“Salute the martyrs first,” Abu Manu, 2009
The media’s supposed awakening on Gaza from these last few months, where many commentators have suddenly started recognizing that this is a genocide, is meant to be a rehabilitation of the liberal order. It’s a performance by the same imperial shills who defended “Israel” in the earlier months, put on in order to retroactively give liberalism a clean, humanitarian image. And it was only because the extermination effort got this far that the propaganda machine came to feel this rebranding was necessary. There’s something else that the imperial system is reacting to, though: the ongoing progress made by the armed resistance coalition within Gaza, which has shown that the occupier’s troubles are never going away and that its collapse truly is inevitable.
Part of why this collapse can’t be avoided is that the occupier has committed crimes of such a historic scale, it’s guaranteed that permanent and catastrophic repercussions will come upon it. I’m not talking about the symbolic penalties that liberal leaders say they want to apply to the Zionist entity; those measures are meant to be substitutes for the actions which can actually threaten the colonial project’s existence, these being economic boycotts against “Israel.” The popular will for such boycotts is growing; the question is whether we’ll defeat the liberal schemes to co-opt the Palestinian cause, and build a real solidarity movement that further cripples the occupier.
The hope of the Zionists is that these resistance efforts will be slowed down enough for the Palestinians to be numerically destroyed, and then relegated to the margins. The obstacle to this goal is how visible the deaths are. Now that we’ve gotten to a stage where hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are at such an urgent risk of dying from hunger, everyone sees that this won’t be a genocide which can be safely ignored. Its scale is comparable to the Armenian genocide, which means the best option for the liberal propagandists is to pretend like they were always against it. We cannot take this as evidence that the Palestinian resistance has already lost, though. In fact, this recent messaging by the media is largely about hiding the progress that the resistance has made.
With every pseudo-denunciation these liberals make of the crimes the Zionist occupiers have committed, there are efforts to dissuade us from supporting the resistance, or from even having any kind of hope that the occupier will be defeated. Hamas is of course still routinely condemned, and though it’s now okay to say a genocide is happening, Hamas is pointed to as sharing blame for this genocide; one of the most insidious anti-resistance narratives is that Hamas played into Netanyahu’s hands by launching October 7’s Al-Aqsa Flood Operation. Which is a narrative that amounts to blaming the victims for fighting back.
There’s also a campaign to portray Netanyahu as the core source of the problem, as opposed to the Zionist settler-colonial project itself. The false solution these liberal Zionists are selling is for Netanyahu to be replaced by “good” leadership, which would supposedly make the ethnic supremacist state no longer racist. And since this idea is inherently impractical, these propagandists will only keep using it as a ploy to divert pro-Palestine sentiments away from truly constructive actions. Chief among these actions being divestment from the Zionist entity, which liberal Zionist organizations like J Street will always fight against even if they claim to want the best for the Palestinians.
The anti-divestment efforts are tied in with the campaigns to vilify the resistance, as they come from the same liberal ideology in which “Israel” must ultimately be protected. And if the discourse is designed to dissuade support for both the armed and nonviolent types of resistance, then those who’ve adopted this soft Zionist worldview will inevitably come to feel a sense of futility about helping Palestine. The narrative managers are cultivating a mentality where it feels like there’s nothing we can do to end the horrors, because supposedly both sides in the conflict are bad and the decision-making has been hijacked by “extremists.”
To combat this cowardly and complacent centrist viewpoint, we need to connect Palestine’s supporters with the actual liberation struggle that’s taking place. We need to build organizing projects that are deeply familiar with the efforts that Palestinians are making to resist, and that are up-to-date on just how good Palestine’s strategic situation is. Fake Palestine allies will always portray the resistance as far weaker than it is in reality, and use this as proof that the project at abolishing “Israel” is a foolish endeavor. But we can thwart these demoralization attempts, if we’re armed with the facts.
The real strategic situation is that the resistance continues to maintain the strength it’s gained, if not keep adding on more strength, while the occupier finds itself in such urgent existential peril that it’s needed to take unprecedented internal measures. I’m talking about the law that “Israel” has implemented which bans its citizens from leaving the country. It’s done this because the very basis for an “Israel” depends on there being a solid Jewish majority within its official borders, and since the resistance launched Operation Al Aqsa Flood, a record number of “Israeli” citizens have left and 40% of the remaining citizens have come to consider leaving.
The domestic travel ban has delayed the ethno-state’s death, but it hasn’t done anything to bring the occupier closer to taking control of Gaza. The occupier says it controls most of Gaza, but this is an inarguable lie, one that depends on pretending the occupier has domination over many places where it doesn’t. The vast majority of Gaza has still not been taken hold of by the occupier’s military, because the invaders simply cannot overcome the resistance fighters. The liberal Zionist narrative says that these fighters have doomed their own people by giving the occupier a pretext to invade; this connects with the lie that Hamas is a creation of Netanyahu, and that Netanyahu has been using Hamas as a tool. This view of history is false, as are the notions about Al Aqsa Flood having been a setback for the Palestinian cause.
That act of self-defense is what brought the occupier to the existential danger it’s now in, and everything the resistance is doing today is an extension of the strategic plan which Al Aqsa Flood set in motion. When the resistance does retreat, these are tactical retreats; it’s not needed to surrender, because its goals are consistently being advanced. The purpose of its efforts is to continue wearing down the occupier, and this is what it’s doing. It’s able to let its fighters keep falling back to secure areas, and keep staging guerrilla ambushes that render the occupier too preoccupied to colonize Gaza.
These defensive attacks are the reality that the Zionist entity is forced to confront in Gaza, week after week after week. And because the resistance has gained this unshakeable advantage, its efforts are sure to one day get the Palestinians a state; which will let Palestinian society rebuild, and thereby bring Zionism’s final defeat. For those of us on the outside, though, it’s a duty to assist in this process rather than sitting back and waiting. We need to centrally focus on bringing divestment, and we need to do so with the appropriate sense of urgency. We see how fast the occupier is murdering our fellow human beings, and our horror over this needs to translate into practical action.
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