent strikes,” even though Israel continued to bombard these targets. The obvious conclusion to be reached by the facts alone–just the facts, that is, without the administration’s editorial spin which Politico all-too-dutifully repeats–would be that the US provides them so that they will be destroyed. That bit of disinformation points to another indispensable role that the US has played in the genocide: its containment of public outrage through use of endless discursive smoke screens. The main domestic challenges to the central role of US imperialism have come from Arab diaspora communities and the student movement, both of which find themselves subjected to a range of evolving counterinsurgency tactics, including police beatings, arrests, Brownshirt violence , and sanctions . The US ruling class seeks to contain these internal challenges long enough to enable a Zionist final solution to its “Gaza problem.”

One discursive smokescreen of the Biden Administration was the frequent press manufacturing of a Biden-Netanyahu, US-Israeli contradiction that did not in fact exist. As we now know from former Zionist ambassador Michael Herzog, the Biden Administration “never once ” approached Zionist officials to say “ceasefire now.” Insofar as any such contradiction did exist, it was merely over the fact that the Al Aqsa Flood operation transpired in the first place, and the administration’s frustration that the Zionist entity proved derelict in the duty for which the US handsomely pays it, which is to keep the Palestinians of Gaza caged and forgotten so that the region can move toward a new commercial order (e.g., the Abraham Accords) with minimal resistance. Almost two years of persistent and expanding genocide shows remarkable congruity between the US and Israel regarding the appropriate counter-measures to restore the total enclosure of any remaining people in Gaza. Put plainly, genocide is not a policy with which the US administration reluctantly goes along, haplessly hamstrung by a bellicose Netanyahu; genocide is the US policy.

Another such smokescreen has been to drown the media in a sea of euphemisms: “humanitarian crisis”; lamentations, expressed in the passive voice without naming the perpetrator, that “too many civilians have been killed”; the cold, mechanical description of the burning alive of hospital patients as “missile strikes”; or casual repetition of the old storyline from October 8 that the Zionist mission in Gaza is to “rescue the hostages.” All of these euphemisms cast a reverie that US-Zionist murder is a matter of “collateral damage” accidentally committed during nobler pursuits. They overall add to the racist imperialist impression, so crucial to US society’s idea of itself, that while the Sinwars and the Nasrallahs of the world are motivated by evil and malice, the Bidens and Harrises would never harm by intention. US state and society have resorted to such ideological chicanery many times before. Throughout its war on Vietnam, US military and intelligence terrorized the people of the countryside as a matter of systemized policy ordered from above. The military and the press successfully used the US public’s scandalization over the 1968 My Lai massacre to mythologize it as an exception, and the “lone wolf” scapegoat for official policy, Lt. William Calley, as a rotten apple. This mythology became canon history in the US, a way to forget and bury that the Vietnam War was but a long succession of My Lais .[17]

Elements of the Regional Counterrevolution

While the Al Aqsa Flood has exposed “Full-Spectrum Dominance” as an impossible fantasy, US support for Israel has nonetheless proved to be the most vexing barrier to the Resistance Axis’s strategy of attrition. US air defense production and supply lines do have finite limits , but it is not clear that the two major confrontation fronts in the world–West Asia and Eastern Europe–are enough to break them decisively. Also unclear are the limits of US financial support to Israel as it endlessly compensates for the Zionist economy’s shortfalls. Over the past two years, Israel played a very important role for the US by fronting its own war against regional West Asian resistance, absorbing the brunt of its social, political, and economic contradictions. It is no coincidence that the negotiating position of the Palestinian resistance appeared to have been strongest when the US was absorbing losses directly –when its own soldiers stationed in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria were returning home in coffins . In February of 2024, Hamas confidently issued maximal demands with a three-phase truce plan . That same month attacks on US bases abated, followed by a year of US-Zionist obstinacy during negotiations that caused Hamas to withdraw from talks in August. Those strikes on US bases came from Iraqi militias and swiftly provoked a renewed series of US attacks on Iraq and Syria. The urgency with which the US administration and military leadership acted in that brief flash of time suggested a strong fear of being overwhelmed.[18]

Without more direct sustained pressure on US assets, the US and Israel’s provisional acceptance of a three-phase proposal, which preserved several of the core conditions from the spring of 2024, took nearly another year’s time and a transition in US presidential administrations. The decision to halt the war–temporarily, as it has since turned out–was perhaps compelled by a cold reality the resistance forces’ steadfastness continues to impose, as US intelligence assessed that Hamas had recruited 10,000 to 15,000 new members since October of 2023. That intelligence report must have made for a disquieting read among US war financiers and architects, who continue to throw nearly every variety of chemical and fire in their empire’s techno-supremacist arsenal at nearly every square inch of Gaza going on two years now, only for resistance militias to keep their numbers and fighting capabilities firmly intact. Only a month into the assault on Gaza, the tonnage of bombs dropped translated to the equivalent of two nuclear bombs. If the US and Israel have been testing how completely genocidal annihilation of over two million people deemed superfluous to the global economy can be accomplished in the 21st century, the survival of the people of Gaza augurs hope for the global majority; and the preservation of Gaza’s armed self-defense capacity through it all puts the Al Aqsa Flood Battle on par with Soviet defeat of Nazism and the Vietnamese victory of US imperialism in terms of its historic import.

But while the Gaza resistance forces have survived, so has the US’s “special relationship” to the Zionist entity. Behind the strategy of the Axis of Resistance war of attrition lay the hope that the US would cut and run from Israel, or at least wind down investments into it, so long as the Zionist movement proved incapable of fronting counterinsurgency war operations against regional resistance. Nearing two years into the US-Zionist war of extermination in Gaza, approximately the opposite has occurred: US investments into Israel and the world Zionist movement appear to be increasing and intensifying. What explains this development? The first reason is obvious: Israel’s military advances. While Zionist society is indeed fraught with fissures, and the reputation of Zionism and popular support for the US-Zionist relationship has never been lower, Zionist savagery did make two major breakthroughs in the last months of 2024, one in Lebanon and one in Syria. In Lebanon, a Zionist assassination wave targeted the Lebanese Hezbollah’s veteran leadership, including military advisor Fuad Shukr, Radwan Force commander Ibrahim Aqil, and General-Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. In Syria, the Syrian Arab Republic fell to the reactionary forces of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham against the backdrop of decades of escalating US sanctions grounding down and hollowing out the state, proving that imperialism is capable of carrying out its own “wars of draining.”The assassinations were likely necessary conditions for the overthrow of Syrian Arab nationalist republicanism, a long-standing goal of the United States and the Zionist entity that opens new frontiers for Arab reaction, which remains in both its capitalist and feudal forms one of the four essential pillars of the US-led regional system, along with Israel, the world Zionist movement, and world imperialism.

Arab reaction has historically provided the US with lifelines in times of crises, as happened in 1973 when imperialism’s Vietnam-induced gold outflow emergency was resolved by the recycling of Gulf oil dollars into war treasuries and weapons industries; and now Arab reaction’s replacing of nationalist, republican, and secular tendencies will entrench Lebanon and Syria into deeper financial dependency, to be used as leverage to solicit resources, cheap labor, and political normalization with the Zionist entity, all necessary surrenders for the fulfilment of a single regional project. From the Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East through the Jordan Valley Unified Water Plan and beyond, Arab normalization with the Zionist entity has not simply served as an end in itself, but as a tool to secure Arab states’ political and developmental subordination under the aegis of US capital. An Arab country deprived of resources, land, and people–an unavoidable zero-sum exchange for the expansion of Zionist settler society and its nuclear-surfeited military apparatus–is an Arab country without substantive sovereignty and, by extension, one incapable of supporting the popular organization and mobilization efforts that forge and secure revolution.

Arab reaction additionally shatters ideological cohesion and concomitant clarity of thought, the ability to pose and answer the question: who are our friends and who are our enemies? Syria’s fall was attained with the help of Saudi, Qatari, and Turkish channels, their sectarianization of regional problems, their revanchist pseudo-histories and grievances beamed incessantly outward from the satellites of Al-Jazeera and the social media pages of Middle East Eye. Those campaigns have found new allyship in Ahmed al-Shara’a and his HTS contras, who spread sectarian poison in what was the last-standing state bastion anti-Zionist secular Arabism. Undeniably, Bashar al-Assad presided over and contributed to his share of contradictions, but he understood the basic point that normalization forbids sovereignty, which is why he refused to talk with the Americans, even as they blackmailed Syria via sanctions and holding its wheat and oil fields hostage. “Abu Mohammed al-Jolani,” as he was once called, is a longtime US project yielding exactly the desired results. As covered in a 2021 episode of PBS’s Frontline about Sha’ara titled “The Jihadist,” he previously “pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda” under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq and later worked under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the one time emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. His war plans against the Syrian state were hatched in excruciating detail, furnished with academic documents, during his tenure at Camp Bucca near the Iraq-Kuwait border, a prison run by the US military but which, oddly enough, operated as a “wholly-owned subsidiary of al-Qaeda,” producing “nine future al-Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS commanders.” James Jeffrey, Trump’s former Special Representative for Syria Engagement, advocated openly at the time for the US to collaborate with Sha’ara and HTS against the Syrian Arab Republic, insisting he was “the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, which is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East,” all while Sha’ara sent messages to Jeffrey saying, “Basically, ‘We want to be your friend…’”

The colossal imperialist victory in Syria will allow the US to offset some of the pressure bearing down on the Zionist entity by offering enlarged perks and counterrevolutionary responsibilities to Arab reactionary regimes, as evidenced by Trump’s latest Gulf weapons and investment deals, $600 billion with Saudi Arabia, $200 billion with the United Arab Emirates, and $243.5 billion with Qatar. For the vestiges of organized anti-Zionist armed resistance that remain, the Syria playbook will be applied as reconstruction funds, whether channeled through Arab reactionary regimes, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the US itself, are denied Gaza and Lebanon pending respective pledges from those two countries to disarm and surrender. Thus, US investment into Arab reactionary regimes is functionally an investment into the future of Zionism.

The second major reason the US has not wound down support for Zionism and Israel, despite facing such massive economic pressures and reputational damage and steadfast resistance, is that the weight of US military, technological, and ideological co-production with Israel and the Zionist movement is such that the latter effectively function as auxiliary detachments of the US empire. As AI weapon engineer and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, a protege of Trump-supporting industrialist Peter Thiel, said about counter-ballistic systems such as the Iron Dome, they are “collaborations between the United States and Israel: there is a lot of US weapons technology in there, there’s a lot of Israeli know-how in there as well.” It has become clear since October 7, 2023, that the US considers its stranglehold on the Arab region to be a matter of existential importance to its empire: Israel has become simply too big to fail. For nearly a century now, the relationship between the US, Israel, and the Zionist movement has overlapped, layer by layer and bit by bit, on the basis of a common interest in counterrevolution. Seymour Hersh documents this trajectory in his book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, writing that by the early 1980s, the United States was providing Israel full intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency and KH-11 satellite technology for anything to do with Syria and Egypt.[19] A story is told that after Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 without express US permission, Ronald Reagan shrugged it off because he thought it was a good sign that Israel knew when and how to act against Syria or Iraq, or as Hersh describes it, “able to take care of problems before they developed.”[20]

For these reasons, press rumors about Trump and the United States “abandoning” Israel should be treated with as much skepticism as those old stories about a supposed Biden-Netanyahu rift, especially given the obvious propaganda value stories about Trump “defying” Israel lend to reactionary Arab regimes trying to sell their collaborationism to the people over whom they rule. US orientation towards Israel cannot be reduced to the intensity or skill of Zionist agitation at a given moment; rather, clear understanding depends on a critical conjunctural reading of broader US imperial strategy and how Israel fits within it. Of course, US-Zionist contradictions have historically emerged, but a) consistent with the general rule within deep politics and their inherent factionalism, and especially considering the embeddedness of the organic links uniting the US to Zionism, these clashes often play out within and across intelligence agencies, and not always along strict national lines neatly dividing “American” from “Israeli” and b) the nature of the disagreements has almost always been about the role Israel and Zionism is to play in US domination of the region, and not whether the US should be supporting Israel and Zionism at all. Even before the ruling institutions of the US endorsed the partition of Palestine in the late 1940s, the US establishment had its own reasons for moving into the West Asian Arab area and opposing regional revolutions, such as “control of the eastern end of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal” and providing an “outlet for the oil of the Middle East,” to name just a few of the State Department’s concerns at the time. When Trump expresses willingness for the US potentially to take over direct administrative management of the genocide in Gaza, he is not hatching the idea merely for the sake of Israel, but for the US-led regional system of which Israel is such a crucial part. Within the nexus of imperialism, Zionism, and Arab reaction, roles may tactically change if external pressures bear down too strongly on any single component of the system. For instance, when the US ceased attacking Yemen on May 6,Israel carried out airstrikes on Yemen’s main airport the very next day on May 7, indicating a hand-off.

US-Zionist organic unity of purpose was again demonstrated through the Zionist entity’s June 13 attack on Iran and the ensuing “12-day war” which culminated in the US deployment of 30,000 pound “bunker buster” bombs on June 21. Just as the Hezbollah assassinations were necessary to clear the way to the overthrow of the Syrian Arab Republic, the fall of Syria opened the path to a direct US-Zionist offensive farther eastward and deeper into Asia against the Islamic Republic of Iran in which Israel served as the offensive spear with which to set in motion a process of sovereignty erosion, much resembling how Israel got the demolition ball rolling for Britain and France during the 1956 Tripartite Aggression against Egypt. Donald Trump’s language openly leveraged the Zionist violence for US aims as he referred to the June 13 attack using the first-person plural: “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran” (emphasis added). Zionist forces targeted air defenses to clear the way for US B-2 Spirit bomber jets during the 12-day period in what was likely to be merely one stage of a gradual process beginning with the violation of Iran’s airspace. It must not be forgotten that the 2003 US invasion of Iraq was the pinnacle of a multi-decade process and project to weaken the country’s defenses, the methods of which closely resemble those being used against Iran now. Thirteen years elapsed between the US’s institution of a No-Fly Zone 1991 and the land invasion. During the interregnum, the US and allies applied sanctions to prevent postwar reconstruction, all the while ordering Baghdad “to comply with several further demands including ending its missile programs and curbing military research—or else face a Western attack.”[21] According to a Washington Post report from 1991, the strategic aim of the US’s aerial bombardment was to “[disable] Iraqi society at large by “[damaging]… civilian structures and interests” for the sake of gaining postwar leverage over an Iraq unable to “repair without foreign assistance.”[22] The Islamic Republic clearly absorbed lessons from Iraq; its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) acted as a deterrent capable of cutting short the US and Israel’s first round of aerial onslaught. As a minimal goal, US military officials undoubtedly used the exchange with Iran to gauge the performance of the ICBMs in a live war situation, knowing their “own” military bases in the Pacific Northeast would be targeted during any attempt to bomb or invade Korea or confront its People’s Army, from which the Iranian military’s missile technologies in substantial part originate.

As long as the preponderance of US-directed monopoly capital is being channeled towards repression and war, the US ruling class is likely to view Israel and Zionism as essential to its survival, and the Trump Administration by all indications views hard power as a long-term solution to the US empire’s crises. Military capitalists such as Palmer Luckey refuse to let go of the idea of Full-Spectrum Dominance. To him, the survival of the Gaza resistance is not a lesson about the limits of control, but evidence that oligarchs must work smarter and harder to conceive nuclear-powered vehicles fit for drilling deep into the earth’s crust and unleashing carbon dioxide and other biochemical weapons to suffocate any resistors who might find refuge in underground tunnels. Luckey’s mindset is emblematic of a class who associates justice and equality with catastrophe and apocalypse. Outwardly, he is non-religious, perhaps even an atheistic transhumanist, but he shares with Trump’s Christian evangelical Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth a fanatical rejection of equality, of the very possibility of universalism.[23] Luckey’s vocal support for the Zionist cause pairs with his outward disgust for internationalism as he predicates his celebration of the atomic bombing of Japan on the immutability of human difference, exclaiming that “people don’t like to admit how different cultures can be!”

The purveyors of this paranoid outlook understand very well that nearly every counterinsurgent technology the US introduces routes through Israel. Even the mega-prisons in El Salvador on which the Trump administration’s deportation machine against refugees and dissidents depends are outfitted by the Zionist entity. Palmer Luckey’s thermonuclear reveries do not indulge visions of catastrophic violence for mere fun, though any observer can easily note the apparent glee and fine detail with which he describes them; rather, the luridness of his dark imagination reflects the extremity of his fear about the precarity of his class’s rule. The resistors of Gaza and Korea, both of whom he identifies as special threats for their subterranean proclivities, continue to evade his class’s best weapons. And it is exactly Zionism’s indispensable role opposing revolutionary and progressive forces in North America, ever more known, every day more notorious, which certifies the Gaza resistance’s ideological victory. Palestine can no longer be backgrounded in Western society; it has become an unavoidable contradiction in the daily life of the US, and that is unlikely to change.

Conclusion: The Limits of Imperial Power

“US imperialism is the highest enemy of the Palestinian people,” an old slogan goes, words that remain true. A defeat of “Full-Spectrum Dominance” means the prevention of total control; it is not the same as the defeat of US imperialism itself. Yet in some ways the United States’ “New World Order ” proclaimed in 1991 still appears more delicate today than at any point since the overthrow of the Soviet Union. The contours of the new world being born are unclear, but the old world’s passage is a necessary condition for Palestinian liberation. When a one-armed Yahya Sinwar, a child of al-Majdal forcibly relocated to Gaza, faced down a Zionist drone in the husk of a dilapidated building in southern Gaza, he perhaps symbolized what the PLO called the essence of Vietnam’s victory over US imperialism in a prior era: the “victory of humans over machines ,” and specifically the global inequality, high-tech holocausts, and attempts at totalizing control that machine represents. Perhaps more precisely, Gaza resistance factions demonstrate military technological innovations which, while backstopped by state power in various locales (in Iran, Yemen, China, the North of Korea, formerly Syria),emerge from and make possible rudimentary forms of sovereignty–machines engineered towards the goal of human survival rather than extermination.

To restore total control, US imperialism threatens to expand its Gaza holocaust into regional and world wars, but Palestinians in Gaza had already endured hell for decades before 2023. Palestinians’ sin is that they disagree with “Israel,” the instrument, agent, and symbol of their dispossession, while US power very much needs Israel to project military superiority in West Asia on its behalf. The unprecedented resources commanded by the modern Euroamerican world were therefore amassed into a massive conspiracy against the people of Palestine, dedicated first to their removal and dislocation, second to their perpetual imprisonment behind wire fences and iron walls, and third to their starvation and periodic execution (“mowing the lawn”). Their revolt began in essence as a class struggle, of dispossessed peasants-turned-slum dwellers seeking to overcome their conditions, in order to achieve the humble goal of returning home. They shake the very foundations of the world-system as a corollary. More raw violence will not overturn the weight of history to convince Palestinians of the wisdom or necessity of “Israel.” Palestinian resistors dare to embrace George Jackson’s famous calculation: they will have their freedom “even at the cost of total war.”

Patrick Higgins is a member of AISC.

__________________________________________________________________________________

[1] AISC editors highly recommend reading two earlier pieces by Patrick Higgins for further background context on several of the themes covered by this piece: Patrick Higgins, "Gunning for Damascus: The US War on the Syrian Arab Republic," Middle East Critique, vol. 32, no. 2, 2023, pp. 217-241,https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19436149.2023.2199487 , and Patrick Higgins, "The War on Syria," Jacobin, August 2015,https://jacobin.com/2015/08/syria-civil-war-nato-military-intervention/ .

[2] Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1969), pg. 3.

[3] Thanks to Naye Idriss for bringing my attention to this formulation.

[4] Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1993), pg. 180-181.

[5] Morris, Israel’s Borders Wars, pg. 107.

[6] See Morris’s description in Border Wars on pg. 121: “...the 1948 war had demonstrated the supreme military value of border settlements. The settlements–almost all of them kibbutzim–had proved serious, almost insuperable, obstacles to the invading Arab armies.”

[7] Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, pg. 122.

[8] Thanks to Samar al-Saleh for finding this article: Kennett Lovespecial, “Israeli Settlers Grow with Town; Nahal Oz, Founded in 1953, Has Average Age of 20–And Works Armed,” The New York Times, August 28, 1955.

[9] See: Anat Roth, “The 2005 Collapse of the Preconception regarding the Settlers' Struggle against the Disengagement Plan,” National Resilience, Politics, and Society Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2019).

[10] One such early reprisal was a mortar attack against the people of ‘Abasan, which occurred on October 7, 1949. For Palestinians, this date is a day of terrorism among countless others, not fit for the 9/11-esque appellation of “10/7” the Western press offers up to the State of Israel. See: Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, pg. 187.

[11] Ayala Levin (2017), “South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar, Ashkelon, 1949–1956,” Planning Perspectives, 34(2), 285–309.

[12] See pg. 10 in “The Military Strategy of the PFLP.”

[13] Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, pg. 112.

[14] Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1969), pg. 12.

[15] “Military Strategy of the PFLP,” pg. 11.

[16] As Mary Turfah writes : “The fighter fights for the future of their loved ones. When their loved ones are killed, it undercuts the possibility of this imagined future. This sows hopelessness and makes them question what they’re fighting for.”

[17] Credit here must be given to Donald Freed for his brilliant formulation: “Lee Harvey Oswald was to Dallas as William Calley is to Vietnam.”

[18] One can only speculate as to the nature of the threats the US levied behind the scenes in order to get the attacks on their bases to stop.

[19] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991), pg. 7.

[20] Hersh, The Samson Option, pg. 9.

[21] A.B. Abrams, Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2020), pg. 347.

[22] Barton Gellman, “Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq; Officials Acknowledge Strategy Went Beyond Purely Military Targets,” The Washington Post, June 23, 1991. This is also the same logic used against Gaza now. As the report says: “The worst civilian suffering, senior officers say, has resulted not from bombs that went astray but from precision-guided weapons that hit exactly where they were aimed -- at electrical plants, oil refineries and transportation networks.” Thus, “damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.”

[23] In a recent interview with The New York Times’s Ross Douthat, Luckey’s mentor Peter Thiel accused his left-wing opponents of promoting apocalypticism in order to institute a totalitarian one-world government–a classic case of projection, considering that Thiel even invokes long-standing Evangelical Protestant fears about the Antichrist and the United Nations to make his point.

On Hamas and the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination: Explainer

From the River to the Sea — On Hamas and the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination: Explainer

On Hamas and the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination: Explainer

Article 6 of 12

Voice of the Proletariat

Originally published at https://voiceoftheproletariat.substack.com/p/on-hamas-and-the-palestinian-struggle

Originally published on January 10, 2026, this article was substantially updated on June 13, 2026, to include additional information and improve clarity.

Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, is often described in the West as an “illegal terrorist group” that “kills civilians,” and their October 7th campaign is often used as justification by the “Israeli” colonial and occupational forces for so-called “self-defense,” which, despite the term, has often led to mass killings.¹

Whether Hamas is “antisemitic” is perhaps the most important question to liberals and those who refuse support to a side due to secondary contradictions.

While it is true that Hamas’ original charter at the time of founding included some aspects of anti-Jewish sentiment, this is no longer the case, as Hamas and other resistance movements have sharply distinguished Jewish identity and Judaism from Zionism.²

To add, as Palestinians themselves are often considered a Semitic people, the current “Israeli” genocide in historic Palestine can itself be considered one of the biggest acts of antisemitism since the Holocaust.

L'Chaim Intifada defines the movement as “the steadfastness of the Palestinian people … [that] will ultimately liberate Palestine.” The article also includes a comprehensive list of resources on the movement, including on-the-ground coverage by journalists and analysts, articles, podcasts, videos, and books.

The Electronic Intifada in April 2026 published an article titled “Debunking the Lie that ‘Israel Created Hamas,’” which can be accessed here.

In August 2023, the organization Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, or CJPME, released a fact sheet regarding the right of Palestinians to resist “Israel’s” military occupation as enshrined under international law, followed by a brief historical summary of Palestinian resistance. It asserts:

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has explicitly affirmed the right of Palestinians to resist Israel’s military occupation, including through armed struggle. This right was affirmed in the context of the right to self-determination of all peoples under foreign and colonial rule.

UNGA Resolution 3314 (1974) “affirmed the right of self-determination, freedom, and independence for all ‘peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination,’ and affirmed the ‘right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support.’

Also cited was UNGA Resolution 37/43 (1982), which “reaffirmed the ‘inalienable right’ of the Palestinian people ‘and all peoples under foreign and colonial domination’ to self-determination.

It also reaffirmed the legitimacy of ‘the struggle of peoples for […] liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.’”

It notes that “[although] UNGA resolutions are not legally binding, they ‘accurately reflect the customary international legal opinion among the majority of the world’s sovereign states.’”

Further, the fact sheet references supplementary amendments to the Fourth Geneva Convention under Protocol I (1977), which:

…expanded the scope of the [original] law, … which had little to say about the use of force against an occupying power … explicitly affirming that it applies to situations including “armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.”

Further, it asserts:

This update to international law gave legal legitimacy to “the resort to arms by national liberation movements, including the PLO,” giving Palestinians a “legal right” to use force against military occupation, similar to that enjoyed by sovereign nations.

This legality is largely ignored by Western states and Westerners alike.

Of course, I will also note that even if this resistance were “illegal,” legality does not inherently equate to correctness.³ It is impossible to expect an entire people to simply roll onto their backs and allow themselves to be slaughtered.

Slavery was once legal, after all, yet almost no one condemns past slave revolts or similar historical resistance. As Chairman Mao asserted, “Resistance is justified” (造反有理)—or as the West often says, “Power to the People!”

While Hamas has admitted to “faults” during the October 7th operation, they have affirmed that they did not intentionally target civilians and have voiced openness to an independent, impartial investigation.

The “State of Israel” has forbidden this from occurring.

At the time of writing, most (if not all) reports of “mass civilian killings by Hamas” were made by Western media or Western-funded humanitarian organizations, who reported based on information provided by “Israel.” These sources are hardly unbiased.

Many such organizations depend on Western government funding and access, hire staff predominantly from Western/Global North contexts, apply frameworks that are themselves products of Western post-WWII power arrangements, and are unable to investigate impartially when the accused, in this case “Israel,” controls access, evidence, and witness movement.

In fact, “Israeli” authorities have been accused of failing to ensure proper forensic evidence collection, “undermining the possibility of future judicial proceedings, accountability, and justice.” It is, in plain words, an echo chamber that helps further “Israel’s” narrative.

As reported by Middle East Eye:

Hamas repeated previous assertions that killing civilians was against its “religion, morality, and education … we avoid it whenever we can. … The resistance did not target any hospital, school, or house of worship; it did not kill a single journalist or any member of ambulance crews.⁴ We challenge [“Israel”] to prove otherwise.”

However, on the other end, “Israel’s” Hannibal Directive, which allows “Israeli” soldiers to target their own to avoid capture, was used during the operation despite having been supposedly decommissioned years ago, as reported by “Israeli” news networks such as Haaretz.

It is worth noting that October 7th was not the beginning of the struggle for liberation, as widely believed. Hamas and other resistance groups did not merely appear out of thin air.

Settler-colonial violence in historic Palestine has been occurring since the late 1940s, when “Israeli” settlers first arrived with permission from the UN and British colonizers.

Voice of the Proletariat remains committed to supporting Palestine in all ways possible.

We stand with a growing number of heroic activists who support the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination as well as other anti-Zionist groups.

We also stand with states such as China and Russia, who have consistently supported victim-centered approaches, including Russia’s counter-proposal for Trump’s “peace plan” at the UN.

In the imperial core, the easiest way to support Palestine is through the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as well as providing material support to Palestinians directly through fundraisers.

In May 2026, Voice of the Proletariat interviewed Aseel, a Palestinian mother in Gaza living with her young son, Sufyan. You can read the full interview here and donate directly.

In addition, Voice of the Proletariat is actively supporting many other fundraising campaigns in Palestine.

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Despite Everything: Cultural Resistance for a Free Palestine

From the River to the Sea — Despite Everything: Cultural Resistance for a Free Palestine

Despite Everything: Cultural Resistance for a Free Palestine

Article 7 of 12

The Tricontinental

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-cultural-resistance-palestine/

Kael Abello (Venezuela), Símbolos de resistencia (Symbols of Resistance), 2024. Courtesy of Utopix.

The artwork featured in this dossier was made by cultural workers from around the world as part of a collaboration between Artists Against Apartheid and Utopix.

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, ‘If I Must Die’ (2023)

On 14 October 2023, days after Israel unleashed its genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian writer and educator Refaat Alareer posted his poem ‘If I Must Die’ on social media.¹ Just over a month later, Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his sister’s home in Shuja’iyya, in eastern Gaza City, along with his brother, his sister, and her four children. Though friends and colleagues had urged him to leave Gaza, he decided to stay. This was his final act of sumud (صُمُود), the Palestinian concept of steadfastness and determination to remain on the land.

‘I am the man I am because of the stories told to me by my mother and grandmother’, Alareer said in a talk in 2015. ‘Stories are also important in our lives as Palestinians, as people under occupation, as native peoples on this land, not only because… they shape us [and] make us the people we are but also because they connect us with our past, they connect us with our present, and they prepare us [for] the future’.² In addition to his own writing, Alareer edited and published several volumes by other Palestinian writers. In 2015 he founded We Are Not Numbers, a project that paired young Gazan writers with mentors abroad so they could tell their stories and counter the erasure of Palestinian history, identity, and resistance – a striking example of Palestinian cultural resistance and defiance in the face of an ongoing occupation.

Since the Al Aqsa Flood operation (Hamas’ armed attack against Israel on 7 October 2023), the genocide in Gaza has been livestreamed for the world to see. As of October 2025, more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 730,000 displaced, and countless maimed, wounded, and starved – all with the full backing of the United States.³ The first three months of bombing alone resulted in an 11.5-year decline in Palestinian life expectancy, from 76.7 years in 2022 to just 65.2 years in 2023.⁴ As of April 2025, the UN estimated that 92% of all residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed, leaving behind 50 million tonnes of rubble that will take decades to remove.⁵ The unthinkable scale of death, destruction, and deliberate starvation has led Palestinians to call this the ‘second Nakba’ – the ‘Gaza Nakba’. The first Nakba (Catastrophe), in 1948, was an act of ethnic cleansing that seized 78% of Palestinian land, destroyed more than five hundred towns and villages, displaced more than half of the population – around 800,000 Palestinians – and led to the creation of the State of Israel.⁶ From the 1948 Nakba to today’s escalated genocide, the establishment and continued existence of the State of Israel have depended on the convergence of the Zionist project and Western imperialism.

However, imperialist patronage does not, on its own, secure consent and impunity – these must be achieved through other means. So, how does Zionism, as a settler-colonial project, fabricate the legitimacy to carry out a programme of such violence and barbarity? Nearly six decades ago, Ghassan Kanafani, a novelist and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), sought to answer that very question. In his book On Zionist Literature (1967), he examined what he defined as ‘all that has been written to serve the movement for the Jewish colonisation of Palestine either directly or otherwise’.⁷ For Kanafani, to ‘know your enemy’ you must examine its cultural production. In the book, he explores how Zionist fiction falsified history for Western readers; why cultural institutions – including the Nobel Committee – rewarded reactionary authors such as Shmuel Yosef Agnon in 1966; how Western commentary came to echo Zionist narratives; and whether Western coverage of the 1967 war was the predictable outcome of a long campaign of cultural disinformation.⁸

For Kanafani, political Zionism – the movement to create a Jewish settler-colonial state in historic Palestine – required a cultural front to propagate its ideology through literary and artistic production. It is not a coincidence that the architect of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was first a novelist: his book The Old New Land (1902), Kanafani says, marked the beginning of ‘the Zionist literary character [marching] in lockstep with the Zionist political programme’.⁹ In fact, a central task of the Zionist cultural apparatus was to dehumanise the Palestinian people in order to justify their displacement.¹⁰ Kanafani documented how the Zionist novel, in particular, was key to this work, depicting Arabs as backward, barbarous, and disconnected from the land.¹¹ He wrote about how Zionist literature concocted and consolidated narratives that reverberate today, among them the claim of Arabs’ ‘mental and civilisational backwardness as an incurable disease’, the notion that ‘Arabs do not deserve a country’, the idea that the lives of Arab children are ‘useless as opposed to the morale of Jewish children’, and the ‘ludicrous association’ that politically and emotionally transferred Nazi crimes to the Arabs in Palestine.¹² Zionist ideology and cultural production thus cast the Zionist project in a ‘civilising role’ against the supposed ‘barbarism’ of Arabs and Palestinians.¹³

In the decades since, these same dehumanising narratives have been recycled and deployed many times over by the Israeli state and regurgitated by mainstream Western media. In the months following 7 October, Law for Palestine compiled a database of over 500 cases of Israeli incitement to genocide.¹⁴ On 9 October 2023, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant delivered what would become a defining statement of the genocide: ‘We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly’. Four days later, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said: ‘It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible’. Galit Distel Atbaryan, member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), called for the ‘erasure’ of ‘Gaza from the face of the Earth’ and for the death of the ‘Gazan monsters’. Israel’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Avi Dichter unironically advocated for ethnic cleansing by saying, ‘We’re doing a Gazan Nakba 2023’. David Azoulay, the mayor of Metula, explicitly evoked the recreation of the Holocaust by stating ‘The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz’. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly called Palestinians ‘monsters’. This endless list of incitements of ethnic cleansing long predates 7 October; the dehumanisation of Palestinians is a historico-cultural narrative that for more than a century has been used to justify their extermination with complete moral, political, and military impunity.¹⁵

The Zionist project has also been built on systematic cultural erasure. During the first Nakba, the plunder and looting of paintings, photographs, films, musical recordings, instruments, and other cultural artefacts were widely documented.¹⁶ An estimated 70,000 books were stolen, many now held in Israeli archives, including the National Library of Israel.¹⁷ This theft and destruction has continued over the past eight decades. Since 7 October, Israel has further targeted cultural centres and workers – an essential component of the project of cultural genocide. Among the dead are many of Palestine’s painters, poets, writers, and sculptors, making the question of culture all the more urgent for the unfinished aspirations of Palestinian liberation.¹⁸

With that in mind, how can the Zionist settler-colonial cultural programme be resisted along a cultural front? What is the role of artists in times of genocide? Can cultural production humanise a people, rescue their history, and advance their struggle? To explore these questions and illuminate Palestine’s rich liberation culture and its historical roots, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research interviewed contemporary artists and cultural workers in Palestine and the diaspora. This dossier is not a comprehensive survey of Palestinian art. Rather, it opens a conversation about the place of cultural resistance in Palestinian liberation. It examines how art and culture have been used to resist cultural Zionism and dehumanisation by remembering Palestine’s past, bearing witness to its present, and imagining its future – one in which its people are free and free to return home. As Ibraheem Mohana, an eighteen-year-old Gazan artist who came into adulthood amid the genocide, affirmed, ‘They started the war to kill our hopes, but we won’t let that happen’.¹⁹

Aude Abou Nasr (Lebanon), Gaza, 2023. Courtesy of Artists Against Apartheid.

Resistance Culture and National Liberation

Across anti-colonial and national liberation struggles, culture has been considered an integral weapon in the battle of ideas and emotions. Revolutionaries from Amílcar Cabral to Mao Zedong emerged from these struggles not only as military strategists and party leaders but also as poets and cultural theorists. Part of the national liberation Marxist tradition, Mao and Cabral – independently yet convergently – developed sophisticated theories of culture as a primary and indispensable front in the national liberation struggle.²⁰ For them, culture was the very terrain upon which liberation was to be won or lost.

For Cabral, who led the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), ‘National liberation is necessarily an act of culture’.²¹ His logic was clear: because imperialist domination is not merely political and economic, it ‘has the vital need to practice cultural oppression’. It seeks to halt the historical and cultural development of the colonised. Therefore, resistance to imperialist domination must be a cultural act – a collective rather than an individual one. The liberation movement, he argued, is nothing less than the ‘organised political expression of the culture of the people who are undertaking the struggle’.²²

For both Cabral and Mao, cultural resistance was no less important than armed resistance. At the 1942 Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature (a three-week conference that brought together China’s leading writers, artists, intellectuals, soldiers, and party cadres), Mao declared: ‘In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people there are various fronts, among which there are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts’.²³ Similarly, in a series of talks given to PAIGC members in 1969 on the ‘Analysis of Different Types of Resistance’, Cabral highlighted ‘cultural resistance’ as one of four key fronts of struggle, alongside political, economic, and armed resistance. For both Cabral and Mao, culture was a primary and decisive battlefield, and the cultural army was just as vital as the people’s army.

Similarly, the theory and practice of culture for national liberation were an integral part of the Palestinian struggle, particularly for Kanafani. In Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1968, a foundational analysis of the literary works produced by Palestinian Arabs under Israeli occupation in the two decades after the first Nakba, Kanafani writes: ‘Cultural resistance is essential and is no less important than the armed resistance itself’; it forms the ‘fertile ground’ for any successful armed struggle.²⁴ That same year, in ‘Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine’, published in Afro-Asian Writings, he outlined the characteristics of Palestinian resistance literature, which he also called the ‘literature of combat’ and the literature of occupied Palestine. He noted that it took about five years after the first Nakba for Palestinians to realise that ‘they had lost not only their families and friends but their country as well’.²⁵ To recover their lost country, a struggle had to be waged on both the armed and cultural fronts. This banner has been carried by generations of Palestinian artists both in their homeland and across the world.

In Liberation Art of Palestine (2001), renowned Palestinian-US artist and scholar Samia A. Halaby meticulously documents the development of a distinctly Palestinian artistic identity in the context of occupation, displacement, and resistance. She argues that this ‘liberation art’ is intrinsically linked to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, with a unique iconography that includes symbols of sumud such as the cactus and the horse as well as themes of martyrdom and the right of return. For her, any ‘good art’ is ‘political art’, and liberation art is ‘a practical art [that] needs to be clear and useful as a poster, leaflet, or banner’.²⁶ She discusses the inextricable link between art and liberation:

The art of Palestine rests on the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Without that base, Palestinian artists would be an atomised collection of imitators of fashionable international styles, and many are. The liberation artists of Palestine are aware that they are fortunate to have a cause, and in fulfilling their duty to serve it, their art gains historical significance as a school with particular characteristics.²⁷

The history of Palestinian resistance and liberation culture has been marked by political ruptures. These ruptures – the six ‘declarations of war’ on the Palestinian people, as historian Rashid Khalidi calls them in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) – are:

the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which pledged British support for establishing a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, paving the way for the British Mandate and Zionist colonisation;

the 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which led to the first Nakba;

the 1967 Six-Day War – known in Palestine as the Naksa (Setback) – when Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights;

Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which expelled the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from Beirut;

the First Intifada (1987–1993), the mass Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation; and

the Second Intifada, which began in 2000 and set the stage for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

At each rupture, Palestinian artists and cultural workers responded with their craft and production. For Halaby, this history of liberation art ‘rose with the uprising and declined with its recession’. Below we shed light on some expressions of Palestinian cultural resistance across these six ruptures.²⁸

Olfer Leonardo (Peru), Sabra y Shatila (Sabra and Shatila), 2021. Courtesy of Utopix.

Remember

My roots were planted before time was born
Before history began
Before the cypress and the olive trees
Before grass sprouted

– Mahmoud Darwish, excerpt from ‘Identity Card’ (1964)²⁹

The prominent actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, who has acted in nearly fifty films and directed four documentaries in his forty-year career, recalls encountering and falling in love with cinema as a child in his hometown, al-Bi’neh. In his village, he remembers, they were ‘without electricity – but there was cinema’.³⁰ Bakri is part of the Palestinian minority within Israel, one of the two million descendants of the 159,000 Palestinians who were not expelled in the 1948 Nakba. He traces the ‘five seasons’ of his own politicisation and creative work – similar to Khalidi’s periodisation – back to the first Nakba, describing how that foundational event and the subsequent stories that he heard from his father and grandfather moulded his political consciousness. As he put it, ‘to tell the story of my people, in fiction and in documentary… is my way of fighting. To protect my culture, my identity, and my humanity. No[thing] more’.

In The Origins of Palestinian Art (2013), Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon describe the first Nakba not as a singular historical moment but as an ongoing event of displacement, death, and loss – a ‘perpetual present tense in which historical events are still taking place’.³¹ For Bakri and many Palestinian cultural workers, locating the ‘origin’ of Palestinian cultural resistance in the first Nakba is not only a personal but a highly political act – a way to refute Zionist claims to the ‘promised land’ as well as policies of cultural and historical erasure.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israeli historian Ilan Pappé uses the term ‘memoricide’ to describe the systematic erasure of the first Nakba from Israel’s historical and physical landscape. Culture is thus weaponised to solidify the physical act of ethnic cleansing, denying the crimes committed and replacing the victims’ history with that of the perpetrators. State-sponsored bodies, particularly the Jewish National Fund, have been instrumental in implementing this programme – from renaming towns, villages, streets, and landmarks with Hebrew names and imposing maps of ‘ancient Israel’ to planting forests that conceal the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages.³² These efforts aim to justify the Zionist foundational myth of ‘a land without a people, and a people without a land’.

Against the backdrop of memoricide, preserving Palestinian art and cultural history is a form of resistance. For a people who have been geographically fragmented and dispersed – shatat in Arabic – origins are central to creating what the Palestinian postcolonial theorist Edward Said calls ‘coherence’. According to Said, this cultural coherence is possible because Palestinians ‘have been united as a people largely because [of] the Palestinian idea (which we have articulated out of our own experience of dispossession and exclusionary oppression)’.³³

In Resistance Literature, Kanafani highlights the Israeli policy of ‘deliberate ignorance’, which severed generations of Palestinians from their Arab heritage and national identity.³⁴ This programme of cultural alienation was achieved by degrading the quality of education Palestinians could receive – from restricting the resources available to Arab students to appointing unqualified or ‘collaborator’ Arab teachers – and by promoting a ‘hybrid and trivial culture’. This left Palestinian Arabs with two choices: emigrate or assimilate.³⁵

Born within the State of Israel a few years after the Nakba and trained at Tel Aviv University in theatre acting and Arabic literature, Bakri has had to navigate Palestinian, Israeli, and international cultural industries to make his films and has faced severe political and legal persecution. Since releasing Jenin, Jenin (2002), a documentary about the large-scale Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp during the Second Intifada, he has been haunted by legal battles. As he explained, ‘The film was banned in Israel. I have been paying $1,000 a month to an Israeli soldier who claimed he appears in my film – for three and a half seconds. And I will keep paying for years to come… It is like the Middle Ages – like when they burned books’.³⁶ Despite the persecution he faces, Bakri continues to make films, defying the imposed binary of emigration or assimilation and insisting on documenting and bearing witness to the Palestinian people’s ongoing resistance and aspirations for liberation.

Pablo Kalaka (Chile and Venezuela), Under the Olive Tree, 2023. Courtesy of Utopix and Artists Against Apartheid.

Witness

Our poems are without colour, without taste, without voice
If they do not carry the lamp from house to house

– Mahmoud Darwish on the function of poetry³⁷

‘The second season [of my politicisation] was 1967’, Bakri recalls, during ‘the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab world, when Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem’. As a fourteen-year-old boy, he remembers seeing his father cry; later, he understood that his tears were for the ‘new catastrophe of the Arab world and the Palestinian people – [for] the first generation of refugees [that] was created in 1948 [and] the second [that was] created in 1967’.³⁸

The well-known political cartoonist Naji al-Ali was part of that first generation, expelled from his village of al-Shajara during the first Nakba. In 1961, Kanafani first published al-Ali’s work in the Arab nationalist movement magazine Al-Hurriya (Freedom), which he edited. A few years later, while working for a Kuwaiti newspaper, al-Ali began drawing Handala, a character that would define his career.³⁹ Eternally a ten-year-old boy – the age when al-Ali was forced into exile – barefoot, and in tattered clothing, Handala is always drawn facing away from the audience. With his arms crossed behind his back, he bears witness to the atrocities committed against the Palestinian people but also to their unwavering resistance, the promise of return, and a free Palestine. Named after a deep-rooted, resilient desert plant, Handala embodies sumud. The more than forty thousand cartoons al-Ali drew in his lifetime are a testament to this steadfastness.

The events of 1967, and the failure of pan-Arab bourgeois nationalism to confront Zionist expansionism, inspired a wave of mass cultural resistance and a revival of Palestinian culture. As Rashid Khalidi notes: ‘Writers and poets both throughout the Palestinian diaspora and living inside Palestine – Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi, Fadwa Touqan, and Tawfiq Zayyad, together with other gifted and engaged artists and intellectuals – played a vital role in this renaissance, culturally and politically’.⁴⁰ The occupation turned culture into a key front in the struggle, ushering in a new era of militant theatre.

‘Theatre in Palestine is new, in general’, says Amer Khalil, co-founder and director of El-Hakawati (later known as the Palestinian National Theatre) in Jerusalem. In an interview with Tricontinental, he explained that ‘In the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, people used to make theatre related to social work. But after the war of ’67, a whole movement of intellectuals, artists, educators, [and] university students started a theatre movement to liberate Palestine… and the theatre movement really became militant’.⁴¹ Beginning in the late 1960s, Palestinian theatre also professionalised and built the capacity to train directors and actors – even amid extreme repression. As one theatre critic wrote in 1976, ‘No theatre group has ever performed without having one or two of its members in jail’.⁴²

In the context of rising censorship and disruption by the occupation authorities, which were set on obliterating anything deemed ‘national’ (i.e., Palestinian), theatre took on an important role. Through the clever use of symbolism and allegory to allow for multiple interpretations, Palestinian playwrights developed a ‘special language [that] served as an artistic code between the theatre and its audience… to convey messages of nation-building’.⁴³ ‘Culture has always been targeted’, Khalil added in the interview, ‘Theatre spaces attacked, artists threatened. Why is culture so dangerous? Because words change people. Stories make people think. And when people think, they start asking questions – about how they live, why they live that way, what life could be. That’s why culture is dangerous – it moves people’.⁴⁴

The El-Hakawati troupe, meaning ‘storyteller’ in Arabic, was formed in 1977 to do just that – to tell stories, move people, and change reality. The troupe brought together Palestinian students from the 1948 occupied territories with artists and intellectuals from occupied East Jerusalem in defiance of the Zionist fragmentation of the Palestinian people. For its first six years, El-Hakawati took theatre to the people, travelling to schools, cinema halls, village squares, and refugee camps before finding a permanent home in a derelict cinema in 1983, where it operates to this day. The troupe has been essential in telling the stories of Palestinian life and resistance, even becoming the first Palestinian theatre group to perform internationally.⁴⁵

The 1980s were bookended by two important ruptures: the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the First Intifada (1987–1993). These ruptures, alongside waning support for armed struggle as the primary path to liberation, had a significant impact on cultural resistance. It was in this environment that the Jewish Israeli activist Arna Mer-Khamis founded the Stone Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp in 1987, in reference to the stone-throwing by children during the First Intifada. In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, the Stone Theatre was destroyed during a massive Israeli invasion of the camp. Out of the rubble rose the Freedom Theatre, founded by Arna’s son Juliano, which carries on the Stone Theatre’s methodology of using theatre to process trauma, assert identity, and engage in resistance. Today, the theatre is run by Mustafa Sheta, who participated in the Stone Theatre as a child. In an interview with Tricontinental in July 2025, shortly after his release from fifteen months of detention in an Israeli prison, he explained that ‘Art isn’t separate from the national movement; our work is an extension of that movement – rooted in dignity, storytelling, and resistance’. The Freedom Theatre, he told us, sees its role as training actors who are also community organisers: ‘Our graduates aren’t only performers – they are agents of change’.⁴⁶

On 4 April 2011, Juliano was shot five times by a still-unidentified gunman. The troupe responded with While Waiting (2011), a remaking of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) that reflected on the yearning for freedom and statehood, and on never giving up.⁴⁷ Shortly before his murder, Juliano had called for a ‘cultural intifada’, which the Freedom Theatre embraced: ‘We believe that the third intifada, the coming intifada, should be cultural, with poetry, music, theatre, cameras, and magazines’.⁴⁸

Tings Chak (China), Palestine Will Be Free, 2024. Courtesy of Utopix and Artists Against Apartheid.

Imagine

We, who have no existence in ‘the Promised Land’, became the ghost of the murdered who haunted the killer in both wakefulness and sleep, and the realm in-between, leaving him troubled and despondent. The insomniac screams: Have they not died yet? No, because the ghost reaches the age of being weaned, then comes adulthood, resistance and return. Airplanes pursue the ghost in the air. Tanks pursue the ghost on land. Submarines pursue the ghost in the sea. The ghost grows up and occupies the killer’s consciousness.

– Mahmoud Darwish⁴⁹

The nature of Palestinian cultural work shifted in the 1990s with the Oslo Accords.⁵⁰ As Amer Khalil explained, with the so-called political solutions presented by the accords, the theatre world – like other cultural fields – began to pivot away from the militancy that had marked the earlier period. Kaleem Hawa, a poet, literary scholar, and organiser with the Palestinian Youth Movement, explained in an interview with Tricontinental that ‘After the Oslo Accords, many Palestinian social and cultural institutions were vitiated by Zionism and hollowed out by the compradorisation of the Palestine bourgeoisie, becoming no longer fit for purpose’. In this context, Hawa emphasised the need for a revolutionary culture as the ‘most important ligament’ between generations. ‘Palestinian youth [have] turned to video production and capsule-like diaries on social media to narrate their collective social experience, which includes alienation and steadfastness. And our elders have had to struggle against a concerted drive, from their own Arab governments no less, to make them forget all that they know and [have] learned’.⁵¹

For Palestinian artists and cultural workers, the period following the Oslo Accords ushered in a crisis regarding the very concept of resistance culture. With increased global recognition came new challenges: navigating institutionalisation, the cooptation of cultural production by and dependence on international donors, the separation of Palestinian art and culture from the people’s concrete realities, and the illusion of a ‘peace process’ on the horizon. The post-Oslo era also generated profound disillusionment with the traditional political leadership, pushing contemporary Palestinian artists and cultural groups toward a critical, independent stance, which in turn reflected a broader fragmentation of the national project.

In this context, satire and humour become tools of resistance. As Samer Asakleh, the songwriter and oud player of the Palestinian band Darbet Shams (Sunstroke), explained to Tricontinental, ‘Sometimes, political topics are too sensitive – like peace agreements or regional normalisation deals. Satire becomes a way to talk about them without immediate censorship or repression and open conversations that would otherwise be shut down’. Referring to his song ‘Do You Condemn Hamas?’, which he wrote in the aftermath of 7 October, Asakleh said, ‘The lyrics are sarcastic – [the rhetorical question] ask[s] if you have emotions only if you condemn Hamas. Audiences laughed, but then they reflected. Some came up to me later and said, “We laughed at ourselves, and we started to think more deeply about the question”’.⁵²

Like many cultural groups of their generation, the band reflects a political conjuncture very different from that faced by musical groups of a previous era. Lead vocalist Hanan Wakeem added, ‘There was a time when political parties in Palestine had their own bands. In the 60s and 70s, groups like Fatah had entire cultural wings with singers and dancers, often tied directly to the movement. That’s mostly gone now. Some artists are still informally affiliated with parties, but it’s not like before – there’s no longer a strong cultural infrastructure built by political movements’.⁵³

The Antidote of Internationalism

In a context of depoliticisation, commodification, and fragmentation, artists increasingly rely on financial support from international organisations, risking further political cooptation. An antidote to this global trend is the revival of internationalism and revolutionary imagination – nowhere is the call for internationalism clearer than in the cultural responses to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Artists Against Apartheid, a network of over fifteen thousand artists from across the world, was founded in October 2023 by artists and cultural workers who saw a deep need to mobilise for Palestinian liberation. Members Hannah Craig and Tahia Islam describe the network: ‘Inspired by the revolutionary artists who used their practices in the struggle against the South African apartheid system, we built this network knowing that as artists we have a unique responsibility to use our voice and artistic practices to protest apartheid and amplify the just cause of the Palestinian people and their resistance against occupation and oppression’.⁵⁴

Similarly, Utopix, an internationalist design and communications collective largely based in Latin America and the Caribbean, has brought together more than eighty artists across twenty countries to produce over a hundred posters on Palestine over the past year, which are available to download for free and exhibited worldwide.⁵⁵ David Jacob Carmona (‘Rasan Abu Apara’), a Chilean-Palestinian graphic designer and member of Utopix, sees Palestinian liberation as ‘represent[ing] a wider struggle with the peoples of the world, from the peoples in Africa who are under Western neocolonialism or the Walmapu in Chile. Art must break silences and educate with the truth… It is a trench, a weapon for struggle. In other words, art must speak to and seek to transform the real world’.⁵⁶

Revolutionary art and culture do more than break the silence or bear witness to the atrocities of imperialism and colonialism: they have the responsibility – and capacity – to imagine a future not yet born. Exhibitions have played an important role in fostering this internationalist imaginary. In 1978, the Plastic Arts Section of the PLO’s Unified Information Office organised the International Art Exhibition for Palestine at Beirut Arab University. As documented by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti in Past Disquiet (2018), the ambitious project was part of the PLO’s efforts to ‘commission, fund, and promote the production of posters, art, cinema, theatre, dance, music, and publications; to organise, preserve, and exhibit folklore and cultural traditions; and to galvanise international support for the Palestinian struggle in the world of arts and culture’.⁵⁷ The goal was also to forge a sense of nationhood among Palestinians and mobilise international solidarity. As Khouri and Salti wrote, ‘If houses were usurped, the record of having had a home would remain alive in a poem and song; if the land was removed from sight by distance, its depiction would retain its visibility in myriad forms’.⁵⁸

In this spirit, artwork donations for the exhibit were solicited from across the world. The idea was to imagine a future museum in a future Palestinian state, where solidarity works would become the very building blocks of the institution. Despite Israeli tanks rolling into southern Lebanon in an operation involving some twenty-five thousand troops, the exhibition opened on 21 March 1978 with contributions from Claude Lazar (France), Gontran Guanaes Netto (Brazil), and Bruno Caruso and Paolo Ganna (Italy), among others.⁵⁹ In June 1982, as Israel began its full-scale invasion of Lebanon to drive out the PLO, the organisation’s archives – including documents and plans for the museum – were destroyed.⁶⁰

Renowned Chilean artist Roberto Matta, who contributed to the PLO exhibition, had donated to a similar project in Chile a few years earlier. This project, the Museo de la Solidaridad (Museum of Solidarity), was initiated by Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1972 – a year before the US-orchestrated coup that overthrew his government – and called on international artists to donate works in support of the ‘vía chilena al socialismo’ (the Chilean socialist path). Many of the 674 works were forced into exile, some of them safeguarded in Cuba alongside leftist artists, intellectuals, and militants. In 1975, the project re-emerged as the Museo Internacional de la Resistencia Salvador Allende (International Museum of Resistance Salvador Allende), a dispersed network operating across Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, before returning to Chile in 1991 as the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende).⁶¹

From Palestine to Chile, these museums are some of the many internationalist efforts that have played an essential role in cultural resistance, defending socialist and revolutionary struggles and imagining a future nation for a people denied statehood. The struggle for a free Palestine is not a struggle of Palestinians alone; it is part of a worldwide struggle against imperialism and colonialism. As Kanafani wrote in The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine, ‘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’.⁶²

Ilga (Palestine and Chile), Palestina resiste (Palestine Resists), 2016. Courtesy of Utopix.

Culture Is Life

Mohammad Bakri considers the ongoing genocide in Gaza to be the fifth season of his politicisation. Although it has been broadcast on mobile phones and computer screens around the world, Bakri insists ‘that’s not cinema’. For him, ‘cinema must make you ask, think, understand, and draw a conclusion’. He reflects on a question that a resident of the refugee camp asked him in his documentary Jenin, Jenin: ‘What can your camera do when the whole world does nothing to help me?’ Thinking about today, he says, ‘The same is happening in Gaza. What can a camera do for starving people? My camera can’t bring them bread’.⁶³ That question of what art can do in the face of such atrocities confronts every artist and cultural worker.

Wakeem of Darbet Shams recalls the impact of the genocide on Palestinian artists: ‘The early months were marked by total shock. Many artists couldn’t sing, move, or create’. This was not only because of heightened repression – many no longer knew what art could or should do. ‘There were constant questions about the role of art in a time of genocide’, Shams continued. ‘Is it appropriate to make music at all? If the song isn’t about the war, should it even be shared?’⁶⁴ Under such conditions, what are an artist’s responsibilities, what are the limits of art and culture, and what does cultural resistance look like?

In this fifth season of politicisation, Bakri’s sober words remind us that culture is a powerful and necessary weapon for liberation and a defiant expression of life itself. They call on us to continue raising the banner of Palestinian liberation and to humanise the Palestinian people and their struggle with every song, every painting, every film, every dance, every poem, every novel, and every cultural weapon at our disposal – despite everything:

Culture is life. Culture is roots, and history. Culture is humanity. If we lose culture, we lose our identity. We lose our life. There is no meaning without culture. There is no meaning to life without love. Culture is love. I will not permit them to take my love away from myself. My culture. This is my heart. This is my people. These are my memories. This is my childhood, when I walked without electricity and without water. The songs that I heard. The food that I ate. The air that I smelled. The mountain that I climbed. The sea that I swam in. This is my culture, my existence. Nobody will take that from me. So I will continue making films. Despite everything.⁶⁵

shenby g (United States), The World Stands with Palestine!, 2023. Courtesy of Utopix and Artists Against Apartheid.

Resistance, Struggle, and Anti-Imperialism in the Global South

From the River to the Sea — Resistance, Struggle, and Anti-Imperialism in the Global South

Resistance, Struggle, and Anti-Imperialism in the Global South

Article 8 of 12

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

Originally published at https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/resistance-struggle-and-anti-imperialism-in-the-global-south/

Anti-colonial resistance in Palestine against genocide and settler colonialism has once again brought the question of armed struggle to the forefront of intellectual and political debates on liberation, internationalism, and anti-imperialism. This movement, to borrow from Palestinian writer Abdaljawad Omar, “is a liberation movement with global resonance that represents a universal struggle”—a global resonance today and yesterday, connected to other present and past liberatory movements.

In the decades after World War II, a wide array of radical movements and ideas emerged in what French scholar Alfred Sauvy referred to as the “Third World.” Fueled by the historical legacies of colonialism and structural continuation of different forms of US and European imperialism, these efforts fundamentally shaped the contours of the Global Cold War—a conflict that historian Odd Arne Westad referred to as “a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means.” Collectively, these Global South movements generally posited—through insurgent practices and resistance, theorizing, and movement organization—revolutionary alternatives to an existing exploitative world order. From anti-colonial revolutions, national liberation movements, and the Tricontinental, these efforts generated global visions based on solidarity and internationalism.

What insights and lessons can these histories offer for our increasingly “globalized” present marked by the unfettered circulation of capital and elites and the erection of murderous border walls/surveillance/technology for the masses? A present indelibly, tragically marked by the “end of history” but one that also sees the gradual re-emergence of internationalist horizons fueled by that long-time instigator of revolutionary internationalism, Palestinian resistance and its myriad forms? What is anti-imperialism in our age of genocide and capital-induced environmental catastrophe? What can anti-imperialist thinking, solidarity, organizing today glean from similar movements and moments in the Global South during the Cold War? Alternately, how have anti-imperialist imaginations from the past that never went away continued to shape the present?

In a forthcoming issue of Middle East Critique, authors reckon with these questions and more.Excerpts from the articles of two participating authors are included here in this Special Issue of My Pen is My Machete, the monthly blog of the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective.

Alexander Aviña is a member of AISC.

The Sword and the Neck – Reading the Al-Aqsa Flood: Book Review and Interview

From the River to the Sea — The Sword and the Neck – Reading the Al-Aqsa Flood: Book Review and Interview

The Sword and the Neck – Reading the Al-Aqsa Flood: Book Review and Interview

Article 9 of 12

Vox Ummah

By Shabbir Rizvi

Originally published at https://voxummah.com/2026/03/the-sword-and-the-neck-reading-the-al-aqsa-flood-book-review-and-interview/

Shabbir Rizvi

Calling for civility in the face of anti-colonial violence has always been the reflex of the liberal bourgeoisie. When the oppressed, the colonized, the downtrodden react to systemic violence imposed on them with their own violence, a chorus of voices from the oppressing class blankets the media-sphere and dominates the conversation.

Posturing themselves as the enlightened class, the arbiters of civilization, the defenders of democracy against the forces of barbarism, the liberal bourgeoisie deploys the usual tactics and talking points: why can’t the colonized and the oppressed subject engage in peaceful protest and discussion? What happened to dialogue? How can one negotiate with such violence?

Ignoring the material conditions of history and sweeping aside the very real historical injustices imposed upon the colonized subject, the talking points injected into discussions around national liberation and self-determination by the bourgeoisie seek to demonize the oppressed and prevent any solidarity in the face of brutal colonialism, all while obfuscating the historical roots of the colonial relationship imposed upon the colonized.

When the Palestinian resistance launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th, 2023, the world watched in awe as resistance from the largest open-air prison broke free and shattered the alleged invincibility of their colonial captors. The concept of “Decolonization” soon entered the general public’s vocabulary, a term once limited to the academic realm. But decolonization now had a modern event to describe what it means, and looks like: resistance breaking the fences of occupation, destroying tanks and occupation soldiers at point-blank range, lobbing rockets into the settlements and cities, and forcing the region to acknowledge their heroic operation.

Mainstream media was activated to control the narrative: fake stories regarding resistance atrocities were published in order to suspend sympathy and solidarity, and the colonial concept of “peace” (capitulation) was forced into conversations that infected even seasoned anti-war organizers within the imperial core.

Similarly, liberal and even some “socialist” philosophers weighed in on the resistance operation by towing the bourgeois line of capitulation, demonstrating how deeply colonial ideology is embedded in academic circles and even “progressive” forces.

However, the Israeli Occupation’s reaction to Al Aqsa Flood, in the form of an ongoing genocide (pre-October 2023) accelerated, demonstrating that peace was never an option within a colonial relationship. The Israeli occupier’s side is dedicated to the eradication and destruction of an entire population (different than the traditional exploitative relationship of the colonizer and colonized), and the oppressed Palestinian side is dedicated to resistance and liberation. There can never be dialogue between these two, as the root of this confrontation is colonization and ethnic cleansing.

In 1970, when Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) spokesperson and revolutionary theorist Ghassan Kanafani was pressed on why he did not engage in dialogue with the Israeli occupation, effectively engaging in capitulation, he answered that such a conversation would be “a conversation between the sword and the neck.”

Which brings us to Yanis Iqbal’s timely book “The Sword and the Neck: Reading the Al Aqsa Flood.” Published through the revolutionary Iskra Books, The Sword and the Neck tackles and viciously shreds the liberal-bourgeois arguments that aim to obfuscate and dismiss the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinian resistance.

The book is a quick read (about 130 pages), but it must be read carefully. Beginning with the very first chapter, it examines the “metaphysics of dominant narratives versus the physics of the oppressed” – placing the narratives that dominate the mainstream conversation around Al Aqsa Flood under the critical lens of historical materialism, tracing support for the colonial plan to dominate Palestine to the basic roots of liberalism: rights for a “community of the free” that are in confrontation with the “backwards,” “barbaric” hordes of the oppressed.

The chapters that follow confront dominant narratives imposed on the psyche of the masses, critiquing philosophers who condemn Palestinian resistance, such as Slavoj Žižek, and breaking down the false narrative that “peace” is but a conversation and “peace” conference away.

Furthermore, throughout the book, Iqbal attacks abstract idealism in concepts such as “justice” and “peace” by drawing on historical materialism to analyze the relationships between oppressor and oppressed. By doing so, Iqbal is able to deconstruct the narratives used to demonize Palestinian resistance and equip readers with talking points and investigative thinking, grounded in historical materialism, to properly defend the just resistance operation, Al-Aqsa Flood – and of course, any subsequent development of resistance to occupation.

After reading the book, one should be able to understand the dynamics of oppression and legitimize the reaction of the oppressed, and not find themselves on their back foot when defending the heroic actions of the Palestinian resistance. In fact, the book equips readers with the historical analysis needed to instead go on the offensive, and deconstruct the dominant narratives that seek to demonize resistance and stifle solidarity with anti-colonial forces. The Sword and the Neck rejects any argument for capitulation with the Israeli oppressor and roots the rejection in the reality of colonialism, staying true to the reference of the title.

The Sword and the Neck is a must-read for anyone who wishes to speak on the Al Aqsa Flood operation. It is a must-read for any organizer who stands in solidarity with Palestine, especially within the imperial core and its junior partners in the Global North. And of course, it is a must-read for those who struggle to defend, or perhaps understand, the legitimacy of armed resistance in the face of colonialism.

After reading the book, I reached out to the author, Yanis Iqbal, who was kind enough to take some time to answer questions regarding the book. Below is the full interview, unedited.

1. Thank you for taking a moment to speak with us. We would love for you to give us a short introduction: who you are, what you are up to, and what revolutionary influences guide your work and political development.

I am a student of political science and philosophy at Aligarh Muslim University in India. My interests span radical political theory, philosophy, cultural criticism, poetry, and film.

My political formation began early through my father, whose doctoral research at Jawaharlal Nehru University focused on Israel-Lebanon security politics. His engagement with anti-imperialist questions shaped the atmosphere in which I grew up. I remember, as a child, being shown images of Hugo Chávez during his illness and being asked to pray for him. That moment created an affective link with anti-imperialist struggle that has remained with me.

Among theoretical influences, Vladimir Lenin has been decisive. His insistence on the relation between revolutionary theory and revolutionary movement continues to orient my work. It compels me to produce forms of theory capable of confronting the forms of subjectivity generated by capitalism and imperialism.

2. Your book The Sword and the Neck challenges bourgeois liberal perspectives on the Palestinian resistance operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” through historical materialism and class analysis. Why did you choose the arguments you responded to?

I focused on bourgeois liberal perspectives because they function as common sense across both dominant discourse and much of what presents itself as radical theory. These frameworks circulate widely and shape how political events are interpreted, even within Marxist spaces.

The book engages figures such as Slavoj Žižek and Étienne Balibar in order to show how their philosophical positions can operate as rationalizations for pro-imperialist alignments. For many of us, theoretical formation takes place through academic infrastructures located in the Global North. Engaging these figures therefore becomes part of a broader effort to intervene in that structure.

The aim is to open space for forms of knowledge grounded in the Global South, capable of grasping capitalism as a global system whose dynamics are inseparable from imperialism.

3. When writing your critiques, did you have a specific audience in mind? Who stands to gain the most from this book?

I wrote with two audiences in view.

First, readers in Euro-Atlantic contexts who are undergoing political radicalization in response to the genocide in Gaza. For such readers, theoretical clarity becomes crucial, especially on contested questions such as the character of the “Axis of Resistance,” which is often dismissed through labels like “sub-imperialist” or “authoritarian.” The book seeks to clarify these issues at the level of political ontology, showing how the US-Israel axis encounters limits within the material structures of state sovereignty.

Second, readers in the Global South whose theoretical horizons are frequently shaped by Northern academic production. The book attempts, in a modest way, to unsettle this hierarchy and contribute to alternative trajectories of knowledge production.

4. Many on the left adopt positions grounded in abstract ideals such as “justice” or “equality,” without engaging in historical materialist analysis. How can progressive forces move beyond this tendency?

Moving beyond abstract idealism requires philosophical work. Much of contemporary left theory in the West remains tied to foundational assumptions at the level of ontology. Concepts such as Žižek’s negativity, Balibar’s “incompressible minimum,” or Ayça Çubukçu’s multiplicity introduce an excess that is presumed to guarantee emancipatory potential. These ontological guarantees then underpin appeals to ideals like justice or equality.

If such guarantees are set aside, politics appears as a field of construction, where emancipatory outcomes emerge through practices that actively produce new realities. Refaat Alareer articulated this rupture with exceptional clarity in his final interview, situating the limits of academic reflection within the immediacy of colonial violence. As he put it, “I am an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade us… I am going to use that marker, throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing I will be able to do.” What appears here is a displacement of philosophy from the security of ontological guarantees into a terrain where survival and resistance reconfigure the very conditions of thought. The point lies in how even the most minimal object becomes available for struggle once practice ceases to rely on abstract assurances and instead takes shape through concrete confrontation.

5. The chapter discussing “the politics of impotence” describes the importance of sovereignty via anti-colonial struggle, which is of course armed and violent. What can progressive forces do to normalize and legitimize the idea of armed resistance without using “international law” which is law written by bourgeois governments – as a reference point?

Contemporary uses of juridical language often reduce the colonized to passive victims, figures defined by vulnerability and in need of rescue. This framing obscures their role as active political agents engaged in struggle.

At the same time, international law has carried a different meaning in earlier moments. Comrade Majd Darwish, whom I met at the 2024 Annual Palestine Forum, has written about how international law helped in the legitimization of Palestinian armed struggle during the height of decolonization. From the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, through resolutions in the 1970s affirming the legitimacy of armed struggle, international law briefly functioned as a codification of anti-colonial praxis.

Re-legitimizing armed struggle will require breaking with all a-historical framings of the colonized as mere victims. Philosopher Seyla Benhabib, for instance, describes the situation in Gaza as a “cruel cycle of violence”: by presenting colonial domination and anti-colonial resistance as mutually reinforcing repetitions, this narrative absorbs the agency of the colonized into a generalized condition of suffering. In doing so, it recasts Palestinians as figures trapped within an endless loop of injury, where action appears only as reaction, and resistance loses its political specificity.

Breaking with this framework requires affirming the colonized as active subjects who strategize, and intervene in the conditions imposed upon them. Armed struggle, in this sense, emerges as a deliberate and historically grounded practice through which new political realities are constructed. The emphasis shifts from generalized suffering awaiting recognition to collective capacities that confront and transform structures of domination.

Shabbir Rizvi is the Political Director of Vox Ummah. He is also a contributor to Sovereign Media and has been featured on PressTV, Al Mayadeen, and Orinoco Tribune.

Nada Elia: 'Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished.'

From the River to the Sea — Nada Elia: 'Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished.'

Nada Elia: 'Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished.'

Article 10 of 12

Progressive International

By Nada Elia

Originally published at https://progressive.international/wire/2023-05-25-nada-elia-zionism-cannot-be-reformed-it-must-be-abolished-/en/

It is impossible to overemphasize that today’s activism must be transformational. It must be decolonial, seeking full liberation from the mental and generational shackles of the oppressive system, and not merely anticolonial, aimed at ousting the occupier.

First published in Issue 15 of The Internationalist.

Achieving justice for Palestine entails more than abolishing Israeli apartheid. The inertia of over a century of inequality, and of the privileged status of the settlers as they forcibly and violently dispossessed, and continue to dispossess, Palestine’s Indigenous people, cannot be reversed solely through the formal dissolution of the oppressive system. The present plight of formerly colonized countries around the globe, after they gained their independence, as well as the ongoing circumstances of the Black and Indigenous people of North America, who theoretically have equal rights but who have remained criminalized, hunted, caged, and murdered, is proof that eliminating legal barriers without addressing the practical consequences of injustice does not redress historic inequities. Therefore, even as we are organizing to overthrow Israel’s state-sanctioned violence, we must look beyond apartheid as the primary means of oppression of the Palestinian people. Beyond apartheid, Zionism itself must be abolished. It is an essentially racist, supremacist ideology, and the oppressive system it has produced cannot be reformed.

Abolition hinges on the understanding that reform—making changes to an existing system—does not solve the problems created by that system, it only helps maintain the system by making it less obviously abrasive, without transforming its corrosive core. Today, this argument is being made about the police all across the USA, with a number of grassroots organizers and public intellectuals debunking myths that the police are an overall positive social force, where rogue elements occasionally go awry. Abolitionists argue instead that the system is not broken, it is functioning exactly as it was always intended to. Therefore, there is no need to “fix” it, to restore it to its original form, because that form itself is oppressive at its inception, as it remains to this day. When was “the system” not broken, abolitionists ask? When was it not racist, when was it not violent, when we know that the origin of the police forces in the US South was as slave patrols, while in the US north, they were first established to thwart protests for better labor conditions?

The call for abolishing the police, and prisons, is not recent, having been discussed in the USA, for example, almost twenty years ago by Angela Davis in Are Prisons Obsolete?, and by anti-carceral grassroots groups such as Critical Resistance, and INCITE! Feminists of Color Against Violence, who understood that their communities are endangered, not protected, by the “security state.” However, abolition has now entered popular discourse, with organizers demanding at protests nationally that police forces be defunded, and the abolitionist Mariame Kaba writing an OpEd published in the New York Times titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”.  Police abolitionists are very clear about the necessity of building strong structures to support disenfranchised communities that have never been “served and protected” by the police. As Angela Davis writes: “Abolition is about organizing community alternatives to policing and mass incarceration, about using the breathing room afforded by these small victories not to propose a slightly better version of the same, but to shoot for something radically different.”

In the context of Palestine, abolition hinges on the understanding that a reform of the Zionist state cannot possibly solve the problems created by Zionism, it only helps maintain them. Seeking to reform the Zionist state assumes that Zionism’s initial impulse—which is premised on settler colonialism and necessitates land theft, dispossession, displacement, human and cultural genocide—is acceptable, but that something went wrong, somewhere down the line. For instance, a reform limited to the West Bank and Gaza implies that al-Nakba—Palestine’s catastrophe—did not start around 1948, but in 1967.

Ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would not dismantle Jewish supremacy in those parts of the Palestinian homeland first occupied in 1948; nor would it address the Right of Return of Palestinians displaced from those cities and villages occupied in 1948, without which the Zionist dream would not have materialized. Indeed, the “peace process,” with its endless round of futile talks, is an illustration of the attempt at “reform,” rather than abolition. What that process has led to is an entrenchment of dispossession, now subcontracted to the Palestinian Authority. Instead, one must ask: “When was Zionism not a supremacist ideology privileging some people over others, based on perceived ethnicity? When did Zionism not necessitate the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people? Was there ever one brief moment, from its inception to the present day, when Zionism was not violent?” Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished.

This excerpt has been taken from Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, published by Pluto Press in January 2023.

Nada Elia is a Palestinian writer, grassroots organizer, and university professor. She is the author of Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives, and has contributed chapters to Palestine: A Socialist Introduction and The Case for Sanctions on Israel. Elia is a core member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and has been the plenary presenter at major conferences such as the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Her articles have been published in Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye and Electronic Intifada amongst many other places.

Photo: Alisdare Hickson / Flickr

Kwame Ture's Anti-Zionism: The Meeting Between Pan-Africanism and Palestine

From the River to the Sea — Kwame Ture's Anti-Zionism: The Meeting Between Pan-Africanism and Palestine

Kwame Ture's Anti-Zionism: The Meeting Between Pan-Africanism and Palestine

Article 11 of 12

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

By Momodou Taal

Originally published at https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/kwame-ture-s-anti-zionism-the-meeting-between-pan-africanism-and-palestine/

Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, defined Pan-Africanism as “the total unification and liberation of Africa under scientific socialism.”[1] This formulation is important not only for what it affirms—unity, liberation, socialism—but also for what it rejects: reformism, nationalism without political economy, and solidarities emptied of material analysis. Ture’s Pan-Africanism was not the Negritude of Senghor; it was a theory of power rooted in anti-imperial struggle.

Within the framework of Pan-Africanism in the twentieth century, Ture emerged as one of the most vocal and uncompromising critics of Israel and Zionism outside of the Arab-Iranian region. Long before Palestine became a household cause, Ture insisted that Black liberation and Palestinian liberation were structurally linked. He understood Zionism not as an aberration of the post-World War II order or a question of competing nationalisms, but as a colonial ideology embedded within a global imperial system dominated by the United States.

In a moment when reactionary forces work relentlessly to erase, distort, or domesticate histories of radical internationalism, Kwame Ture offers not only an archive but a model. His Pan-Africanist orientation rejects the separation of domestic racial injustice from global imperial violence. Key moments of Ture’s anti-Zionist organizing illuminate the tradition of principled, internationalist struggle that speaks directly to the present.

In August 1968, the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) convened a five-day national conference at the University of Michigan. Contemporary reporting notes the presence of between 300 and 400 Arab students from across the United States, alongside a delegation from the Black Panther Party. The conference took place just over a year after the June 1967 Six-Day War , which resulted in Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula.

Far from a cultural or academic gathering, the OAS convention reflected a growing radicalization among Arab students in the United States. A report written at the time by Jan Garrett and Peter Herreshoff observed that the convention marked “a further deepening of the Arab students in the direction of revolutionary struggle and community-building struggle and the identification with the liberation struggles of the colonial world.”[2] This identification was neither accidental nor rhetorical; it emerged from a shared understanding of imperialism as a global structure rather than a series of isolated injustices.

The internationalist orientation of the conference was underscored by a message sent to the delegates by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a central figure in Third World anti-imperial politics. Nasser warned: “I do not wish to sketch a rosy picture of the Arab future. You are well aware of the fact that it is not Zionism alone that we are facing, but indeed all the forces of imperialism, which despise all human and moral values and look with contempt on whatever is sacred in international relations. Israel is the spearhead of those forces.”[3] Nasser’s statement framed Zionism not as a clash of civilisations as Bernard Lewis would write , but as an instrument of imperial power. This framing would deeply resonate with Black radicals in the United States who were increasingly seeking international allies.

This moment unfolded amid a decisive political shift within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1967, SNCC issued a public statement denouncing Zionism and expressing solidarity with Palestinians , marking a sharp break from mainstream U.S. political discourse. Under Ture’s leadership , SNCC moved decisively toward an internationalist, anti-imperialist framework—one that understood African Americans, or as Ture insisted, Africans in America, as part of a global struggle against colonial domination.[4] This position came at a high cost. SNCC was accused of antisemitism. Yet rather than retreat, the organization doubled down on its analysis. In defiance of the backlash directed at SNCC, the OAS invited Kwame Ture to serve as a keynote speaker at its 1968 convention. In his address, Ture made his position unmistakably clear: “People who want our support will have to condemn Zionism.”[5] With this declaration, Ture established anti-Zionism as a litmus test for solidarity. Solidarity in praxis then required taking sides against imperial structures.

Central to Ture’s analysis was his understanding of Zionism as a form of settler colonialism. He rejected the framing of Israel as a unique historical exception, instead situating it alongside other settler projects produced by European expansion. In speeches delivered throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ture repeatedly named Israel in the same breath as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Southern African settler regimes. As he argued: “The settlers’ aim is to make the colony an extension of their original country. Mozambique is a settler colony. Angola is a settler colony. Portuguese Guinea is a settler colony. Australia is a settler colony. My brothers and sisters, Israel is a settler colony. But more importantly for you and for me, we must come to understand that America and Canada are settler colonies.”[6]

This analysis collapses the artificial distinction between “foreign” and “domestic.” For Ture, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, the enslavement and racial domination of Africans in America, and the colonization of Palestine were not parallel tragedies but interconnected outcomes of a single global system. U.S. imperialism, in his view, constituted the structural condition of possibility for Zionism in the post WWII order. In Stokely Speaks, particularly in the speech “The Black American and Palestinian Revolutions,” Ture articulated his position with characteristic clarity: “We have begun to see this trickery of Zionism; we have begun to see the evil of Zionism, and we will fight to wipe it out wherever it exists, in the Middle East or in the ghetto of the United States. The United States is the greatest de-humanizer in the world, and Israel is nothing but a finger of the United States of America.”[7] By explicitly tying Israel’s continued existence to U.S. geopolitical ambitions, Ture made clear that Israel functioned as an extension of American power. Its violence was not accidental or defensive; it was systemic, structural, and internationally enabled.

In 1989, Kwame Ture was invited to deliver a lecture at Oberlin College. As had become routine, his invitation sparked organized efforts to have the event cancelled. He was labelled antisemitic, and organizers were pressured to publicly denounce him. These tactics—moral panic, donor pressure, and institutional intimidation—bear a striking resemblance to those deployed against pro-Palestinian voices today . However, Oberlin College refused to capitulate. In a public statement, the administration rejected the false binary imposed upon them, insisting, “We refuse to be drawn into an exchange in which we only have one of two choices: either to denounce Kwame Ture as an anti-Semite or to be labelled anti-Semitic ourselves.” The statement further clarified: “Anti-Zionism is the principled opposition to the notion that the land of Palestine was given by God to the Jews… Anti-Semitism is the racist discrimination against Jewish people. There is a world of difference between these two positions, and people are presently paying with their lives for the difference.”[8] At a time when universities increasingly capitulate to state pressure and donor intimidation , Oberlin’s refusal stands as a rare example of institutional courage.

Ture’s anti-Zionism was not idiosyncratic; it was rooted in a broader Pan-African and Third World consensus. In 1975, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) adopted a resolution identifying Zionism as a danger to world peace and as structurally linked to apartheid regimes in Southern Africa. The resolution explicitly recognized the shared imperial origins of Zionism, apartheid in South Africa, and settler colonialism in Zimbabwe and Namibia. This position informed African support for United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 , which declared Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. The resolution was overturned in 1991, not because its analysis had been disproven, but as a condition imposed on Palestinians and Arabs for Israel’s participation in the Madrid Peace Conference.

In 1991, Ture helped found the World-Wide African Anti-Zionist Front , reaffirming Africa’s historic opposition to Zionism despite mounting U.S. pressure. In his opening address, Ture summarized the matter succinctly: “Many think that Zionism is not Africa’s direct enemy and therefore Africa’s struggle is relegated to a supportive role. We conscious Africans know that Zionism is Africa’s direct enemy.”[9] Ture’s claim was not rhetorical. Israel demonstrated consistent hostility to African liberation through concrete actions, including:

Participating in the killing of Egyptian soldiers during the 1967 war

Opposing Algerian and Tunisian self-determination at the United Nations from 1954-1962

Provisioning military and diplomatic support to apartheid regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Portuguese-controlled Angola and Mozambique from 1960’s to the 1980’s:

Training police forces across North America, starting in the 1970s, exporting counterinsurgency tactics that intensified racialized policing, and

Ongoing support of the illegal U.S. blockade of Cuba, standing alongside Washington against a Black-led socialist revolution

These actions reveal in no uncertain terms that Israel is no friend to African people. As such, for Kwame Ture, anti-Zionism was not an optional position within radical politics. Opposition to imperialism, capitalism, and racism required the complete rejection of Zionism. As he declared : “We know many who call themselves anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist—but are not anti-Zionist. However, when one is anti-Zionist, one is automatically anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and definitely anti-racist.”[10]

“I dream,” averred Ture, “of having coffee with my wife in South Africa; and mint tea in Palestine.” These simple, grounded dreams remain unrealized. And they remain ours.

Momodou Taal is a member of AISC's student wing.

____________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2007), 179.

[2] Jan Garrett and Peter Herreshoff, “Arab Student Movement in the United States,” Liberated Guardian, 1968.

[3] Gamal Abdel Nasser, message to Arab student delegates in the United States, 1968, cited in contemporary OAS materials.

[4] Peniel Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 215-30.

[5] Kwame Ture, speech at OAS Convention, University of Michigan, 1968.

[6] Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 201.

[7] Ibid., 183-84.

[8] Oberlin College Administrative Statement, 1989 (Oberlin College Archives).

[9] Kwame Ture, address to African Liberation Support Committees, late 1980s.

[10] Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 201.

"Our Allies in the World Are the Free People, Whether Progressive, Marxist-Leninist, or Islamic": Palestinian Resistance

From the River to the Sea — "Our Allies in the World Are the Free People, Whether Progressive, Marxist-Leninist, or Islamic": Palestinian Resistance

"Our Allies in the World Are the Free People, Whether Progressive, Marxist-Leninist, or Islamic": Palestinian Resistance

Article 12 of 12

Voice of the Proletariat

By Park Jee-hoon

Originally published at https://voiceoftheproletariat.substack.com/p/allies-regardless-of-ideology-palestinian-resistance

In a video shared by @james_dreamin on INS on August 1, a Palestinian freedom fighter asserts that Palestine stands with all its allies regardless of ideology.

While the video remains up on INS at the time of writing, my story share was taken down by Meta. This is very common for posts depicting or even simply discussing so-called “terrorist organizations,” such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar’Allah (the Houthis), and the IRGC.

This post is part of my efforts to keep such videos available online despite corporate social media censorship and takedowns.

Transcript

Our allies in the world are the free people, those who support the rights of the Palestinian people. They are our allies, regardless of their ideology, whether progressive, Marxist-Leninist, or Islamic.

Whatever sect they belong to, every free and noble person in this world is our ally. And within our capabilities, we will stand with them, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, against the Zionist imperialist project in the region.

This transcript was typed manually without the use of GenAI.

The term “progressive” can, of course, be defined as either “liberal” or “revolutionary” depending on context. In the modern era, “progressive” typically relates to liberal ideology, though the term can also be understood as “revolutionary.”

For instance, the translation chosen by the Marxists Internet Archive uses the word “progressive” for Mao’s quote, “All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust,” while other translations state, “All counter-revolutionary wars are unjust; all revolutionary wars are just.”

It is worth noting that the vast majority of “pro-Palestine” liberals do not support Palestinian resistance, only holding an abstract, purely theoretical idea that Palestine should be free. The liberal Zionists often push for a “two-state solution” and uphold the so-called “State of Israel’s” supposed “right to exist.”

Thus, it can be concluded that liberal “progressives” are not the kind the fighter is invoking, but rather those who hold revolutionary ideologies.

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Citations

Citations

Despite Everything: Cultural Resistance for a Free Palestine

Notes

¹ Alareer, ‘If I Must Die’.

² Alareer, ‘Stories Make Us’.

³ UNRWA, ‘UNRWA Situation Report’.

⁴ Prashad, ‘Life Expectancy Falls in Gaza’.

⁵ UN Web TV, ‘Searching Gaza’s Missing’.

⁶ Prashad, ‘The Palestinian People Are Already Free’.

⁷ Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 1.

⁸ Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 4.

⁹ Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 53.

¹⁰ Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 83.

¹¹ Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 69.

¹² Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 69, 83, 84, 90, 99.

¹³ Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 69, 91.

¹⁴ Law for Palestine and Al-Haq Investigates.

¹⁵ Law for Palestine.

¹⁶ See Adam Raz, Loot.

¹⁷ Hatuqa, ‘Israel’s “Great Book Robbery” Unravelled’.

¹⁸ Sheehan, ‘These Are the Poets and Writers’.

¹⁹ Chak, ‘War to Kill Our Hopes’.

²⁰ Tricontinental, Dawn: Marxism and National Liberation.

²¹ Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, 6.

²² Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, 6.

²³ Mao, ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum’.

²⁴ Kanafani, Resistance Literature, 9–10.

²⁵ Kanafani, ‘Resistance Literature’, 69.

²⁶ Halaby, Liberation Art, 45.

²⁷ Halaby, Liberation Art, 54.

²⁸ Halaby, Liberation Art, 32.

²⁹ Darwish, Select Poems, 96.

³⁰ Bakri, interview.

³¹ Makhoul and Hon, The Origins of Palestinian Art, 10–11.

³² Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, 226–229.

³³ Said, The Question of Palestine, x, 42.

³⁴ Kanafani, Resistance Literature, 19.

³⁵ Kanafani, Resistance Literature, 22–25.

³⁶ Bakri, interview.

³⁷ Kanafani, Resistance Literature, 74.

³⁸ Bakri, interview.

³⁹ Totry and Medzini, ‘The Use of Cartoons’, 25.

⁴⁰ Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 107.

⁴¹ Khalil, interview.

⁴² Snir, ‘Palestinian Professional Theatre’, 11.

⁴³ Snir, ‘Palestinian Professional Theatre’, 7.

⁴⁴ Khalil, interview.

⁴⁵ ‘Founders of El-Hakawati Theatre’.

⁴⁶ Sheta, interview.

⁴⁷ Mee, ‘The Cultural Intifada’, 174–175.

⁴⁸ Mee, ‘The Cultural Intifada’, 168.

⁴⁹ Hamdi, Imagining Palestine, 1.

⁵⁰ The Oslo Accords were a series of agreements signed between Israel and the PLO in the mid-1990s that established the Palestinian Authority and gave it limited self-governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Israel retaining effective control over borders, airspace, external trade, movement, and security, and complete control over more than 60% of the West Bank. Together with the Paris Protocol, this framework integrated the Palestinian economy into Israel’s customs and fiscal regime.

⁵¹ Hawa, interview.

⁵² Asakleh, interview.

⁵³ Wakeem, interview.

⁵⁴ Craig and Islam, interview. To view the poster collection produced by Artists Against Apartheid, visit their website: https://againstapartheid.art/downloads.

⁵⁵ To download the posters, visit their website: https://utopix.cc/bitacora/eyes-on-palestine/.

⁵⁶ Carmona, interview, our translation.

⁵⁷ Khouri and Salti, Past Disquiet, 28.

⁵⁸ Khouri and Salti, Past Disquiet, 30.

⁵⁹ Khouri and Salti, Past Disquiet, 31.

⁶⁰ Khouri and Salti, Past Disquiet, 34.

⁶¹ Khouri and Salti, Past Disquiet, 46.

⁶² Kanafani, quoted in The Revolution 1936–39 in Palestine, xiv.

⁶³ Bakri, interview.

⁶⁴ Wakeem, interview.

⁶⁵ Bakri, interview.

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