How liberal Zionists spread the “Israel created Hamas” narrative, & used it to undermine the pro-Palestine movement

This is from a book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why the Pro-Palestine Movement Failed to Stop a Holocaust, & How it Can Still Win.”

Whenever somebody who purports to be pro-Palestine takes part in demonizing the resistance, one of the most harmful things this does is help the Zionists in separating Gaza from the West Bank. When the occupier enclosed Gaza—and in turn created an outcome where one area of Palestine would become governed by a different leadership than the other—it aimed to kill the hope for a pro-Palestine united front. Essential to this project is the narrative that there are “good” and “bad” Palestinians, with the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority being the noble side and Gaza’s Hamas being the evil side.

The struggle against this narrative is something only those within the Palestinian community itself can properly carry out, because it’s a cultural debate that’s internal to this community. But every supporter of Palestine can and must combat the larger propaganda around this narrative, in which the forces that are actually resisting the occupation get portrayed as moral equivalents to the oppressors. (Or, more insidiously, as secret tools of the oppressors.)

For the “pro-Palestine, anti-Hamas” actors to effectively influence the movement, certain narratives have first needed to be normalized within left-wing and antiwar discourses. Narratives which depict the resistance as being a controlled opposition for the Netanyahu government, even if those promoting these ideas do so in a way that’s sympathetic to the concept of resistance.

What these arguments do is vilify the resistance as it actually exists, mourning how Palestine supposedly has no authentic forces fighting against the occupation. (Or, more honestly, mourning how Gaza is ruled by forces that want to fight the occupation rather than endlessly trying to compromise with the oppressor.) This narrative has overlap with the idea that “Israel” would be a progressive force which is willing to reach a two-state solution, if only the “extremist” Netanyahu government were replaced; this is because the “Israel created Hamas” narrative is a liberal Zionist argument, propagated in order to sell the idea that “Israel” will become good when Netanyahu is gone. We know it’s a liberal Zionist argument because some of the first people to make this argument—if not the very first people—were occupation officials who’ve positioned themselves as the level-headed progressives within Zionism.

When pro-Palestine commentators try to argue against the genocide’s rationale by depicting Hamas as a creation of “Israel,” someone they often cite is Avner Cohen, a former “Israeli” religious affairs official who directly participated in the colonial management of Gaza. The quote from Cohen that these commentators most commonly use is “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” and the source this statement comes from is a 2009 Wall Street Journal article; one that sought to proliferate a chauvinistic view towards the Palestinian resistance, and rationalize the Zionist aggressions the world had just witnessed.

Written right after the 2008 Zionist assault on Gaza, where over 1000 Palestinians were murdered and over 46,000 homes were destroyed, the article was trying to frame these events in a way that somewhat criticized “Israel” while still depicting Zionism as salvageable. With Netanyahu likely to become the next prime minister, it made sense to present Netanyahu’s faction as representing the “bad” kind of Zionism, the one that was to blame for bringing “extremists” to power in Gaza. That way, the U.S. could implicitly justify the recent war crimes against Gaza as necessary for combating these “extremist” Palestinian forces. Within this narrative, “Israel” had only been trying to clean up the mess made by the “bad” Zionists. 

Wrote the Journal about Cohen’s lament over the rise of Hamas, and how this would have consequences for the occupation forces:

Responsible for religious affairs in the [Gaza] region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

The implication of this kind of language is that Hamas is an equivalent to Al Qaeda; that the occupier’s efforts to manage the rise of Hamas are analogous to Washington’s support for Bin Laden and the Mujahideen. This is the conclusion that leftists who know Al Qaeda’s history come to when they absorb these narratives about Hamas; but Hamas does not have the reactionary role of Al Qaeda or ISIS. Once you accept that premise, you’ve already conceded the argument; “Hamas is ISIS” is one of the Zionist entity’s biggest talking points, frequently used by Netanyahu himself. And that so much of the left has accepted this argument makes it all the more effective.

The creation of Hamas represented a genuinely revolutionary break from the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had taken a weak stance towards the occupation but ended up producing a real national liberation force. This force, Hamas, then entered a coalition with many different armed resistance factions that were not Islamist; for example, the communist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which participated in Al Aqsa Flood. This disproves the narrative that Hamas is an enemy of the left, as the empire’s propaganda has encouraged leftists to believe; to characterize Hamas as a reactionary Zionist tool is to oppose all of the leftists and communists who ally with it.

The only way you could coherently oppose Hamas is if you were coming at it from the anti-communist, anti-Palestinian, War on Terror worldview; which is obviously what the Journal was seeking to promote with this article, but if you’re a leftist the empire prefers that you still hate Hamas. The purpose of this kind of propaganda is not just to defend Zionism, but to manipulate the left in particular, keeping Palestine supporters hostile towards the resistance.

The Journal’s framing of the origins of Hamas has since been copied by much of the “progressive” or “alternative” media, because this is a framing that lets somebody oppose “Israel” and the resistance at the same time. It was certainly useful for Medhi Hasan, the ostensibly pro-Palestine pundit who’s been able to keep the legacy media’s favor by promoting key imperialist narratives.

Hasan is one of the figures most responsible for popularizing the “Israel created Hamas” argument in modern discourse, with Hasan having quoted Avner Cohen in a 2018 piece for The Intercept where this idea was the main message. When Hasan has promoted the “Assad gas attack” narratives, and advocated for voting Blue during the Biden administration’s facilitation of the Gaza genocide, his emphasis on this argument about Hamas makes perfect sense. It’s an argument that a pro-Palestinian commentator reaches for when they want to still be compatible with the imperialist media machine, so the most opportunistic and liberal types of “pro-Palestine” voices have gravitated towards it.

No matter how aggressively Mehdi Hasan denounces the genocide or debates against Zionists, his promotion of that framing enables those who seek to normalize the occupation, and to make Zionism appear compatible with a “free” Palestine. When Hasan endorses Democrats, this of course also has that effect; but the more effective psyop he propagates is the one about Hamas being a tool for “Israel,” because this is a psyop that’s successfully swayed many people who otherwise reject imperialist narratives.

It’s a common talking point within the more online elements of pro-Palestine discourse; and this isn’t just because it’s been boosted by our ruling class, but also because it has the appearance of being a profoundly radical argument. It seemingly blows apart the entire Zionist worldview, exposing the fraudulence of the idea that “Israel” is here to fight terrorism. But what happens when you affirm the narrative that those fighting against the occupation are “terrorists?” When you forsake a real analysis of anti-colonial resistance and national liberation, for the sake of trying to argue with the colonizers on their own terms?       

What happens is that much of the pro-Palestine base stays disconnected from the actual, material power struggle that’s taking place. Which helps the NGO-tied, pro-normalization elements take control of the movement. Among these elements is J Street, the liberal Zionist Political Action Committee that backs Sanders and other social democrats. Though left-wing orgs in general are increasingly being targeted, J Street will stay part of the establishment; I personally expect it to gain a larger role in the Democratic Party as time goes on. This is because J Street acts as an instrumental vehicle for promoting the ideology of the Palestinian elites who collaborate with the occupier. 

It’s an ideology that’s anti-communist, anti-Iran, aligned with the Syrian “revolution,” hostile towards the resistance, and in favor of normalization. Its adherents can wish for the genocide to end, but they’re fundamentally guided by beliefs which assist the Zionist project. And they receive support from the highest levels of the imperialist power structure.

One example of this is when the European Commission provided ample backing for the creation of the Two State Solution Coalition in April 2018. States the Geneva Accord website about what the Coalition and its partnered NGOs seek to do:

The Palestinian and Israeli Geneva Initiative NGOs (the Palestinian Peace Coalition and H.L. Education for Peace) educate and campaign, both locally and internationally, that it is in the best interest of both peoples to negotiate directly in order to reach a realistic, dignified, and sustainable two-state solution in which both peoples can build a brighter future, as is embodied in the model Geneva Accord model. The GI and our activities are designed to reinstill in the Israeli and Palestinian peoples the hope that it is possible to reach an agreement that will serve their respective national and personal interests and aspirations. We are committed to exposing each side’s public to the message of the other – despite the physical and psychological barriers.

The Palestinian Peace Coalition/Geneva Initiative has direct ties to J Street; in its 2024 Leadership and Friends Spring Assembly, J Street featured the PPC’s Director General Nidal Foqaha as one of the event’s speakers. According to the narrative that J Street-aligned politicians are pushing, the European Commission and these NGOs represent the “peaceful” alternative to the “extremist” path that Hamas and the resistance are on. But the irony is Hamas also takes the position that a two-state solution is what needs to happen; it just does so in a way that’s compatible with the true and full liberation of Palestine, unlike liberal Zionists do when they advocate for the two-state solution.

The “peaceful” side in this debate does not even offer a realistic path towards compromise, because in order to get that compromise, the resistance will need to win. The occupier rendered two states impractical when it seized key parts of Palestinian land, turning the West Bank into an archipelago of isolated Palestinian territories. Moreover, any version of a Palestinian state that the occupier willingly agrees to will be one where the Palestinians don’t have the ability to defend themselves, and therefore are not sovereign; that was the kind of “Palestinian state” the occupier proposed in the 1995 Oslo negotiations, which were the only time when there’s been any serious diplomatic breakthrough towards getting Palestine statehood.

For Palestine to gain a state, the occupier will need to be made weak enough that it can no longer hold the leverage to prevent that state from being established. Which requires that the resistance win.

Why has the resistance made a two-state solution its goal, when “from the river to the sea” is the only way that all Palestinians can ever become free from persecution? Because realistically, the Zionist entity won’t disappear all at once; there will need to be an incremental dismantling of the ethno-state. There will need to be a change in demographics, where enough of the colonizers leave for the Palestinians in “Israel” to no longer exist under the whims of a deeply supremacist-minded Jewish majority. With an empowered Palestine, one that’s come to have a state of its own, many of these supremacists will not stay in “Israel” in the long term; they’ll largely leave, like the settlers in Rhodesia did after the indigenous people subdued them. 

The 20th century’s history of anti-colonial struggle provides Palestinians with the solution to their own land’s settler-colonial problem; this history shows that when an indigenous people have triumphed, a crucial percentage of the colonizers will go away of their own accord, rendering settler-colonialism untenable. That’s the logical outcome of what a two-state solution will produce when it’s actually put into practice: a scenario where the Palestinians can rebuild their civilizational strength, making colonizer society too crippled to carry on.

When liberal or “labor” Zionists say they want a two-state solution, they’re coming from a place where they seriously believe that “Israel” can be redeemed, and made into an equal society. That’s at least the rationale behind the “two-state solution” talking point when liberal Zionist spokespeople use it; functionally, it’s a way to funnel Palestine supporters into an endeavor that’s a dead end for their cause. Any version of “pro-Palestine” politics that opposes the resistance can only set back the project for liberation. All practical manifestations of this kind of politics are ones that have ruling class backing, and that seek not to help Palestinians fight the occupation but to have Palestinians appease it. This is what the EU-backed NGOs are doing when they work to “expose” Palestinians to messages from liberal Zionists.

This is not what the bulk of the pro-Palestine movement’s base wants. Among the majority of Americans who are against the genocide, there is a massive current that outright supports the resistance; an April 2024 Harvard CAPS-Harris survey found that among 18 to 24-year-olds, over 40 percent of respondents supported Hamas over “Israel,” and this proportion has no doubt grown since then. The mass will is there to build a united front in solidarity with the resistance. And such an organizational force  can be built, but we will first need to navigate around the traps the NGOs have set for our movement.

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Victory won’t come on its own: the Axis of Resistance can only win if we wage a popular struggle alongside it

Above: Iran launching its missiles

There can only be a successful resistance towards Washington’s war drive if we build the international workers force which can actually change the power balance. If we create a global united front behind the Axis of Resistance, like the united front that was instrumental in helping Vietnam defeat the USA. This aspect of collective organization, of class struggle, is what’s been largely missing from anti-imperialist or “antiwar” politics in the present-day Global North.

The movement which opposes Washington’s aggressions has relied too much on the “alternative” media, which so often tells us what we want to hear rather than giving us an honest strategic appraisal; and this has kept the movement detached from the actual national liberation and class struggles. These struggles are the driving forces behind all anti-imperialist victories, and we must truly become part of them.

Because of this gap in experience and awareness, too often we’ve expected victory to come of its own accord. But every time our cause has gotten a win, it’s been the outcome of fights waged by the popular masses, whose interests wouldn’t be represented if not for collective organization and a struggle against the capitalist class. Iran became as anti-imperialist as it now is because of the proletarian influences within its revolution, which have made the country’s economy essentially socialist. The equivalent is the case for capitalist Russia, which wouldn’t have entered into a fight against NATO if not for the leverage the country’s Communist Party holds. 

Likewise, whenever the anti-imperialist cause has experienced a setback, it’s been due to the areas in which class struggle has been lacking; due to the ways the bourgeoisie have been able to maintain or retake power, and thereby corrupt the efforts at resisting the hegemon. 

Iran is socialistic in its economic structure, but in political terms it’s not a dictatorship of the proletariat; different class influences within its political order are still battling for control. Which has made it easier for the imperialists to undermine the revolutionary forces within Iran. Starting with Soleimani, Washington has been perpetrating a wave of assassinations against the revolutionaries in Iran’s leadership, one that they hope will ultimately take the life of Khamenei himself. With the assassination of President Raisi in May of last year, Iran’s liberal reformers got an opportunity for gaining power, and soon they managed to elect President Pezeshkian. When Haniyeh was murdered in July, Pezeshkian refused to retaliate; this move was part of a “peace” deal where the Zionist entity promised not to attack Lebanon in exchange for restraint from Iran. It was only after the entity started a new war on Lebanon anyway, and murdered Nasrallah, that the revolutionaries regained the leverage to carry out a retaliatory strike.

Since then, Khamenei’s faction has been able to get more influence in important areas. After Khamenei declared in March that Iran won’t seriously negotiate with Washington, Iran has inflicted damage upon the Zionist entity, to a more serious degree than it previously had the political will to do. These developments are good, but so many more things will need to happen before the resistance can actually start bringing its lines forward; the recent retaliations are defensive in nature, and to win, it will need to make up for its biggest recent losses. Losses that also came about due to lack of popular struggle, not just locally but in the empire’s core.

The fall of Syria’s anti-imperialist government came about from a combination of bourgeois sabotage within its political structure, lack of will from its allies to assist Syria, and refusal from the U.S. left to act in solidarity with the country. All of these problems stem from the same ill: a failure to rebuild the international workers movement. This is something that I especially want to convey to left-wing or antiwar people in my own country, because it’s those of us in the United States whose government is leading all of these destructive schemes.

It’s important to recognize the internal deficiencies that have made these countries more vulnerable to Washington’s aggressions. In the case of Syria, those deficiencies looked like a substantial bourgeois political presence that undermined the will to defend the country; and this is useful to learn, but our takeaway from it cannot simply be “imperialism’s targets need to act more ideologically pure.” Purity isn’t the point, class struggle is. The only practical way we can respond to these problems is by building up the international solidarity movement, which will have a positive effect in all areas. It will help the anti-imperialist rebels who continue to fight the Syrian jihadist coup regime, but that at present are far from victory; it will help the Iranians, the Palestinians, the Yemenis, the Lebanese, and every other people who are resisting the hegemon.

Doing that work to revitalize the proletarian movement is the only productive path forward. We can debate about how well these countries have been living up to the ideal of an anti-imperialist ally, and it’s necessary to point to the real problems with them. But for more progress to come in the fight against the hegemon, there is going to need to be a struggle from the bottom-up. We within the movement are going to need to construct the organizational outlets that the globe’s masses will require in order to assert their interests, whether that looks like weakening the imperialist governments, strengthening the resolve of the anti-imperialist governments, or undermining U.S. proxy states such as “Israel” and post-Assad Syria.

This work must become our central focus, and we have to treat it as an urgent task. Washington’s recent sabotages of potential peace efforts in Iran and Ukraine have pushed Iran and Russia in a more revolutionary direction, but this can only take our cause so far. When the struggle against the hegemon wins, it will happen not due to a reaction from the bourgeois states that have been pushed into conflict with the empire, but due to the advances from the international workers struggle. And those of us in the empire’s core shouldn’t act like we’re above the world’s other proletarians in any way, but we must recognize the unique role that our location gives us. Joti Brar has pointed out that “Ultimately, the system’s final death blows will be delivered by workers on the home front. Genuinely revolutionary parties must be built in the imperialist countries, and they must establish strong connections with the masses.”

It’s by learning from the revolutionary movements in the countries which imperialism targets that we’ll be able to properly carry out this mission. These movements are the ones that have already achieved great new progress following the USSR’s fall; they’ve managed to massively change the balance of power shortly after the liberation struggle experienced such a severe setback. If we follow their lead, we will bring the struggle to its next stage.

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The Dems seek to neutralize the mass movement behind Zohran. Only a pro-Palestine united front can prevent this.

The popular base behind Zohran Mamdani is real, and has great revolutionary potential; the risk is in how this potential could become misdirected. Mamdani was able to beat Cuomo because of how big of a pro-Palestine element there is within the masses, particularly Gen Z. And the idea that Zohran is a change-maker has gained serious traction in dissident circles, including ones that aren’t necessarily on the left; Jimmy Dore and his community have joined in on the excitement around Zohran. This is why when we point to the problems with Zohran, we need to take a different posture than simply saying “this candidate is bad actually.”

That would be like making it your whole mission to “stop Trump,” while denying the massive trend towards class consciousness that the MAGA movement represents. We should recognize the problems with the leaders of reformist movements that gain popular momentum, while not discarding the movements themselves; otherwise we’ll isolate ourselves from the masses. I see why Zohran has gotten popular support, like I see why Trump gained that support; there’s a reason why so many of the people see something in him. So my point is not that Zohran has contradictions, and therefore we should tear him down; my main point is that the system could take advantage of these contradictions, and use them to further an agenda that undermines the pro-Palestine movement.

When Zohran affirms the “Israel has a right to exist” idea, or condemns the Al Aqsa Flood Operation, these are certainly bad things; but the problems they present go beyond anything Zohran himself has the potential to do. The reality of Zohran’s situation is that if he becomes mayor, he’ll be navigating an environment which will no doubt force him to acquiesce; like with Bernie Sanders, the strength of Zohran lies not in what the leader is willing to do, or what they can do within the system, but in the mass movement that’s formed behind them. In the potential for the movement to become a force unto itself, break from reformist politics, and organize towards the defeat of the ruling class.

Many of the people who’ve gravitated towards Zohran would not have done so if they hadn’t seen him say a ton of things beyond the “I support Israel’s right” line; they know that this candidate represents a trend which was produced by the rise in pro-Palestine sentiment. So when I critique him for saying this, my primary concern is not that he’ll convince anti-Zionists to become Zionists; there’s a large section of the masses which have become immune to Zionist propaganda, and the narrative managers have been forced to give up on converting them anyhow. The risk is instead that the Democratic Party could divert the Zohran movement, and prevent it from becoming a force unto itself; which would enable the Dems to divert the larger pro-Palestine movement.

What our ruling class seeks to do with the Palestinian struggle is make it captured by liberal Zionist NGOs, more than it’s already been. The struggle’s enemies want to kill any potential projects at building popular organizational power, thereby making way for forces that claim to be “pro-Palestine” while promoting Zionism. A key part of this mission is to separate the concept of supporting Palestine from the concept of supporting the Palestinian resistance; which requires selling an idea of the “two-state solution” that’s compatible with the campaign to exterminate the Palestinians.

When Hamas says it wants a two-state solution, it means this in a fundamentally different way from how liberal Zionists mean it. The resistance seeks two states because that will be a necessary incremental step towards the ultimate full dissolution of the Jewish ethno-state. Realistically the occupier won’t disappear all at once; so creating a Palestinian state alongside it is how to build Palestine’s strength back up, until what remains of “Israel” becomes unable to continue. Liberal Zionists see two states as a way to preserve the existence of “Israel,” where the indigenous people can be made to permanently compromise with the colonizers. For this reason, as long as liberal Zionists hold decisive influence over the pro-Palestine movement we won’t even get a compromise. The only way we’ll ever get a Palestinian state, in any form, is if the resistance wins; the occupier will never willingly give away its territories, so it will need to be forced into that.

If the Democratic Party gets its way, the hope which Zohran has created for progress towards Palestine’s liberation will be used to placate the movement. To neutralize the forces that would otherwise keep organizing in solidarity with the resistance, giving more control to the “pro-Palestine” actors who seek to maintain the Zionist entity. Bernie Sanders and other social democrat spokespeople are the ones who fill this role within the anti-Palestine counterinsurgency.

When pressed, Sanders has refused even to endorse the BDS movement; which is indicative of what the NGO-industrial complex seeks to do. The liberal Zionist PAC J Street, which backs Sanders and is connected with the biggest Zionist “peace” NGOs, promotes a path of compromise and nothing else. The EU-tied Palestinian Peace Coalition, for example, seeks to “reinstill in the Israeli and Palestinian peoples the hope that it is possible to reach an agreement that will serve their respective national and personal interests and aspirations.” Which, in the absence of supporting divestment or the resistance, amounts to endless discussions that will never bring the occupation closer to ending.

This is the nature of “pro-Palestine” Democratic Party politics: a trap that’s designed to stop any real potential for defeating the occupiers. Even if Zohran is better than someone like Sanders, he’s functioning within the rigged game of reformism, and he’s already been pressured into conceding key parts of the argument to the Zionists. What the ruling class hopes Palestine supporters do is simply keep cheering on Zohran, or other reformist figures who are sympathetic to our cause, without building the organizational front we need. It will not be so easy to neutralize us, though; the mass energy for a pro-resistance movement is there. 

I understand why a Palestine supporter would support Zohran; it makes sense when he’s a representative of the Palestinian movement who has substantial momentum. And I welcome these supporters into the next efforts at constructing a united front for Palestine.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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Kash Patel’s war on dissent, & the “dissident” media figures who’ve sold him as an anti-establishment hero

The Kash Patel psyop has cost our social movements many months of extremely precious time in the fight against repression. It’s created hubris where there should be caution, complacency where there should be alertness. When you can get the bulk of the people who are disillusioned with the political establishment to place hope in the same figure who’s been assigned to crush dissent, all of the imperial state’s schemes will be able to go forward with impunity for the perpetrators.

This is why it’s no longer effective to simply speak truth to power: our rulers have become bold enough that they don’t feel a need to conceal their crimes anymore. And a crucial reason why they’ve come to feel so above consequence is that dissent has been thoroughly captured. Even though the majority of the U.S. masses see that our ruling institutions aren’t on their side, it’s easy for the state to create diversions that placate the people. And this is not the people’s fault; the primary ones to blame are the “dissident” figures who have agency to go against the ruling class, but choose to present the people with false solutions. In this case, the “solution” has been to cheer on Kash Patel for his supposed efforts to fight corruption, even though what we’ve seen from Patel is an acceleration of the deep state’s anti-democratic campaigns.

When Trump was trying to get his cabinet picks confirmed, this is the sentiment we heard from commentators like Candace Owens: we’ve got to support every Trump appointee who’s getting pushback from the major parts of government. The core problem with this strategy is that it’s by default a surrender of popular power towards the ruling class; and this is because the elite faction which Trump and Patel represent is inherently antagonistic towards the popular interests.

We’ve seen this when Patel’s FBI has raided the homes of relatively low-profile activists, like San Jose’s Alex Dillard; when it’s added onto ICE’s political persecution efforts by going after Michigan pro-Palestine organizers. Supporting Patel didn’t stop the wave of repression that the deep state had been planning prior to the 2024 election; this only aided the repression by taking attention away from it, and by promoting uncritical praise of Patel. Patel used this to carry out anti-liberty measures that were justified by the Russiagate narrative, which was the same psyop that the deep state once weaponized against Trump. That’s what StopFBI.org has reported in regard to the San Jose raid:

In April 2025, San Jose anti-war activist Alex Dillard was subjected to the execution of a federal search warrant. FBI agents raided his home and seized his personal electronic devices, seeking evidence of alleged ties to Russia and implying that he may have been acting as a foreign agent. We, as members of the San Jose community as well as the broad progressive people's movements in the U.S. and around the world, stand in solidarity with Alex against these attacks. We assert that these accusations are entirely baseless. They constitute a clear act of political retaliation against Alex's First Amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations. This incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of repression by federal agencies against activists, journalists, and organizers who speak out against U.S. imperialism, war, and systemic injustice.

Candace and the other alt media figures who’ve promoted Patel had an opportunity to bring serious public scrutiny upon the FBI; to rally the people against what the FBI is doing at a pivotal moment in the crackdown. And a majority of the conservatives in their audiences would have agreed that the repression is a bad thing. The modern conservative alt media represents a break from the old, unpopular War on Terror conservatism that the Daily Wire has to offer; Candace got the role in the discourse that she now has by splitting with Ben Shapiro over the Gaza genocide. Yet Candace has gone along with the “Kash Patel will change things” narrative, and so have Russell Brand, Tucker Carlson, and other conservatives who’ve sold themselves as transgressive voices. This expectation of a big shake-up due to Patel’s nomination became the default in many online political spaces, and big tech was glad to further boost that narrative in the algorithms.

The outcome of this false hope was that those targeted by the repression were left with far too few allies. There was massive attention on ICE’s persecution of Mahmoud Khalil, but when it’s come to the FBI’s attacks on civil liberties, the backlash has been marginal. Whereas Khalil’s detention actually did create some disillusionment among the MAGA base, the repressive campaign has gone largely unnoticed when it’s been carried out by the FBI, because the supposedly most radical and principled media sources have severely neglected that topic.

My argument is not that this problem will be corrected if these alt media figures learn from their mistakes, because we have no reason to trust them to learn from it. Their loyalty is to capital, and they’re concerned with advancing a business model; so whatever improvements they may make in their messaging, it will come as a reaction to preexisting trends in geopolitics and culture. It’s been an improvement for Tucker to go from promoting the War on Terror to encouraging sympathy with Russia; but he’s done this as part of an imperialist strategy to split Russia from China, which he still vilifies. It’s a good thing that Candace is calling out Zionism, but this has come with efforts by Candace to promote “Judeo-Bolshevik” anti-communist atrocity propaganda. These figures are not leaders of a revolutionary movement, but discourse actors who are trying to divert revolutionary energy. And to build a real movement, we will need to avoid any rhetoric that tails after them.

As Washington’s war on Iran gives the state a pretext for speeding up the crackdown, we have to orient ourselves around defending our orgs from these attacks, and around giving the people the means to fight back. This means applying historical knowledge about how people have resisted repression; how they’ve needed to create both a front guard and a rear guard, balancing the above-ground mass organizing with networks that can operate clandestinely. These are the kinds of things that the most widely visible “dissident” commentators never focus on, and it’s telling what kinds of actions they propose as a substitute. Since the election, when the crackdown has reached its new stage, these figures have at most advocated for siding with one wing of the deep state over another.

That’s what the push to get behind Kash Patel has been, and it’s likely to continue even after Trump has discredited himself through the Iran strikes. One of the narratives that’s become prevalent within alt media is the idea that even though there are bad elements in the Trump White House, there are also figures who could turn things around, and Trump is just being tricked by the bad advisors. Because of the Kash Patel psyop, Patel is still overwhelmingly viewed within these discourse spaces as one of the “good” Trump officials. 

There is great intertia and great confusion that’s come from these narrative manipulations, and this has happened at the worst possible time; this is when our government has launched a regional war to save the Zionist entity. The situation is extremely urgent in all areas, and the anti-imperialist movement has been crippled due to how much it’s relied on “alt” media and online politics. Any future our movement has will come from bottom-up organizing, not from appealing towards our rulers through internet campaigns.

The more that real change fails to come from the Trump wing of our ruling class, the more burned-out the masses are going to get on alt media. The danger will then be that dissident politics itself loses momentum, as it won’t have a clear path forward. What we must do is offer the people that path, in the form of a united front against this war drive; one which you don’t need to be a communist to join, but where communists are able to party-build and to propagate our ideas. That’s the role the American Communist Party, which I’m part of, seeks to have in this new antiwar movement. And if we navigate these conditions properly, we’ll be able to forge a different path for dissident circles. One that’s not reliant on any of the top-down forces which seek our movement’s destruction.

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The Steve Witkoff “peace deal” psyop was what got us war with Iran. The antiwar movement must learn from this.

To understand how our government was able to start this war with Iran, we have to look at how the Trump White House sold a false promise of “peace.” And how certain voices from the “alternative” media have assisted in marketing this lie, even though these same commentators are now condemning Trump for attacking Iran.

The main figure I’m talking about is Tucker Carlson, who played a crucial part in providing cover for the Trump neocons as they prepared for this provocation. Carlson has denounced Trump’s strike on Iran, yet just three months ago, Carlson platformed the actor who’s been most instrumental in creating complacency over Trump’s Middle East policies: Steven Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. This March, Witkoff had an interview with Carlson where he articulated all the narratives the second Trump administration had been promoting about its foreign policy in that earlier stage. Witkoff asserted that Trump was genuinely looking for peace in Ukraine, peace in Gaza, and peace with Iran, and that by doing so he was mounting an authentic opposition towards the neocon establishment.

To craft this image of a Trump government that was standing up to the foreign policy elites, Witkoff and Carlson discussed how the media has targeted Witkoff, referring to instances where he’s been labeled an agent of Hamas or other foreign governments. Supposedly this meant he was standing up for real principles; but the reality is that whatever differences there are between Witkoff’s camp and the Zionists who’ve attacked him, these points of divergence are entirely superficial.

All that Witkoff and Trump have done to change Washington’s diplomatic posture is assert they’re open towards negotiations with these governments, which has actually served as a ploy for justifying more war and genocide. If Trump and Witkoff have been doing all they can to bring peace, then according to this narrative these foreign governments must be the ones who’ve undermined that goal. This is undoubtedly an idea that the advocates of war with Iran hope to promote as Trump escalates the conflict; and for the antiwar movement to resist this war, it will need to learn from the Steve Witkoff psyop.

The most destructive lie that Witkoff told in the interview, and that’s been propagated more widely by Trump’s apologists, was the notion about Trump having seriously intended to rescue the people of Gaza. Many of the commentators who’ve helped sell Trump as “fighting the deep state” recognize that what’s happening in Gaza is not a war but a genocide; so to deny that they’ve been narratively assisting this genocide, they’ve had to affirm the perception that Trump’s White House seeks to end the mass murder in Gaza.

This isn’t what Trump himself has said, with his stated plan being to ethnically cleanse Gaza; but Witkoff spoke as if there’s actually a chance that the U.S. will bring about economic development within Gaza, as opposed to engineering Gaza’s extermination like it’s actually doing. This lie was part of the cover which Washington managed to create for itself during that moment; a cover that concealed the plans for bringing the genocide into its next stage, and for instigating a regional war to save the Zionist entity.

If the antiwar movement wants to succeed, it will need to go beyond admitting that support for Trump was the wrong tactic. The movement will have to commit towards a united front with the forces that are resisting Washington’s aggressions; which means breaking out of online politics and “alt” media, and building an actual anti-imperialist front within the workers movement.

This is an essential question for all of the political actors and orgs that have spoken out against Trump’s Iran strike: are they willing to not just rhetorically oppose the war machine, but carry out the essential step of entering into class struggle? We’re not going to truly have an impact on our government’s war plans until we’ve prepared the proletariat to leverage their unique power against the war machine; to implement strikes across the core productive industries, ones designed to punish the ruling class for perpetrating these imperialist schemes. To bring about such a project, we will need to bring our orgs into the workers movement, and build up independent worker orgs. There is a viable route towards gaining the power we’ll need for victory, if we choose to take this route.

The Steve Witkoff psyop, and all other “dissident” ideas that involve appealing towards the ruling class, can only gain traction because our movement hasn’t pursued a truly revolutionary strategy. Because far too many “socialist” or “antiwar” orgs have avoided serious class struggle, and instead tried to win the favor of either the Democrats or the Republicans. This ruling class tailism is the easy path, the path that gets you boosted by the algorithms and keeps you relatively safe from repression. That opportunistic route is tempting, but anyone who sincerely wants to win this fight will reject it, and join in on the project for a workers struggle against the wars.

It’s this idea, the idea of class struggle, that can let the anti-imperialist movement truly make a compelling argument for why the masses should join it. The overwhelming majority of people who’ve been influenced by the Steve Witkoff psyop aren’t motivated by opportunism; they’re looking for answers, and the only answers they’ve found are ones which were crafted to keep them away from class struggle. When the movement for a workers revolt becomes stronger and more visible, it will gain much more mass pull.

This is how communists can intervene in the situation our government has created, and turn the backlash against the Iran war into an effective popular effort. The same applies to the backlash against the Gaza genocide, which is absolutely not finished despite the efforts to demobilize it. If we take the right lessons from what we’ve experienced, we’ll be able to end the antiwar movement’s cycle of defeats.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.