The recent strategic gains of Palestine’s resistance, and of the global movement that’s aligned with it, give us the lessons we’ll need to keep fighting amid Zionism’s next attacks. This has to be our takeaway from the latest genocidal acts that our government has orchestrated in Gaza, where amid an ongoing blockage of the Rafah crossing and regular bombings since the ceasefire, the occupier took 22 more lives in a Gaza airstrike last week. We are seeing the latest repeat of a cycle, the same cycle that the aggressors brought about during the first ceasefire from January to March of this year. In this routine, the White House and the occupier make a show of supposedly having agreed to “peace,” continuously violate the ceasefire, and then re-start the normal levels of mass murder.
The hope of the extermination’s perpetrators is that this time, the pro-Palestine movement will be more fatigued than it was then, letting them speed up the killing. When one looks at this from the perspective of the resistance, though, they are not of the mindset to become fatigued about fighting for Palestine. Because by connecting our movements to the actual Palestinian struggle, and learning from the experiences of Palestine’s freedom fighters, we find that the picture before us is not static. The enemy may be able to repeat its past tactics, but it cannot turn back the historical process, and reverse the Zionist unraveling which got accelerated with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
One piece of context which has been kept from us by the imperialist media, and that becomes visible when you follow the activities of the resistance, is that both ceasefires were truly the product of Palestine’s strengths in fighting back. Every time the occupier and its Washington backers have pulled back, it’s been due to the efforts of those who are combating it, with Gaza’s armed resistance coalition being by far the biggest counter-force. Especially amid this latest ceasefire, it’s apparent that the occupier’s concessions are proof of Hamas having essentially already won. The efforts to colonize Gaza have obviously not stopped, but the fact that the occupier still hasn’t managed to fulfill its goals in Gaza is itself proof of an irreversible Palestinian strategic victory. All future escalations by the occupier can only have the effect of further weakening Zionism, and a key reason for this is that Gaza has shown it will never be subdued. The aggressor’s investment in Gaza will never pay off, and its crimes can only continue backfiring.
The resistance coalition couldn’t have gained this level of strength if it hadn’t embraced a practice of principled, sustainable reconciliation among former factional enemies; a practice that every revolutionary movement must learn from. As Noel Bamen explains in his essay which debunks common myths about Hamas, it is not true that Hamas has sabotaged the Palestinian left; what’s happened is that it’s responded to sectarianism which its past opponents on the left haven’t truly been able to justify, and then successfully unified with these forces. Writes Bamen:
For its part, Hamas despaired of the left because whenever and wherever Hamas clashed on the ground with Fatah, the left would either stay neutral or implicitly support Fatah, as Khaled Hroub describes the counter‐perspective. He notes further that after the elections of January 2006, Hamas’s relationship with the Palestinian left have further deteriorated. None of the three small leftist groups which won seven seats in total in the PLC agreed to join Hamas’s government. Hamas blamed them for foiling its efforts to form a national coalition government. And thus ultimately also for the power struggle with Fatah, which led to the split between Gaza and Ramallah….The left must indeed wear this shoe. And even during the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, the PFLP clearly positioned itself against Hamas and condemned the coup d’état.
Since then, however, the relationship has improved significantly. As early as 2011, Hroub speaks of closer relationships with the PFLP and DFLP. In recent years in particular, the Islamic and left‐wing liberation organizations have grown ever closer on the basis of their joint resistance to the Zionist and Oslo regimes: Leftist and Islamic students carry out joint actions at universities in the West Bank, communists and Islamists fight side by side in cross‐organizational and cross‐current brigades in the West Bank and the same is true in Gaza within the framework of the Joint Operations Room of the resistance factions as well as the Al‐Aqsa Flood. Organizations such as the prisoner solidarity network Samidoun or information projects such as Resistance News Networks are also an expression of these cross‐current unity efforts.
This story is so important for global liberation movements to study because it shows that even while existing under a genocidal siege, a country’s organized masses can heal divides among themselves, and use this unity to achieve victories that they previously hadn’t been able to reach. In fact, it’s because of how extreme Palestine’s subjugation is that there’s been such a strong will to find unity, and thereby overcome the internal problems which had been holding back the struggle. That exploitation and state violence are most extreme for the Global South is a key part of why its revolutionary movements are so far ahead of the ones in the imperial countries; it’s a product of the principle that Stalin explained in The Foundations of Leninism, where the countries most liable to first experience revolutions are the ones in which global capital’s chain is weakest.
The Palestinian struggle has been able to take advantage of the weaknesses within Zionist capital. Prior to Al-Aqsa Flood, the economy of so-called “Israel” appeared strong, but as soon as the resistance advanced its anti-colonial war, the Zionist structure began to crumble. The occupier’s resources became spread too thin, its economy experienced major capital flight, and former Zionist allies in the Global South like Colombia exacerbated the damage to “Israel” by cutting it off from important energy imports. Normal life for the Jewish colonizers in Palestine couldn’t continue, these colonizers began moving back to their real home countries, and the panicked Zionist state had to create a law that banned them from leaving.
It turned out that Zionist capital couldn’t stand on its own, which was always obvious when one considered how its entire “strength” always came from being propped up by U.S. finance capital. The power balance in Palestine, and in the world as a whole, got thrown into question amid unexpected gains for the Palestinian revolutionary forces.
The collapse of Zionist colonizer society has continued since the ceasefire, which is another piece of context that proves the success of the resistance. It also demonstrates another way in which the perceived advantages of the enemy are an illusion. The occupier, and the global hegemon that it relies on, are not as in control as they want us to believe. When they repeat their routine of faking interest in “peace,” then using a ceasefire as an opening for more attacks, they are not operating from a place of security. They’re using whatever methods they can to terrorize Palestine and the world, and thereby make Washington appear strong when really it’s not; which is the broader strategy that’s been behind all of the Trump White House’s imperialist aggressions.
I am not advocating for bravado when I say these things; bravado is something we need to avoid, we can only recognize victories that our side has objectively gained. I only seek to illuminate the parts of this story that the Zionists want hidden, and that give us a real sense of the strategic situation. If we study how the Palestinian resistance has gained victories, if we study the historical materialist principles that determine how revolutionary struggles succeed, then we will not have to go into this fight’s next phase while flailing in the dark. We will have a guiding light, even as the imperial state further intensifies its efforts to crush us. Our movement can survive the next crackdowns, and provide critical parts of the global support that Palestine will need to triumph.
————————————————————————
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment