Image from Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society
After last year’s U.S. election, the two most prominent organizations within Palestine’s resistance put out statements which showed that they have faith in the American masses. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said: “We see in the popular and student movements that stand in solidarity with Gaza, along with the emergence of small, free voices and parties, a glimmer of hope that could contribute to even a slight change in the U.S. stance on our cause.” Hamas said: “The elected U.S. President is urged to heed the voices that have risen from within U.S. society itself for more than a year since the zionist aggression on Gaza, rejecting occupation and genocide and objecting to support and bias toward the zionist entity.”
It has now been almost a year since Palestine’s freedom fighters made this appeal towards the American people, almost two years since the Zionist entity accelerated its genocide to an unprecedented degree, and 77 years since the effort to eradicate Palestine’s people began with the founding of so-called “Israel.” In terms of the rate of destruction and death that Palestinians are experiencing, the situation is worse than it’s ever been. Yet in terms of the worldwide popular movement against Palestine’s colonization, there is more strength than ever.
The state of these global pro-Palestinian forces isn’t quite as important as the state of the Palestinian resistance itself, but the resistors in Gaza have treated our efforts as critical to their own success. They know that the more our work succeeds, the more lives will be saved, which is just as important as the strategic military success of the struggle. Those who are operating in the heart of this fight have recognized our significance within the project to end Zionism; and it’s time that we reorient our movement so that it recognizes the importance of Palestine’s armed resistance.
An organization or individual does not need to break the laws of their country in order to advance this position of principled solidarity. Our government classifies the Palestinian resistance forces as terrorist orgs, which is a practical reality that constrains us. However, there is a commonsense procedure for avoiding unnecessary risks, while maintaining a consistent solidarity stance: never give in to the pressure to condemn the resistance, while centering one’s practice around the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. Working to economically isolate the genocidal entity is the best and only practical way that we can weaken this entity on a material level, and thereby save lives while bringing the resistance closer to victory.
This necessity for advancing BDS is something that’s recognized by every political actor who seriously desires an end to Zionism. A problem the movement faces, though, is that even among BDS supporters there isn’t a consensus on supporting the resistance. Somebody can easily have the best of intentions, while still being confused about which sides in this conflict deserve our support. There’s a widespread belief within dissident spheres that the armed resistance coalition is a tool for the occupier, and that its actions are false flags. This is an error in analysis that we absolutely must combat, or else the pro-Palestine struggle will remain needlessly weakened on both an ideological and practical level.
When you have anti-Zionists who fail to back the resistance, this makes it all the more easy for the “soft” Zionists to undermine the Palestinian movement, and draw it away from meaningful practices like BDS. Blanket “false flag” narratives have this effect by rendering our movement blind towards the material factors driving the resistance actions, which by default gives the Zionists an opening. After this week’s Palestinian shooting attack in occupied Jerusalem, Within Our Lifetime’s founder Nerdeen Kiswani said about the idea that the attack was staged: “Calling every act of Palestinian resistance a ‘false flag’ undermines the struggle. Resistance is a right under international law, and Palestinians have every reason to resist occupation. Dismissing it as staged erases both that right and the conditions that make it inevitable.”
In the case of the Jerusalem shooting, the people who have this mindset about the resistance were able to point to something which seemed to back up their position: the fact that Netanyahu was supposed to testify, but then couldn’t after the incident. And it’s understandable that somebody would connect these two things, but when one has the larger context around what national liberation struggle means, it looks more believable that the incident did indeed occur organically. The same applies to the October 7 operation; many have speculated that October 7 was deliberately enabled by Netanyahu’s government, but it absolutely represented an authentic and strategically beneficial act by a resistance coalition. This is true regardless of the ways the Zionist entity has exploited that event.
To understand why Within Our Lifetime’s current in the pro-Palestine movement rejects the “false flag” analysis on the resistance, you must consider that 1) the people in power will always do their best to take advantage of any crisis, and 2) Palestine is a place in which it makes total sense for organic armed resistance to emerge. There are plenty of observers from outside of Palestine who look at armed actions that the Zionist entity’s leadership exploits, and conclude that because these acts by the oppressed have been exploited, this must mean these acts are either false flags or strategic mistakes.
This is where liberal pacifism and reformism can arise: from an attitude that’s dismissive towards all revolutionary methods which are violent (or at least “violent” in the sense that they use force to defend against the oppressor’s violence). According to the worldview of the anti-resistance camp, as soon as the oppressors make any move to counter the resistance efforts of their victims, this is proof in itself that these victims have fought back the wrong way.
Something we need to learn from the actions of the Palestinian resistance, as well as from acts of class resistance like last year’s vigilante attack on a healthcare CEO, is that events have a life of their own. When a resistance act occurs, its effects are not isolated to the reactions from the aggressors and oppressors; when an act has the right strategic calculation behind it, it will create ripple effects that the oppressors can’t control, and that advance the progress of the revolutionary forces. October 7’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood has brought the Zionist entity to unprecedented economic and military disaster, making Zionism’s end that much closer. It’s also galvanized the pro-Palestine struggle, parallel to how the healthcare CEO incident has galvanized America’s working-class revolutionary momentum.
There are many strategic and tactical lessons to be gained from these stories. But we’ll only benefit from them if we recognize the given events as organic revolts, and see the positive developments that have come from them. Otherwise we’ll blind ourselves during some of the most critical moments in the pro-Palestine struggle, and in the workers struggle that it’s intertwined with.
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