Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
I like to add a couple of grinds of Himalayan Pink Salt to the top on the pecans. I also chop some pecans for the interior. Seriously, add some salt to your brownies with nuts. It really turns up the flavor.
🔗 Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR6eenlZjog💯 Join the DISCORD to see our schedule, behind-the-scenes, hate mail, & more! http://discord.gg/wh...
"We might get on a plane and fly private to Beirut to see a painting. Or, we might fly to Paris - which is actually inconvenient compared to taking the Eurostar but is fucking fun" Inigo Philbrick (prior to getting caught in large scale art fraud).
This is how we're #geoblocking traffic from the UK, France, Mississippi, Texas, Wyoming, and others with #Cloudflare. This also assumes you have Cloudflare properly configured to send you the real-ip address of all ingress traffic and not just the IP address of Cloudflare's proxies:
First, we have one #PageRule for each site. It's simple, it matches on every #URI and it has one setting: IP Geolocation Header: On.
That tells Cloudflare to send the IP #Geolocation headers with each request.
Next, all of our sites are reverse-proxied behind #Nginx. So this is for #Nginx, not sure how you would implement this for #Caddy or #Apache, but I'm sure you can:
We created a map file in /etc/nginx/conf.d/geo_map.conf that contains the following:
# Build a single key of "COUNTRY:REGIONCODE"
map "$http_cf_ipcountry:$http_cf_region_code" $blocked_geo {
default 0;
# Blocked countries (match regardless of region)
~^(GB|UK|IR|IL|RU|KP|FR|IT): 1;
# US states (only when country is US)
~^US:(MS|WY|KY|MO|VA|UT|TX|TN|SD|OK|NC|NE|MT|LA|KS|IN|ID|GA|FL|AR|AZ)$ 1;
}
This map file is shared across all of our instances.
Then you basically add an if block toward the top of the server section in your site config to query the map file you created. If true, respond with an HTTP/451 (access blocked for legal reasons) but you can just as easily specify any response code, and even redirect requests to another web page explaining why access has been blocked.
Head to https://squarespace.com/jimmythegiant to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code JIMMYTHEGIANT📣 Discord - https://discord...
Today the island of Ireland has a smaller population than it did 200 years ago. How did that happen, and what has it got to do with free market capitalism? A...
The original version of the song was recorded and released in the UK in 1973 but did not hit the charts. The song was re-recorded for the Rollers' 1974 UK al...
As I finish up the Franklin miniseries, I give it credit for largely being historically accurate up to a point. Franklin was not the indispensable man when it came to France’s involvement in the Revolutionary War. He also wasn’t irresistible to women of various ages.
Douglas and the writers for iTV took a bit of creative license surrounding him. Not a complaint, it’s expected. The writing is top notch, and about 70% is subtitled for being French. A recommended watch for Apple TV viewers.
This Video Is Satire/Parody.This video is not real or true.This Video Contains Altered Or Synthetic Content #Meme #Comedy #Parody #Satire » Subscribe to TUS:...
Thanks for tuning in! I had some thoughts about how India and colonialism are represented in right-wing western media.Read more of my writing on Medium: http...
William Carey helped India have a consistent language they had a different language in each region of India prior to him and he found Sanskrit roots related to all the common languages in India when trying to study the language to create a Bible translation
He worked together with Hindu scholars or Hindu clergy who believed that the practice of burning women married to dead husbands was not in the Hindu scriptures and as a team they outlawed the practice all under the British
Peepy is a fictional plush character created by the art brand itemLabel. It's depicted as a cute, peanut-shaped creature with a criminal backstory—described as having committed a "dangerous and disrespectful crime" and now being "out on bail." Each Peepy has absurd stats like "Strength: Grass Eating" and "Weakness: Probe." They come in various designs (Cow Pattern, Corndog, Axolotl, etc.) and are marketed as adult collectibles, not toys. Despite the playful aesthetic, the lore involves dark humor, including murder and time anomalies. So no, it’s not a shrimp, but it might need calcium for its molting alibi. 🦐⚖️
I remind you that insulting a public figure is subject to legal liability.
Perhaps if the pedophile child molester #PiotrCzczerek's penis were a tad larger he wouldn't feel compelled to steal from children. #tennis #drogbruk #KamilMajchrzak
Do people who google everything ever realize that google is in control of google?
Do they understand that google is not an organically growing treasure of facts and truths that have been objectively controlled by some universal all knowing professors.
I mean do they understand that google is not objective?
Because they sure don't act like it.
Retards who don't know nothing about anything use google to fact check those who actually can speak without "googling"
most people I know that still use Google have no idea (or aren’t willing to come to terms with the idea) that Google controls Google. They think it’s a completely unbiased collection of links
@necktweaker unfortunately, even with the obvious self-censoring, it's still the best search engine (and I've tried others, willing to try more if you have suggestions)...
This is not about the best search engine, but U are wrong about that too.
No this is about the fact that if those who can not speak in a normal conversation without using "google" could just shut up. Yeah that would be great.
No my fren. Google is not the best search engine it is nearly impossible to find any information at all on google today.
I have not tried all search engines but I am using Kagi search now and it is far superior to google.
i didn't feel like messing with abrasive blasting cause if you leave one particle of abrasive in your oil galleys you can destroy the engine. the block was looking ok it just didn't get as shiny as i wanted and there is some practical value to being able to easily see any leaks, which is more difficult on a dark crusty old engine.
i painted the tranny too. thinking about actually installing that clutch tonight, the whole point of what i started to do
From the roof of my building I heard what sounded like a lot of gunfire in the distance, I thought it must be from the army base (a few km away), but it turns out its the archery people, the "crack" of the arrows hitting the targets is quite loud!
@Pheonix and I discuss weight loss drugs, physical fitness, ultraprocessed food, meat plant shit, married a hitchiker, is weed really legal, AI skepticism, climate change, and the petalheads weigh-in with their worst vacations.
@Pheonix and I iscuss pollution, fluids, food additives, letters from dad, high art, car hacking, Cracker Barrel, and the petaheads weigh-in on their favorite fall smell or flavor.
Recently, a rash of articles has surfaced criticizing the Western left for “celebrating” Hamas. Most of these critiques say that reducing support for Palestinian resistance to supporting Hamas is a disservice to Palestinians because Palestinians represent a multiplicity of voices with different political dispositions. Instead, these arguments call on the Western left to reckon with the complexity and diversity of Palestinian politics.
Bashir Abu Menneh’s article in Jacobin, “The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith,” chastises what he claims is the left’s celebration of a “socially regressive” movement such as Hamas in an article that reads more like a hidden critique of armed resistance itself than of Hamas. Matan Kaminer penned a response to an article by Andreas Malm, both published on the Verso blog, stating that the global “solidarity movement must engage with the diversity of Palestinian politics,” in which he takes issue with “counter-systemic” forces like Hamas that lack a leftist agenda. In Boston Review, Ayça Çubukçu responded to Jodi Dean’s article, “Palestine speaks for everyone,” due to Dean’s suggestion that the global solidarity movement should stand alongside the organized left in Palestine in support of the current Hamas leadership for the struggle for liberation.
Of course, giving attention to Palestinian politics, its history, and its current conditions and multiplicity is imperative. Indeed, despite the relatively small number of Palestinians, and despite the fact that Palestine between the river and the sea is a small geography fraught with highly contested terrain, one can find a myriad of Palestinians who echo any number of fantasies or ideologies about the conflict — including Palestinians who readily affirm Zionist ideology.
But funnily enough, this is what Western leftist critics of Hamas get wrong. They fail to understand that the diversity in Palestinian society and politics also translates into diverging attitudes toward resistance to colonialism. While they call for a nuanced understanding of Palestinian politics, that nuance doesn’t extend to an understanding of the dynamics and forces that both motivate and shy away from (or actively oppose) anticolonial resistance.
This ignorance of Palestinian politics is almost willful. It harbors a secret hostility to resistance — especially armed resistance — but claims to oppose Hamas on entirely different, perhaps ideological, grounds. Yet to truly understand intra-Palestinian dynamics and unpack the “monolith,” we have to actually understand how Palestinian political forces have evolved with respect to the very idea of resistance in the first place.
Fragmented geography, fragmented politics
Palestinians are subjected to various divisions meticulously crafted by Israel. In fact, it would be highly surprising if Palestinians were unified when their everyday lives are so radically different — dispersed across the globe and subjected to various governmentalities and modalities of Israeli control. These divisions are not only geographic but also entail different levels of privilege and exclusion imposed by the colonial state. I speak of Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, the territories of 1948, and the diaspora.
Moreover, this radical fragmentation has led many Palestinians to begin questioning the very notion of our unity as a people, pondering whether the discrepancy in the capacity of Palestinians to resist is a sign of the weight of geographic divisions and various colonial governmentalities after 75 years.
The genocidal war in Gaza exposed the simple fact that Palestinians in their different localities — aside from Gaza — have been incapable of accumulating power, devising new tactics, forging new organizations, or building a new intellectual and material edifice for confronting the challenge that settler colonialism presents to Palestinian people everywhere. Nothing clarifies this failure more than the paralytic fear that has gripped Palestinian society outside Gaza and outside some of the more advanced articulations of the struggle and new modes of resistance that have risen in the past decade, including the primacy of tactics like atomized acts of resistance in the West Bank and ‘48 Palestine and the proliferation of armed self-defense zones in the northern West Bank.
This multiplicity is not merely a function of the variegated political ideologies amongst Palestinians that fall under different modes of structural control. Rather, it erupts within the very fabric of the individual Palestinian psyche. An intense internal dialogue unfolds where Palestinians are torn between the radical potentiality of resistance and their visceral dread of the relentless Israeli military juggernaut. Consider the paradox between the desire for liberation and the gnawing fear that any disturbance of everyday life — even one caused by resistance — could unravel the fragile semblance of normalcy. This is the true site of ideological struggle, not only in the public sphere but at the level of the individual, where the sublime possibility of freedom confronts the traumatic reality of potential annihilation by a superior military machine.
Each force, with its own demands, pulls the Palestinians towards an array of existential choices — revolution or resignation, emigration or steadfastness, symbolic effacement or the full affirmation of identity through acts of sacrifice. This silent internal dialogue manifests itself in diverse political articulations — in the oscillation between the stance of the intellectual and martyr Bassel Al-Araj, who declared that “resistance always has efficacy in time,” and the more cynical resignation implied by positions like those of Mahmoud Abbas, which proclaim “long live resistance, but it is already dead and should be killed wherever it reappears!”
But let’s not be fooled. The ideological machine tied to the Palestinian Authority that claims unmediated access to “bare reality” operates precisely by denying its own ideology. They boast of seeing the world free from ideological blinders, asserting that their clarity necessitates forging an authoritarian political system that views resistance to colonialism as a “farce” and cooperation with the colonizer as a “sacred” imperative. This realist-pragmatic stance ostensibly leads Palestinians toward a kind of negation — a symbolic, political, and material self-effacement, yet cunningly masking this erasure through pretenses of political representation and establishing a state.
Meanwhile, the ruling class, in its lust for continuity and control, perpetuates a “political realism” that conveniently overlooks its own class bias and social prejudices. A narrow elite from among the colonized profits. The ultimate aim of this pragmatism is to create a reality in which the very notion of resistance is lost in the annals of a compromised reality. But it is nothing more than sophisticated rhetoric justifying security and economic alliance with a settler colonial regime that replaces the colonized with the colonizers.
The result is a continuum in Palestinian politics with varying dispositions towards resistance. One could imagine figures like Mahmoud Abbas and Mansour Abbas on one end of the spectrum, and political formations like Islamic Jihad and Hamas on the other, with hardly any serious political force in the middle.
What all this tells us is that the main dividing line between Palestinian political factions isn’t over the schism between secularism and Islamism, the struggle over divergent socio-economic agendas, or the merits of a particular tactic in service of liberation. All those are important issues in their own right, but what is actually causing a rift in the Palestinian political arena is the chasm between a politics of raw defiance, and a politics of accommodation, cooperation, and collaboration.
Ultimately, the Western left’s quixotic search for a secular progressive alternative to Hamas overlooks a simple fact: at this particular historical juncture, the political forces that are still holding onto and leading a resistance agenda are not of the secular left.
None of this is by accident. Israel and its allies meticulously cultivate and mold a Palestinian leadership that aligns with their colonial ambitions, while at the same time arresting, intimidating, and assassinating alternatives.
This also isn’t unusual for anticolonial movements, and being a member of the colonized does not automatically confer upon you fidelity to the anticolonial effort. In Palestine, a century of colonialism has created many distortions in the Palestinian body politic, transforming the once-revolutionary PLO into a Vichy-like regime that kills the nation in the name of the nation. Other Palestinians have embraced new affinities and identities, including identifying with Israel (to the extent that it’s possible to identify with an entity whose main feature is Jewish supremacism). History has taught us that there are instances where people will also fight for their servitude, and one need not look beyond figures like Joseph Haddad and Mosab Hassan Yousef to understand what that means.
Yet, there’s a deeper struggle at play: Palestinians have long battled not merely for the recognition of their plight but fundamentally for the world to acknowledge the imperative to resist. This necessity to resist and the right to such resistance becomes even more critical in a global context where the narrative of Palestinian resistance is manipulated — cynically used to justify and legitimize Israel’s century-long assault on Palestinian existence and agency. It’s a perverse scenario where the act of resistance, essential for survival and the possibility for justice, is twisted into a justification for the oppression it seeks to overcome.
Hamas is an easy scarecrow here. It is an Islamist political group that both centers a politics of defiance and pushes a social agenda that seeks to reconstitute the Palestinian subject. Critics of resistance can easily point to shortcomings in Hamas’s socioeconomic outlook or deride its “socially regressive” agenda. But they aren’t really interested in undermining Hamas’s social agenda. In truth, they want to undermine or distance themselves from the form of resistance that Hamas chose to pursue. But many of Hamas’s critics offer nothing in their alliance system, in their forms of struggle, or even in their intellectual output that could match its work to accumulate power in the Gaza Strip and its opening of a strategic pandora’s box that has overflowed and deformed the colonial regime, providing a historical moment that includes among its many possibilities the potential for Palestinian liberation.
The politics of ‘Muzawada’
“Muzawada” is a term in the Arab political lexicon that could crudely be translated to “political one-upmanship.” It has a longstanding tradition of being wielded as a tool of disparagement among political rivals, and in practice, its primary function has been to defame and demoralize one’s political competitor by exposing their hypocrisy, unrealistic discourse, or their inability to translate rhetoric into action. The Syrian Marxist intellectual Elias Murkus gave the example of how Syrian Baathists employed muzawada to undermine Jamal Abdul Nasser in the 1960s, pointing out the chasm between his rhetoric and his actions regarding the liberation of Palestine. But Murkus notes that this disparagement did not so much come from a genuine concern for Palestinian liberation as it did originate in the desire to erode Nasser’s charismatic influence within Syria and Lebanon.
In this context, it is not surprising that Palestine historically emerges as the prime theater for such political “outbidding” or “one-upmanship” in the Arab political landscape. Crucially, muzawada is not confined to rhetorical jousting, even though that is how it was historically employed. In Palestine, muzawada evolved from rhetorical outbidding to “actualized outbidding” in the 1990s, where political factions competed with one another through the ability to create and actualize resistance.
These dual manifestations — rhetorical and actualized muzawada— are pivotal for understanding internal Palestinian political rivalries. During the Second Intifada, the emergence of the figure of the “istishhadi” was one such form of actualized one-upping, as it transcended the traditional “fida’i.” The fida’i was a figure of self-sacrifice who would engage the enemy but might return to his base, whereas the istishadi embodied the self-sacrifice of the fighter who did not plan to return to base, but kills and gets killed, thereby becoming a martyr.
The emergence of this new counter-hegemonic force at the turn of the century, largely at the initiative of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, saw the reformulation of resistance through the creation of new oppositional modalities and a new figure of sacrifice for resistance.
In the Second Intifada, “one-upping” meant outdoing one’s political rival through actualized resistance operations. This form of intra-competition saw the labor of resistance as the means of directing internal political grievances outwardly toward the colonizer. Palestinian factions were unified in the direction of their political actions but also competed to outdo their rivals through the actualization of different acts of resistance.
Yet the current nature of the disunity in Palestine is not a form of outbidding similar to the Second Intifada and is not based on the idea of outdoing one’s internal rival. Rather, it is a disunity that emerged once the PA elevated cooperation with Israel to the “sacred” and saw the continuation of resistance as a farce. On the other end of this disunity, Hamas and Islamic Jihad emerged as the most proactive forces leading organized forms of resistance. The division took on geographic, ideological, and political forms.
In this form of outbidding, one side of the political equation employed Israel’s militaristic response to resistance to claim: “See? This is what happens when you resist!” It suspends the search for a politics of defiance, and in fact argues for political paralysis, stasis, and accommodation of Israel at the expense of the long-term ability of Palestinians to resist.
Within this telos, three leftist Palestinian responses have emerged. The first is a left that weds itself to the Palestinian Authority and comprador class on the basis of “secularism” and as a result of its organizational weakness — for example, the Palestinian People’s Party (formerly the Communist Party). Another left positions itself with Islamist forces on the level of shared resistance to anti-colonialism, but distances itself on the level of social agenda, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). A third left equates between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in the hopes of being seen as an alternative to both, seemingly claiming that “they are both equally bad,” yet remaining incapable of organizing a social or political alternative, such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The notion of being “socially regressive” or “socially progressive” in the current political landscape of Palestine is, to say the least, exceedingly complex. How, for instance, can we reconcile leftist parties that support forms of social regression and political authoritarianism in the West Bank like the current disposition of the remnants of the Communist Party? How do we even define “social regression” within the context of an advancing settler colonialism that seeks to erase an entire society? Isn’t resistance to that colonialism in and of itself a progressive act that will empower the dispossessed? And isn’t collaboration itself a socially regressive force because it subordinates the colonized? Or is the proclaimed ideology of those who resist more important?
Where do we start articulating a socially progressive agenda in concrete situations like the West Bank, where the PA uses a mix of authoritarian practices, insists on forms of banking-education, employs traditional social structures such as families and clans, and sees in the internal foe the ultimate enemy, creating the condition for an ongoing civil war and division as Palestinians also attempt to fight back against colonial encroachment and effacement. On a strictly “Western” plane, there is no totally or fully progressive force in Palestine, but only progressive elements or dispositions — even within political formations that are dismissed as regressive.
Hidden critique of armed resistance
In these successive articles, we encounter a perplexing contortion that seeks to undermine support for resistance, particularly armed resistance. There’s a growing recognition among many in the “West” of the necessity and efficacy of resistance, or at least that after decades of negligence in explaining its sources and necessity, one could start the process of grappling with its reality. This includes engaging with it without rendering it profane. This shift in the Western left does not mean that it has suddenly embraced Islamism, but it recognizes the nature of the condition in which Palestinians are ensnared — a ferocious settler colony that refuses to speak a political language with those it renders abject, that relies on excessive violence and diplomatic and legal impunity, and which employs a complex system of architectural, technological, and indirect forms of control.
But more troublingly, the persistence and evolution of armed resistance defy some of the Palestinian intelligentsia’s operative theories, interests, and political dispositions, including the anxiety of a true break in the colonial regime that permits the work of decolonization to commence.
These are the theories that have persisted for decades, utilizing a widely accepted talking point that Palestinians should refrain from armed resistance in order to cultivate a favorable image in the West, and on the global stage more broadly.
The prevailing notion is that armed resistance is fundamentally incompatible with garnering sympathy for the Palestinian cause. They fetishize a particular reading of the First Intifada as an exemplary model of a largely nonviolent and widespread popular revolt capable of conjuring support from the masses, civil society, and international legal bodies, thus appealing to the liberal sensibilities of mainstream Western societies.
Of course, such a reading also hides the psychic and ideological onslaught that Palestinians faced in the wake of the Second Intifada, which attempted to sear into Palestinian consciousness the notion that resistance is futile, that armed resistance will only bring about havoc, and that Palestinians cannot and should not confront Israel militarily due to the asymmetry in power. However, much like the Palestinian Authority, a defiant alternative built around “popular resistance” or “peaceful popular resistance” was only used as an ideological and psychic tool to sustain what Abu Mazen and the PA called “sacred security cooperation.” Very few attempts to organize popular resistance were conceived, and in many instances, they were also fought by the PA and its security system and were met with severe violence in both Gaza and the West Bank.
The notion that the Western left has suddenly become cheerleaders for Hamas is profoundly disingenuous. Jodi Dean did not celebrate Hamas, but perhaps she found something exhilarating in the act of defiance — the march to break the colonial regime that encircles Gaza. She aligned herself with part of the Palestinian left that engages in resistance. Most Palestinians shared Dean’s sentiment on that particular day, including many who later grew disillusioned or revised their views, either out of ethical considerations or due to Israel’s carpet-bombing campaign and genocidal war, deeming some to conclude that “it wasn’t worth it.”
Yes, there are many voices that detest Hamas in Gaza, the West Bank, and across the Palestinian polity — for a myriad of reasons. Among them are many on the Palestinian “left” who use their ideological differences and the Islamist-secular divide as a cover for their rejection of “resistance” altogether. As Bassel Al-Araj said, if the left in Palestine wants to compete with Islamists, they should compete in resistance. Muzawada through action.
Hamas, at the end of the day, is the contemporary articulation of a long history of resistance that folded within it the peasants of pre-Nakba Palestine, Palestinian revolutionaries in exile during the early years of the PLO, and the Islamists who took the wide-scale initiative in the 80s and beyond.
Many among the secular left have grown pale, rejecting Hamas’s resistance not out of a conviction of its inevitable failure, but rather due to a deep-seated anxiety about its potential success.
This isn’t merely an ethical opposition to the use of violence; it’s a fear that the Islamists might actually prove to be more effective than their own, now largely melancholic and demobilized, political stance. Meanwhile, certain factions within the Palestinian elite gaze upon Israel as a beacon of modernity, and are driven by a profound fear of their own perceived “regressive” society — a telling indication of their ideological dispositions, ensnared in the lure of the Other and terrified of the emancipatory potential of the Palestinian masses.
To have political and ideological differences with Hamas and tactical disagreements, including ethical problems with its targeting or its war-making abilities, is one thing. But to undermine the minimum level of understanding of why Palestinians, in all their ideological formations and historical articulations, see resistance in all its armed and unarmed forms as a necessity, is another. In fact, it is nothing short of brash, especially in an environment that fires professors for voicing any emotion or symbolism of support for Palestinian resistance.
The world can indeed recognize the necessity of resistance and the efforts of individuals to fight and reclaim what they’ve lost. To do so moves beyond the concept of victimhood to which many liberals in Palestine and some within the left want us to confine our struggle — a form of Palestinian subjectivity that only elicits pity.
Resistance is pre-political
Even in the absence of formal armed movements or strict ideological formations, the West Bank witnessed the emergence of small, informal groups — trust circles, collections of friends, and small-scale armed units that transcended ideological boundaries. This means that any analysis must start from tangible realities. Projecting idealized, rigid frameworks on political groups is not only unhelpful but intellectually lazy and profoundly ignorant of the fact that this generation will continue to resist.
Resistance is pre-political. It exists organically among this generation of Palestinians who continue to be erased from their land and continue to lose their friends and loved ones. It is those forces who do well in organizing that latent resistance and end up becoming a force to be reckoned with in Palestinian society. It is a necessity, and even in its militarization, it grows from tangible material realities, rather than from ideological choices alone.
The prevailing fear, as always, is that beneath the guise of significant ideological differences (which I also hold), our critique of resistance becomes an attempt to extinguish its very possibility.
Hamas represents only one of many political projects and historical attempts to break through the Iron Wall imposed by Israel. It might fail or it might succeed, but it hasn’t done anything that other socially progressive forces in Palestine haven’t tried. More importantly, Hamas in Gaza is not merely an external influence or importation; it is intrinsically woven into the larger social fabric and, at the very least, merits more than being summarily dismissed on simplistic grounds of being “regressive” versus “progressive.”
Hamas isn’t going anywhere in Palestinian politics. It is an energetic political entity that has astutely learned from the mistakes of its predecessor, the PLO, both in warfare and negotiations. It has meticulously invested its intellectual, political, and military resources into understanding Israel and its psychic center of gravity. Whether we like it or not, Hamas is now the primary force leading the Palestinian struggle.
The left must confront this basic fact. One cannot ground solidarity with Palestine on a politics that dismisses, overlooks, or excludes Hamas. This stance fails to grasp the complexities and contradictions inherent in the Palestinian struggle. In doing so, the left overlooks the dividing line between collaboration and resistance to its peril.
The last six months of genocide in Gaza have ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonization and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century.
Towards the Last Intifada: A Statement on Palestine by Anarchists
As anarchists living in the belly of the United States empire, we are committed to meaningful solidarity with the resistance in Palestine. Solidarity must not just be in name but, centered in establishing an effective resistance at home; one capable of fighting to overturn the US empire and western hegemony. We are currently living through and witnessing one of the most historical moments in anti-colonial struggle.
The movement in the US is at a major crossroads- where we are seeing a split between those committed to revolutionary change and those who are invested, consciously or unconsciously, in the continuation of the US empire. We write here what constitutes a sincere position of solidarity with Palestine in the true spirit of anarchism in the hopes that our intentions can reach beyond the counter-revolutionary impulses of social democratic imperialism that we find in the movement today. We look at specific aspects of the resistance in Palestine to understand how the factions have been able to launch a successful struggle against the Zionist entity and analyze how we might learn from them in order to unite those with an anti-colonial perspective to support them in this crucial moment.
The October 7th militant attack on the Zionist colonial regime, and the fighters who continue the battle against the occupation, from Gaza to Jenin, have created an example for contemporary resistance movements. The tactical prowess, creativity, and tenacity of the Palestinian Resistance fighters has, despite all odds, been successful against a more highly equipped and technologically advanced army. The relationship of the resistance groups involved has demonstrated how to create a functional and significant revolutionary force. There is now a symbol of hope, not just for the Palestinian people, but for those around the world who struggle for freedom against the US war machine.
Not only has the Palestinian Resistance been an inspiration for people in dire circumstances, but the determination has emboldened regional actors to fight on their behalf, creating an unprecedented campaign against Zionist brutality. In the course of this struggle, the interdependence between the Zionist regime and the US has been on full display. In a historic turn, the military cards of these oppressor states have been pulled, and despite a bombastic and horrifically devastating military campaign, they appear to be floundering. The Palestinian Resistance, presuming the fragility of western domination, may have precipitated the potential downfall of the white supremacist world-system. The political target for the Resistance has remained the same throughout the decades, and amidst their cries and proclamations, some of us have purposely kept our ears open to their calls. The destruction of the Zionist regime has, and remains, their target objective and we should strive to harmonize our efforts. The regime, as the Resistance says, is as weak as a spider’s web, and we recognize that fragility within the entire US imperialist apparatus.
This is a welcomed development not just for those who have felt the wrath of western hegemony abroad, but for those subject to its brutality at home. European expansion and exploitation justified through Christianity and a lust for wealth, decimated the population of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, or Abya Yala (the so-called “Americas”) from 70-100 million people to 12 million just in the first hundred years. In a 50-year period, 27 million out of 30 million indigenous people were murdered by conquistadors. The kidnapping and mass enslavement of millions of African people is a crucial illustration of this genocidal process, and an integral part of European capitalist accumulation and domination through the settler colonial process in the northern hemisphere. While methods of domination adapt throughout time and place to meet the needs of the colonizer, the genocidal intent stays the same, as we see in Palestine and the United States today. Whether the colonizer’s tools are extermination via large scale military conflicts or industrialized exploitation, incarceration, assimilation, ecocide, and policing, these genocides have continued for more than 500 years. Yet so has the resistance.
From the earliest days of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans rebelled, freed themselves, and joined other fugitives and Indigenous tribes to resist the white planter system, and the United States project in itself. Maroons of the Dismal Swamp – as well as Black Seminoles in Florida successfully struggled against genocidal Euro-American colonial expansion for more than 150 years before the Civil War. In the Caribbean, groups of Maroon guerrillas and enslaved plantation workers overthrew the French colonial power structure in the first successful revolutionary epoch against colonialism in the hemisphere: the Haitian Revolution. The lineage from Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner to Assata Shakur and Dhoruba bin-Wahad; from Sitting Bull to Leonard Peltier; from Sandino to Carlos Fonseca; is where we look to find creative ways to address the real needs of the people and the precise ways to attack the US empire.
As anarchists, we often speak of our history in regards to Catalonia, Haymarket, or the Makhnovista movement; contemporarily the Rojava Revolution, or Zapatismo. These revolutionary projects were not as ideologically rigid, or pure, as many anarchists often assume, yet even so we too, still view these references with reverence. We aren’t looking to mirror any of these reference points, but rather learn from a diverse array of experiments.
The wealth and leisure in western societies is created through the imperial process, and our communities domestically are disciplined to ensure the settler-colonial regime in the United States enforces the same abroad. When we understand ourselves and our enemy in this way, we also look to historical and ongoing occupation and genocide by the hands of the US in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, in Hawaii, and in the entirety of the global south. We understand fighting Zionism is fighting US imperialism, which is fighting for the liberation of all colonized people. From inside the belly of the beast, our efforts align with those advanced sectors of resistance who are destroying this process of barbarism. For example, when we see the imperialists being ejected from the Sahel we recognize the importance of the conflict, and the importance of the experience of those who have been colonized. Understanding this interconnection gives us a clear picture of our power and the landscape of the enemy.
The US and the Zionist regime are the primary dominoes in the impending collapse of western civilization. To understand them better, we need more than an abstract view of them as nation-states. The state and its military operation is a complex web of relations — industrial, yes, but also social, familial, architectural. We salute the ingenuity of saboteurs against Zionist funders, the international student occupations for Palestine and the Stop Cop City struggle in demonstrating the importance of mapping the flows of power, of identifying what and who within their local situation is woven into the operation of empire. If we’re to play an active role in the demise of these monstrosities, we need to know their Achille’s heels. We believe that power-mapping the enemy is an essential tool for the insurgent.
We need to map our own power too, in each locale and in thorough detail. An assessment of our side must figure into our topography and our tactical considerations. Three committed people are capable of quite a lot. One hundred fifty people, with the element of surprise on their side, may have unfathomable success. Knowing the numbers, capacities, locations, and resources of our forces allows us to strike the enemy’s targets and strategically coordinate.
Our path towards resistance should be unequivocal as well. The principle objective of the revolutionary anarchist movement in the US should be the destruction of the United States. That fundamental target, while it seems clear, has been largely obscured by some segments of the left, who are beholden to the superficial sham of activism, and by tacitly or explicitly allying with US propaganda and/or military goals, have placed the movement on the altar of western militarism. It is beneficial to make our position utterly transparent. Our actions, literature, propaganda, and methods should be subordinated toward the end of the United States. With this task in mind, the initiatives of international resistance are signs for us to act in solidarity, and for others to act in solidarity with us. The collapse of the United States, the chief architect of barbarism, the head of snake, is the goal for revolutionaries internationally and must be ours as well.
Despite existing hierarchies, the prison break of October 7th was also the result of highly horizontalized social structures. As anarchists we need to be careful that our keen eye for hierarchy doesn’t make us useful as the lackeys of social democratic imperialism. The Resistance is demonstrating what is necessary to conduct an efficient revolutionary campaign, and we intend to learn from it and integrate some of these lessons into our practices. The concept put forth by the Resistance, “the Unity of the Fields,” is a practice in a larger process of struggle, that if adhered to should produce greater revolutionary momentum. It states that resistance factions do not need to create one overarching governance structure or a bureaucracy, but should coordinate in struggle, based on shared political objectives. This mirrors the concept of “the mosaic,” how Russell Maroon Shoatz defines as “the movement of oppressed sectors acting in concert.”
The movement in the US is currently scattered and, importantly, factions of the movement have remarkably disparate political goals. To build a capable resistance, we must flesh out these objectives to be able to coordinate from collective to collective, faction to faction. It is essential that any unity is defined by that process. So long as a shared horizon can be envisioned, we believe unity is possible.
We propose these objectives as an essential starting place:
1. The end of the Zionist regime, a free autonomous Palestine, and solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance.
2. The revolutionary end of the settler-colonialist regime of the United States.
3. Coordinating our efforts faction to faction to undermine the US regime and their political-military proxies internationally to weaken the entire colonial system.
In establishing this base level of shared agreement the movement can then strive towards middle and longer term plans and end the confounding cycle of reactiveness that has plagued us for so long. To be clear, we are calling for a reformation of the movement away from symbolism and spectacle, so when calls are made to intensify the struggle, or when the exploited rise, we are not trapped in the activist fog that the movement itself has created. If we truly want freedom for Palestine this should be the first step. Indigenous, Black liberation and all internationalist revolutionary movements have always known this truth: the freedom of Palestinians, which is intrinsically tied to all colonized people, will take nothing short of the dissolution of the US empire, and our efforts must dignify the rebels in Gaza and the West Bank.
When we reach our hands out in revolutionary greetings, when our colonial siblings are suffering from mass starvation, we don’t offer conditional support, with prerequisites, based on racialization or secularism. The Resistance here has varying belief systems, similarly to Palestine, and a political desire striving for unification must be derived through acceptance of those differences and the fundamental belief in the absolute destruction of the western world-system. Secularism and science is not devoid of episteme: an episteme that is usually externalized in western superiority over those who haven’t been “enlightened” yet. It’s specifically the goal of US exceptionalist media to portray all forms of Islam as being the same. Anarchist have played into this indoctrination when we foreground the most violent strains of Islam. Islam, for instance, has a foundation of zakat – essentially mutual aid and jihad – to strive towards a better self and betterment of one’s Ummah (Muslim community).
“Fight against them ˹if they persecute you˺ until there is no more persecution…” If they stop ˹persecuting you˺, let there be no hostility except against the aggressors.” ~ The Qur’an 2:193
Islam encourages Muslims to strive for a better world, to struggle against oppression, and to humbly fight back. This is a part of why many Black revolutionaries are Muslim and has become a driving episteme in the Palestinian resistance. As anarchists fighting against the entity’s imperial war machine in the belly of the beast, amongst our varying experiences and understandings of the world, there are elements that unite us. The desire to end genocidal settler-colonialism, love, care, and the belief in another world are uniting forces within our struggle that propels us forward in the long-term struggle towards the Last Intifada.
In Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, Palestinians and Resistance fighters are attacking the Zionists on all fronts to end the occupation. They are fighting at unprecedented levels of coordination towards The Last Intifada. The Resistance called upon Muslims, the Arab world, westerners, militants, workers, students, anarchists, communists, radicals, and all of “those who have been wronged” to be in material solidarity with Palestinians. We cannot expect the Resistance to fight alone. Our liberation is connected and dependent on the death of western civilization. We, as anarchists, have a duty to fight for Palestinian de-colonial struggle and the struggle to defeat capitalism and western hegemony. We must continue to hemorrhage the US empire. The beast cannot continue to claw colonized peoples across the world without being clawed back.
For The Last Intifada.
– Lenapehoking Anarchists, September 2024
“Permission ˹to fight back˺ is ˹hereby˺ granted to those being fought, for they have been wronged.” ~ The Qur’an 22:39 Further Readings
Kassem Kassir “The Phrases “Unity of Fields [of Battle]”, “Unity of Fronts” or “Axis of Resistance”: Between Slogan and Reality.”
Al Jazeera “Last set of French troops exit Niger as Sahel sheds Parisian influence.”
What We Did on 7 October 2023 — Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
For a year now, every person on the planet who is not indifferent or excluded from the general forms of information, when they hear this date, they automatically associate it with a specific event of historical significance. And yet, all this time, apart from the Palestinian resistance, only the NATO imperialists and their subordinates have been referring to this date, in the terms of counter-revolution, the narratives of “counter-terrorism”, in order to exonerate the genocide of a revolted people. The testimony of resistance creates in immediate time the continuity of living memory, relaying and extending the power of revolutionary experience. Against this experience stand the narratives which take a distance from the testimony of the resistance subject, as well as the silence that, like a threateningly insidious command, objectively established, attempts to eliminate the historical intrusions of those revolutionary initiatives that are subversive for the rulers’ order. The silence about the world-changing initiative of October 7 is an irrevocably guilty readjustment of the narratives that then equated, in their capitulated consciousness, the revolution with the counter-revolution, describing two monsters in contrast to which the metaphysical “good” evaluates itself. Of course, this need to disassociate oneself from the inevitably violent revolutionary rupture into the standstill of history, is an expression of subservience to the militaristic and ideological totalitarianism of capital. Has the ideological obliteration of October 7 and of the organized armed Palestinian resistance produced a struggle? Yes, it has produced a protest movement against the NATO war machine, demanding the appeasement of the monster we aroused on October 7. Not by coincidence, the idealistic protest has had zero effect on the progress of the war.
If we speak from the point of view of the resistance today, we have a responsibility to speak through the living presence of October 7. How can we advance the revolutionary struggle by forgetting its historical achievements? How can we fight today, if we put a lid on what the resistance is achieving as we speak? Speaking through the resistance, its entire concurrent and historical experience speaks right here. Revolutionary testimony always has the tone of speaking in first person. It may, for the sake of accuracy, use third person for acts in which the bearer of the testimony was not directly active, and third person for general statements, but the voice of the testimony participates in a collective subjectivity that permeates the Earth and history. Third person interpretations, with the veneer of some third way or no way to freedom, comprise, in the here and now, counter-revolutionary fatalism with political assertions. Even before we talk about the actual struggle, in opting between first or the third person for doing so, lies the conflict between revolutionary popular testimony and counter-revolutionary domination. October 7 has shed plenty of light on the historical/evolutionary wall, after breaking through the wall of the imperialist-colonial prison. The political subjects who stayed behind the breach cannot speak from the perspective of the resistance (literally and not because of a supposed prohibition by revolutionary ethics). Those who broke the barrier did it for all of us. Anyone who wants to escape from the capitalist theocracy to be in the revolutionary flow must break down the walls he/she maintains.
Before October 7, for years, Palestine was finished for the imperialist metropolis, and also for the left and the anti-authoritarian movement. The m-l (tn: Marxists-Lenininsts) and a part of workerist libertarian Marxism that continued to refer to the Palestinian resistance were considered obsessive and dated. In current time, the international line of struggle was unable to go further than denouncing the apartheid in terms of liberal humanism. On October 7, dead Palestine returned in terms more revolutionary than ever before and shook up the Earth. Gaza was a closed field of genocidal terror because its people had chosen (or tolerated, it doesn’t matter) the government of a party that resisted the colonialists. On a different scale of size and time, Gaza’s resistance, the breaking of the wall and the subsequent razing Gaza to the ground, is reminiscent of the organized escape of Red Army Jews from the Sobibor extermination camp 80 years ago. Despite the success of the operation, very few survived at the time. The Nazis then dismantled the camp, to erase from history the point of revolutionary breach of the Holocaust. And today the losses are not counted in numbers, but the resistance has been victorious from day one.
October 7 demonstrated that the way out of the historical zionist and imperialist program of extermination of the Palestinian people, can only be revolutionary. The terrible technocratic scarecrow of imperialist domination collapsed as its colonial base was breached and exposed to resistance, for the first time radically. On October 7, the Palestinian resistance launched an organized mass offensive and took over the military bases and fascist settlements in the area of the frontal zone where the wall was breached. It was an operation of military neutralization, i.e. focused on neutralizing the enemy’s military power. The capture of colonists, which in social terms is a perfectly just and lenient means of resistance, was the link in the chain of the revolutionary battle. It was publicly demonstrated by numerous documents and testimonies from the colonists themselves that the resistance operation not only did not have characteristics antagonistic to its liberating political purpose, but was carried out with discipline in the use of the minimum necessary force.
The first reaction of the colonial army was to implement the standing order to exterminate the captured colonists, but also those who simply were present in places occupied by the Palestinian guerrillas. Combat helicopters and tanks bombed and burned down their own settlements, as well as many from the obscene rave party, in order for the colonialists to avoid negotiating from a position of weakness. The cannibalistic directive demonstrates that the state prefers to exterminate the last, most sectarian and discriminating shred of its humanity in order not to lose a single shred of its power. For bourgeois ideology, as for its set of laws in particular, the preemptive, blind extermination of its own citizens and soldiers is an unspeakable crime, a taboo1, because whatever contradictions and exceptions it invokes, it thoroughly abolishes its axiomatic foundations, both in the historical and logical dimensions. Despite the overwhelming documentation of the widespread application of this directive, the liberal and leftist zionist opposition has been unwilling to do anything more to defend its own colonial community against a self-destructive political regime, other than peaceful protests. The imperialists, their transnational institutions and their humanitarian organizations have legitimized the taboo by imposing absolute silence. This alone shows that the bourgeoisie consciously prefers and remains ready to exterminate all humanity rather than give up its power. Once again in history, it crudely demonstrates this.
One year later, how many of those who profess solidarity with the Palestinian people, who hasted to reproduce the counter-revolutionary propaganda about massacres and rapes, have apologized? What do they say today about the unspeakable torture, the shootings of pregnant women and children at the hands of their mothers and the rapes committed by the entire colonial army, systematically, with a political program and general consent from its fascist state? They are silent, if not continuing to belittle the crime of colonialism and thus protect it by equating it with the “crime” of armed resistance.
The revolutionary operation of October 7 had a horizon far beyond the first invasion; it was not a leap without a tomorrow. The resistance was ready for a long war, knowing the automatism of the arrogance of the zionists and imperialists and their excessive savagery. The breach of the colonial fortress was the necessary provocation for the spiraling down and collapse of the colonial army and subsequently of the entire colonial formation and imperialist planning, within the organized resistance trap, the Gaza fort. The capture of colonists was not intended to prevent counter-revolutionary counter-attack. Could the experienced Palestinian resistance invest in a conservative war measure? The captured colonists were the symbolic point that chained colonial arrogance to the trap. In the ultimate place of exclusion where the crucial battle has been fought for a year, the resistance stronghold stands defiant and the Palestinian people strong, the colonial system has been humiliated and its fascist polity has collapsed in a rapid dynamic of disintegration. The resistance holds the initiative, October 7 continues. Those who froze behind the broken wall have nowhere to stand today.
The Palestinian resistance of October 7, revealing the unlimited inhumanity of the imperialist system and its zionist gendarme, has awakened the broadest movement of internationalist solidarity of the last decades and especially the broadest solidarity in the history of the Palestinian struggle. The liberal fundamentalists who in October ’23 were whitewashing the road of zionist genocide by proclaiming that the Islamification of the resistance has isolated it from international solidarity, were proved wrong. In order to denounce the present resistance, an attempt is made to gentrify its history. If the Palestinian resistance is today capable of carrying out purely military operations and showing clemency to the butchers of its people, it has done so because, when it was necessary to take roots politically, surrounded by ruthless tyrants, it took up the responsibility of the provocation, with hijackings, the attack on the zionist mission of the Munich Olympics, etc. The whole history of the Palestinian resistance was condensed to a new level on October 7 and is moving forward with courage and faith until liberation, having once again dispelled fatalism. Memory is as vivid as the act of resistance. So today we inhabit the rift that we opened on October 7. As a comrade said 30 years ago, bringing to an assembly the example of our relationship with the Palestinian resistance, if you are traveling by plane and there is a hijack, you cannot say, “I am an anarchist, I am with you, let me get off”. We will go all the way together. As RAF taught us with its martyrs, the flight to the capitalist metropolis takes off from the ultimate places and in the ultimate ways.
EVERY DAY AND EVERYWHERE OCTOBER 7
PALESTINE, KURDISTAN, INTIFADA SERHILDAN
The Lebanese communist revolutionary, George Ibrahim Abdallah has spent 40 years in the captivity of the imperialists. On the 7th of October 2024 the french state will examine a new demand for his release, which is pending since last year. If on the 7th of October the french state does not release Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, it will have effectively taken responsibility, with the participation of its left wing, for the genocide of the Palestinian people and the terrorist antisocial attack against Lebanon.
From the streets, the guerrilla forts and the prisons we shout, FREEDOM to the unrelenting sun of resistance Georges Ibrahim Abdallah.
Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
Septembre 2024
1Let us not forget that the preventive blind mass extermination of a regime’s own citizens was attempted to be legitimized by the imposition of biotechnological vaccination for Sars-CoV-2 on an ideological framework of statistical epidemiology.
The Palestinian Revolution and the Rift in the International Movement — Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
I can imagine many people resenting the term Palestinian revolution when reading the title of this article. Some have already written that revolution is one thing and resistance is another, that war is one thing and liberation is another. I chose this title, being literal, precisely because it would be provocative. Let us be open to any dialogue, knowing that the first thing that is at issue is the definition of the subject. In times of war, any political discourse is a polemic act. War is not a choice, it is not a means among other means, as statist positivism and its projections on the anti-authoritarian pretexts for capitulation assert; it is the incessant class condition in which we find ourselves and through which we liberate ourselves. Every phrase that has been uttered in the last 20, 50, hundreds and thousands of years flutters on the broken Gaza wall or hangs in the rubble of the city, among the dismembered children. If the well-meaning movement researchers who have produced numerous analyses of the class and social background of the Greek revolution of 1821 find it difficult to recognize the Palestinian revolution as such, this says something about their euroelitism and nationalism. As for those who deny resistance to colonialism and imperialism, as well as its revolutionary potential, by juxtaposing the “essential” antithesis of capital-labor, the totality or molecularity, today we can say that their abstractions and confines are filled with the stench of the carnivorous capitalist North. The thoughtless adoption of the dogmatic social-democratic scholasticism suggests a blind consumption of intellectualism, self-indulging in ideological garbage. If I pay you a regular salary, the relationship is class-based. But if I take your land to build a work camp or a prison, then not only the relationship is not class-based, but it is subordinate to that, even if I put you in the camp on a salary or put you in prison! If I put you up against the prison wall and shoot you, the relationship is not class-based, it is “essentially” indifferent outside of its interpretation into a monetary relationship. If I lock you up in the prison that I built by stealing your land, if I control your survival resources and bomb you day and night, the relationship is not class-based and the relation of power cannot be changed until the labor relation is universally and completely dismantled. This kind of idiocy goes around as scholastic proletarian theory.
We have entered the evolutionary phase of capitalist civilization where it is materialized as a total synchronic crisis and where every tick of the clock reveals the positioning of every political subject on the side of revolution or on the side of counter-revolution. All antitheses are condensed, they intersect and are confounded towards the maximum and the minimum and in the explosive way that they emerge they express their complexity. The anti-capitalist movement is shaped within this vortex, it does not stand still in some idealized apathetic position of an overseer. It is therefore traversed by the whole set of intersections, confusions and complexities. The war waged by the statist public health control revealed a deep rift in the anti-capitalist movement, the imperialist war in the Ukrainian territory revealed other rifts, which literally culminate into war. The revolutionary counterattack inside the territory of the zionist colonialist rule, illuminated the most fundamental rift within the movement. If we can schematically say that the first rupture concerned the fractional scope of imperialist colonialism over the social body and the second one concerned revolutionary autonomy in conditions where military rule, as fundamental to capitalism, is unveiled, then the Palestinian rupture concerns the very point of the history of capitalism and its destruction. The unfulfilled crusade of colonizing the Eurasian East (prior to the complete colonization of Africa and of the continent westward to Europe) reappears as a historically inescapable and globally universal definitive question. Incidentally, wage slavery, on which the capitalist mode of production is founded, emerged and prevailed in Europe through the colonialist war to the east (in particular, from the data so far it appears that the prime organism where the prevalence of the wage relation was incubated was crusading Venice).
The historical moment of the dissemination of CoV-2 and the culmination of the anti-health imperialist counter-revolution, through its militaristic and bio-technocratic experiment of the universal vaccination, brought to the fore the class and political subjectivity of the human body, i.e. the most elementary organic unit of human existence and society, making it the target of a totalitarian colonial campaign. Imperialist terrorism attempted to establish itself in new depths of primitive accumulation and to restructure all existing power relations with the guiding principle of the liquidation, expulsion and purging of surplus labour. This coincided with the powerful manifestation of the Black Revolt in so-called America and of the women’s revolt globally, the living subject of the history of slavery and capitalist colonization of the Earth. The war of state sanitation introduced a historically innovative regime of perpetual state of emergency, which through bio-politics gave primacy to militaristic terms of domination and to the ideology and morality that derives from that. The counter-revolutionary offensive, in the form of the emergency regime, within the metropolises of Euro-Atlantic imperialism, continued in relation to the war in the Ukrainian-Russian space and now continues in relation to the war in Palestine (the Chinese counter- revolution continues on the first axis). It is no coincidence that the Israeli techno-stratocracy is a pioneer in the production and export of technology and methodology of control and repression, of fascist organization and politics, of biotechnology, digital integration and post-humanist fiction ideology. It should be noted that Israeli fascism imposed universal compulsory biotechnological vaccination of its citizens. Zionist colonialism fuses on the one hand traditional religious totalitarianism and racism, and on the other hand the fundamentalist governmentalist and mechanistic mentality of the bourgeoisie, the theocracy of capital and its technocratic mysticism. That is why Israeli colonialism today is demonstrating worldwide, on behalf of the Western Empire, the might of its terrorism with unprecedented intensity.
In the ideological battle within the international movement, which of course expresses contradictory and now increasingly antagonistic tendencies on the line of conflict between revolution and counter- revolution, what emerges as a central rift is the koinonismos (1) of counter-revolution. In particular, the koinonismos of imperialism and more specifically the koinonismos of imperialist social democracy. In correlation to this, anti-imperialist social fascism reappears as a problem. In the Greek movement the concept of koinonismos has been defined as the internalization of the pervasive ideology of the regime by the social movement. I reinstate it here with a reverse definition, which, without negating what is historically recorded, it puts the title of social in the right causal relation: the social ground and the social relation are not constructed by power, but on the contrary, power pillages their material, their name and their value, in order to return them to the subjects, having reconstructed them with the necessary divisions. This rift concerns the underlying anti-proletarian, anti-social and counter-revolutionary roots of making a separation from the aggressive initiative of the Palestinians, from their Islamic vanguard, from the unholy revolutionary means, from the open class war, from anti-imperialist resistance, from the national identities of the global South, from the prevalence of faith over survival, from the devaluation of the ideological and normative claims and rhythms of the bourgeois positivism internalized in the movements of the North, etc.
The koinonismos of counter-revolution is defined by the class and political frontier that the ruling class erects against the savage proletariat, which in the historical narrative is presented as uncivilized and in politics as terrorist. The koinonismos of imperialism has as its central axes the peace of Christian ecumenism and bourgeois liberalism with its modern ecumenism. The peace of God presupposes the sovereignty of the crusading sword. Imperialist socialism, by demanding the disarmament of the ‘uncivilized’ in order for a peace to be recognized, expresses its militaristic totalitarianism. Let’s not forget that even when Euro-Atlantic imperialism declared war on Russian nationalism, it called Russian nationalism uncivilized and collectively criminalized Russian culture (arts, sports, history…).
The common joint of imperialist koinonismos is the Law of Empire, developed on a global model, in transnational conventions (treaties) and transnational institutions. The sword of peace of the god of the Judeo-Christian tradition is surrounded by legal trinkets and supposedly collective mediations. Around the slaughterhouse, the real class conditions of political warfare (military, biopolitical, moral-social) imperialist koinonismos bombards with a totalitarian morality, founded on the given biopolitical class divisions. Not only is not every death or freedom of every person measured equally, but more specifically, the more intense the class or political factors that determine a person’s life chances and local rights, the more necessary and just for the political economy of capital is the intensification of their oppression or even their killing.
In examining the ideological conflict around the Palestinian revolution, I will use as a model of reference the first statement of Syriza after the revolutionary initiative of October 7, because it contains in three sentences all the basic ideological points of imperialist social democracy that have been internalized in the anti-capitalist movement.
“SYRIZA unequivocally condemns today’s Hamas attack against Israel, calls for its immediate end and expresses its solidarity with the people of Israel. The ongoing violence by all sides in the region, is a threat to any prospect of resolving the differences and is brutally affecting the security and rights especially of civilians, Israelis and Palestinians. We stand firmly in favour of the immediate resumption of credible bilateral talks for a two-state solution on the basis of the 1967 borders, with the capital of the Palestinian state being the city of east Jerusalem.”
Let us distinguish the ideological points that form the positions of imperialist social democracy:
1. Condemnation of the attack against the occupier’s national body inside its fort. This condemnation is the most basic position statement within the war. Various people try to convince that the condemnation of violence or of state violence from either side places them in a third position, morally and politically superior. The global proletariat understands, today as a whole, that the condemnation of the real military victory of the Palestinians is an expression of solidarity with imperialist koinonismos and thus a statement of consent to the extension of genocide, stronger than any tearful protest against it by the very subjects who condemn the attack.
In many statements, the condemnation, in its support, invokes the particular religious identity of the political organization that carried out the attack on the colonial fortress. This dogmatic demonization of Islam is identical with the fundamentalism of the crusades, which permeates conservative ideologies of capitalist times and culminates in imperialist/colonial elitism. Those who have been quick to denounce the religious character of Hamas identify with Netanyahu in his position that “we are the light, they are the darkness”. Koinonismos, the most subservient to imperialism, immediately assimilated the propaganda about rapes and massacres of civilians and children as if these practices, which characterize state warfare in general, are automatically derived from the Islamic identity of the resistance organization. The anti- theocratic guise of political condemnation is itself an attack on faith that transcends the carnal lust and fears of the bourgeois citizen, an attack on social morality that puts individualist autarchy under question, an attack on the collective and transcendentalist psyche that dismantles utilitarian positivism.
The ideological lackeys who, disgusted from the resistance’s attack joined the chorus of the liberal crusade, forgot that Hamas is the elected government of the marginal colonial territories, which was arbitrarily denied its bourgeois-democratic authority. The genocidal blockade of Gaza began in 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah coup plotters, at whose hands the struggling Palestinians had been infamously tortured. Liberal fundamentalism, which sets up a la carte democracies, with coups, terrorism and mass purges, calls the “uncivilized” people fascists, whenever its bribery doesn’t work. The goal is the condemnation of their extended political autonomy.
Hamas was of no interest to the luminaries of imperialist social democracy during the years when the unrecognized Hamas government was tolerated by the colonialists, as it was managing the biopolitical and economic plight of the people of Gaza due to its total blockade. Once it breached the blockade, its militaristic armor and the security of its national reproduction, imperialist social democracy felt the need to join in denouncing the virtual hideous monster.
2. Recognition of the settlers and their genocidal state as a people. Subsequently, expressing solidarity with the colonialist organization. Only statism ascribes the concept of people to a state that is ethnically homogeneous. From the socio-revolutionary point of view, the popular always defines itself in class terms. The militarist colonists never and nowhere constituted a people. All Israelis are settlers because, in contrast to their abstract historical locality, their actual settlement, residence and expansion in the biblical land is by direct and continuous ethnic cleansing of another locality. If we were talking about the United States, only white fascists consider white Americans a distinct people. There is an Israeli nation, but it is not a people. The people of the Israeli state are the Palestinians, the hunted natives. Israeli citizens become a people to the extent that they betray their nation and fight with the Palestinian people. We will see this in a moment in their own words.
A side note, invoking the phantom Israeli people and expressing solidarity with this makes no class or political distinctions within the colonial nation. This phantom comes straight out of the most horrible statist nationalism, that is, colonialist nationalism. In any case, solidarity with the exploited classes of the colonial organism itself cannot possibly depend on submissiveness to its state of domination. On the contrary, class solidarity starts from the anti-colonial revolution, the social war for the destruction of the state-launching ground for imperialism.
The declarations of solidarity with the “Israeli people” are an invitation to complete the genocide of the Palestinians.
3. Condemnation of violence on both sides.
4. Focus on civilians and subjecting them to the imperialist conditions of rights and security. The focus on civilians completes the project of moral-ideological disarmament, depoliticization and passivization of the resisting people. At the same time that imperialism is blowing up the revolted prison of Gaza, it is also assuming the paternalistic responsibility of managing the survivors of genocide. More generally, the humanitarian infiltration of the transnational and parastatal (NGO) institutions of capital in the global South is paving the way for the formation of protectorate state institutions in the service of imperialism, with the assignment of managerial positions to collaborationists. We should note that the regional hegemonic powers are also playing in this field, always against the political autonomy and internationalist solidarity of the resisting people.
The external projection of the security claim as a primary need, annihilates the revolutionary needs of the people and extorts the recognition of the colonial interest, the security of its national fascist regime, as a universal need. The conclaves that hold the sword of imperialist peace can define the rights and the timeliness or untimeliness of their application. While international rights have been established in order to give the form of a contract to structural inequalities, the equation of the Palestinian people and of the zionist settlers under the category of ‘civilian’ legitimizes colonialism and currently justifies the attempt for a “final solution” for the sake of the security of the genocidal organization, i.e. total ethnic cleansing through genocide.
5. Proposing the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories that remained unconquered until 1967. On this point, libertarian imperialist social democracy is differentiated from the statist leftist social-democracy in terms of theoretical formulations and working field. However, they meet on the basic point of the relationship with the colonial state. Left social democracy expresses the imminent imperialist project of annihilating the Palestinian resistance and imposing on the wreckage of Gaza a collaborationist regime based on the experience of the Abbas management, who is an agent of the years-long ethnic cleansing. Libertarian social democracy, with a kind of Jesuit elitism and hypocrisy, advocates the fraternity of the exploited Palestinians and Israeli “peoples” or “societies”, without the destruction of the colonial state. I note that the workerist position that attributes the capacity for overthrowing the Israeli capitalist state formation exclusively to the Israeli working class, validates colonial nationalism and even lends it with an ideological envelope of pure national socialism (Nazism). Nothing new, Mussolini started out as a leftist and zionist settlers too, with strong socialist, workerist and communitarian roots.
All the ideological points of imperialist social democracy except the last one are replacing political polemics with a biopolitical ethics and managerial lingo. The biopolitical discourse objectifies existential experience in order to strip it of its class history and political subjectivity. Biopolitical ethics defines what violence is in order to exempt a set of capitalist-state practices from the category of violence and at the same time to criminalize resistance practices. Critical biopolitical ideology ratifies imperialism’s stripping of bodies of their collective identities and their resistance power. Vulnerability is transformed ideologically into an insurmountable anthropological condition, either as a class condition or as its weak consciousness. In this context, “civilians” become the central figures of the biopolitical narrative of war, with imperialist citizenship as their archetype of identification and measure of evaluation.
From a revolutionary point of view, the examination of experiences and the subordination of means to abstract ends that come from outside the immediate field of struggle is an ideological ploy to eliminate and replace the practical ends of direct resistance with the koinonistic ethics of the means, i.e. the anti-proletarian and counter-revolutionary values of the bourgeoisie, which reflect established inequalities. To judge the Palestinian resistance by the yardstick of anarchist or Marxist utopia is a project of ideological colonialism, but also of existential annihilation by the intelligentsia of dominant european humanism. Values that do not allow for taking sides with the existing resistance are values that are comfortable with the existing class slaughterhouse. In the offices where the fundamentalist critique on unholy means takes place, sits the Inquisition, which is certainly concerned with popular resistance, but only as an enemy. A Palestinian people separated from its armed struggle and its resistance organizations is the imaginary flock of the crusader church.
The Palestinian revolution awakens a multitude of questions of the international anti-capitalist movement, which are inevitably answered immediately by each one’s stance. I will only mention a few of these in which the class-political borders have already been drawn within the actual conflict, and then I will focus on the revolutionary lines given to us by the revolutionary anarchists from the ground of the conflict.
a. The identification of class relations in the actual composition of capitalist domination on a global scale. Who is an enemy and who is a friend at any particular point for the revolutionary anarchist movement? How is the distinction between direct and indirect political tasks concretized at each point, given anarchism’s characteristic historical stance of directly responding to the needs of our community as oppressed people, with the general perspective of freedom and equality? The most concrete answers, the only ones capable of bringing about alliance, immediacy and radical perspective, stem from the direct struggle of the subjects involved. This observation confirms the anarchist claim to the political autonomy of all resistance.
b. The correlation of ends and means. A question that many anarchists falsely and arrogantly declare that anarchism has solved, unlike the statist political currents. Whenever the class conflict brings this question to the fore, as did the revolutionary initiative on October 7, all those who claim to have answered this question without having a revolutionary organization on the ground, can and do validate their ideological position in only one way: by separating themselves from revolutionary action.
c. The strategic treatment of the relations between imperialism, the state and the social revolution.
d. The political mediation of the resistance. Here I am not referring to the mediation of the Palestinian movement by the Palestinian political organizations, the surrounding state or, more generally, political-military forces and the international imperialist institutions. The Palestinian people have felt on their own flesh the exploitative and usually treacherous attitude of the Arab and Islamic states. One sees no friends in the UN and in the various imperialist political interventions. Here I am referring to the ideological and political mediation of antagonistic positions of the international movement on behalf of the Palestinian movement. In particular, it is important within the internationalist movement, to deal with the internalized imperialist koinonismos and also with anti-imperialist social fascism, from the point of view of their colonialist political authoritarianism against the autonomy of the Palestinian revolution. In the sphere of political mediation which cancels the field of struggle itself, belongs also the usual koinonistic address to an imaginary apathetic mass as if it constituted the political public of resistance. The political public of resistance is of course the movements themselves, from their organic processes (and their collaborations) to the militant frontier of their development.
The confusion has spread to the internationalist movement. A simple example is the confrontation within the anti-fascist football club St.Pauli. The critical response (2) of the local clubs to the club’s pro-Israeli statement sharply reproduced the positions of imperialist social democracy. An exception was the message of the Turkish club, a few days later, which highlighted the historical unity of the anti-colonial and anti- racist struggle. The radical position came from the key borderland between the global North and the global South. I will focus below on the first statement (3) of the Anarchist Federation of Afghanistan-Iran, because of the intensity of its reactionary positions, its locality in a place of struggle (Middle East, Kurdistan), and in connection to this because of its internal contradictions. In contrast, I will examine the social-fascist positions that present themselves as anti-imperialist. The last critical reference will focus on conspiratorial (4) positions.
The entirety of the ideological positions of imperialist social democracy have been eloquently and succinctly answered by the Palestinian refugee Nidal Khalaf in his intervention, “On ‘pro-Palestinian’ hypocrisy.” (5) I will only summarize at this point, but anyone who continues reading this text should read the aforementioned article as if it were interjected here. I adopt every word of it, considering it sufficient to deconstruct the scarecrows of imperialist koinonismos. N. Khalaf, after stating from the outset that “Israel” is a colonial entity created and existing as an advance military base for Western imperialism, makes it clear that a war is being waged with colonialism and that it is not a border or religious dispute. He then goes on to denounce pro-colonial pacifism and collaborationist case of the two-state solution, the condemnation of violence and international law. He explains that the western value systems underlying the allegedly friendly critique of the Palestinian resistance, exist due to and for the sake of imperialist genocide. According to the Palestinian refugee’s testimony, the real hypocrisy is not the imperialists’ policies and their propaganda, but the projection of a pro-Palestinian identity by subjects who conform to the western scheme of liberal values. The worst form of western hegemonism is the attempts at moral subjugation, which are condensed in the refusal to support the Palestinian resistance organizations. The article closes by returning back to the exponents of cultural imperialism the image of the dead civilian. The whole text decimates the ideological colonialism of imperialist koinonismos that is so internalized in the international movement.
I proceed to a political summary of the views expressed in two interviews by two anarchists from the field, one who spoke (6) on behalf of the Palestinian anarchist organization FAUDA and one with Israeli citizenship. (7) Political positions from reality, against the political mediation of imperialist koinonismos. As another testimony (8) from the refugee Palestinian diaspora notes: “There is plenty of temptation to wag fingers in the aftermath of the operation [of October 7], but surely that task is not the domain of academics and activists in the metropole. Nor should it be the priority of diaspora Palestinians (among whom I include myself). In our environs, filled with their own kind of hostility, the priority should be to defend Palestinians against the torment to which they have been subjected by the entire industrialized world. Among politicians, artists, celebrities, and intellectuals, Palestinians have no shortage of critics happy to cosign Zionist genocide. Those critiques don’t need or desire our validation, anyway. Abandoning our brethren in order to appease the Zionist establishment will deliver no accolades. In the end, the aspirant to respectability is left only with the shame of conciliation.
Palestinians are perfectly capable of formulating strategy and thinking through complex problems without the guidance of outsiders; they certainly don’t need half-baked moralism from dorks and social climbers in the West.”
The actual relationship between ends and means as testimonies from ground reveal, clarifies the issue of concretizing class-political relations and identifying enemies and friends. I begin with two quotes from the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. (9) “The Gaza Palestinians have decided they’re willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom.” Who would deny this cause and its consequences? “On Saturday, Israel saw pictures it has never seen before. Palestinian vehicles patrolling its cities, bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear away at that arrogance.” No consequence is capable of undoing the achieved unity of this cause and this means. The October 7 initiative drew a line of war, of revolution and counter-revolution in Gaza that defines the world in an inescapable way: you either tread on one hemisphere of the Earth or the other, either with the Palestinian revolution or with imperialist genocide. The word arrogance, couched as the self-consciousness of the colonial nation (self-consciousness can only ever be negative) dissolves the counter-revolutionary propaganda about innocent victims.
The comrade from FAUDA informs us that the common front of the Palestinian resistance under the same banner and with the common goal of liberation from zionism is a fundamental need and that their organization is fighting for the unity of the movement. It also points out the necessity of mobilizing the youth for this purpose. (10)
The comrade with Israeli nationality informs us that what characterizes the Palestinian resistance these days, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, is the common and broad fronts. Islamists, secularists, Marxists and even national-liberals, like some parts of Fatah, are fighting side by side. The immediate class and political frontier has been defined, the immediate revolutionary purpose has been defined, the practical consequences are inescapable.
The comrade, with their testimony, completes the revolutionary line by taking a radical stand at the rear of the colonial frontier. His words illuminate precisely what internationalist defeatism means. Already as he introduces himself he declares his place of birth, Haifa, as occupied Palestine and thus calls the occupation by its name, for all Palestinian land. Recognizing the anti-colonial resistance as the only revolutionary movement in the occupied territories and as the vanguard of any radical change, he declares his obligation to deny his Israeli identity, to become an enemy, a traitor to the colonial nation, to his “society” and to ally with the dispossessed. Here is a perception of class specific condition, of the specific consequences of ends and means. The comrade declares his duty to side with the oppressed, on their own terms and under their own leadership. And he notes on this that anarchism (11) gives him both the language and the tools to envision this politics. “For me, there is no ‘anarchist society’ to march towards, since we don’t have an end goal. I see anarchism as a resistance movement, an arsenal of tools for the oppressed all over the Earth to fight the present dystopia, and that is what attracts me to it.”
The comrade participated in the organization “Anarchists against the Wall” (now dissolved). Since the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day, the walls between North and South have multiplied: Palestine, Mexico, Mediterranean, Evros (greek-turkish border), Kurdistan. The revolutionary initiative of October 7 was a powerful blow to the historical development of the global imperialist prison. The comrade from the settler hinterland explains that the idea of coexistence is a superficial show and that only by fighting against the wall did the two sides come together, not as enemies, but as fighters for the same purpose, comrades, co-conspirators and allies, on equal terms. “What Hamas did on Saturday, October 7, was to break the ghetto, both physically and symbolically. They broke the gates surrounding Gaza and reclaimed land inside Israel, positioning themselves as a force beyond their assigned role as the Gaza government. They put themselves at the forefront of the Palestinian liberation movement, directly decolonizing territory.” Class conditions, revolutionary consistency, ends, means, all crystal clear from the anarchist perspective that unites the oppressed in the war.
Let us return briefly to the question of defining the grid of class relations overall. Why is the anti-colonial struggle the key meeting point on both sides of the border? Why not the workers’ struggle, the anti-patriarchal struggle, etc.? Aside from the fact that the regime of national subordination and general exile in Palestine has implanted a condition of domination that superimposes the entirety of class relations there, the comrade points out an additional condition: the settler democracy allows everything, all kinds of radicalism, as long as it is committed to the zionist military rule.
I would like to make two comments on the information given to us by our comrades from Palestine. Both the relativist theory of the intersectional approach and the relativist theory of the abstract wage-relationship as a universal class identity, are incapable of dealing with the specific class needs and social currents that unite people in revolutionary struggle. This does not imply that the correct theory is the post- Leninist one that projects imperialism as the main antithesis in relation to which all other antitheses are indifferent. We will see this below. Direct action anarchism, even when aware of the various abstract theories of Marxist or sociological origin, goes beyond them, having at its disposal the wealth of knowledge offered by direct struggle. There are no issues that fall within a molecular sphere independent of class relations on a global scale, nor issues that fall within a mega-scale where relations are inevitably mediated by states. The scales are interrelated and the criticality of each antithesis is defined by the subjects of the resistance. There are contradictions that affect internationalist solidarity (e.g. Hamas’s links to the Turkish state and the ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories of Rojava) and direct contradictions that exclude any non polemic encounter (e.g. the participation of the working class and the queer community of the colonial Israeli nation in its war machine).
Many libertarians internationally are still investing in the working class of the colonialist establishment. Typical is the intervention of the Anarchist Communist Group of Melbourne (12) (11/10) which, while acknowledging the complicity of the majority of the Israeli working class and not expecting Jewish workers’ solidarity to be a major force in the near future, characterizes the targeting of Israeli workers as damaging. Although this intervention describes the Israeli state in real terms, pointing out that Israeli fascism is moving towards the “final solution”, it does not neglect the obligation to imperialist social democracy to condemn Hamas with a cultural shadow (abstractly “reactionary”) and to distance itself from the targeting of Israeli civilians. But why is equality in horror damaging, especially in a permanent condition where no other practice has been able to even remotely crack the arrogance of genocidal peace, as the Israeli writer D. Levi attests?
Both comrades from Palestine answered categorically to the questions put to them about workers’ solidarity: mass proletarian solidarity from within the colonialist entity towards the Palestinian people is an ideological ghost. The suggestion that the liberation of Palestine, and more broadly of the global South, from imperialist domination is dependent on the workers’ movement of the North, is a characteristic expression of imperialist social democracy, of the colonial capitalist conception of progress and its projection against the revolutionary class struggle. Without the direct struggle of the oppressed people, nothing else happens except the expansive reformism of genocide.
Immediately after the revolutionary initiative of October 7, the state of settler bosses detained the thousands of Palestinian workers who crossed from Gaza every day as if moving through a labour camp, tortured them and marked them with numbers. Some workers died from the torture. In what way did the settler workers express their solidarity? By continuing to enlist and work to murder 160 children of the uncivilized proletariat every day.
The popular movement of the citizens of the occupied colonial hinterland has a direct enemy and if it does not confront this enemy in a way proportional to the intensity and depth of the current nationalist offensive, it will leave the nationwide responsibility of Israelis for the culmination of the genocide intact. War with zionist fascism which suppresses even the slightest questioning of the “final solution” and which devalues even the Israeli hostages and their protesting relatives, must be internalized in the Israeli nation. During the Nazi occupation of Europe, Italian and German antifascists found a way to stand in solidarity with the peoples in the conquered lands and to put antifascist resistance into practice: they defected to the partisans. This was the clearest manifestation of proletarian internationalism.
Of course, the preconditions for solidarity to the Palestinian resistance are not put forth by the anti-nationalist anti-colonial movement of the colonial entity, which has expressed understanding for the loss of its own people in the revolutionary attack of October 7, but by the imperialist social democracy. The same fascism, especially its antiproletarian-counterrevolutionary expressions, must be confronted in the imperialist hinterland, such as the capitalists’ terrorism against the workers of Starbucks (13) or against Harvard students in the USA and the military rule in the streets of Europe.
As various people attempt to contrast the Kurdish Freedom Movement with the Palestinian movement, doing in this way great disservice to internationalist solidarity, let me remind that the internationalist connection of the PKK with the revolutionary proletarian movement in the turkish territory is the HBDH ( Peoples’ United Revolutionary Movement) the front of the Turkish armed revolutionary organizations with the PKK.
Those who say that “resistance, uprisings and revolutions will either be social/class or nothing”, denying the class and social nature of the Palestinian resistance and the class and social elements of the political self-determination of the resistance organizations, are aiding the imperialist genocide. Their “nothing” is a gleeful applause for the cultural and physical ethnic cleansing of the oppressed who stray from the fundamentalist lines of colonial socialism. After all, the ideological totalitarianism of “All or Nothing” always comes to nothing anyway. (14)
Speaking of workers’ struggle, when the FAUDA comrade was asked about the possibility of a new general strike of Palestinians like in 2021, he replied that although it is not a trivial and useless practice, the struggle today has gone beyond this level. The situation and experience prove the necessity of armed struggle. The interdependence of means and ends is not deduced from some abstract interpretation of the conflict (e.g. workerism), nor from a mechanistic projection of abstractions onto practice. Even the purely economic struggle, as we move away from the reformism of the workers’ aristocracy, requires armed ways of protecting itself against military and penal repression, strike-breaking and anti-union terrorism (e.g. in the greek territory today). The political strike sharply raises the level of conflict. And finally, the whole historical experience of the workers’ movement showcases that the labor camp is a base for self-organization and for venturing into the struggle, but not a place of militant power, when the bourgeoisie is ready to extend its military means beyond limits.
The class conflict in Palestine reveals the hypocrisy of the ideological distinction, founded on an anti-armed struggle stance, between organized vanguardism and spontaneous insurrection, a construct propagated in the libertarian movement by the situationist lackeys of counter-revolution. Many political texts claiming the title of solidarity with Palestine, call for or wish for the emergence of an uprising in the image of the 1st Intifada, as opposed to the current military conflict. These vulgar euro-elitists, who pretend to be the generals of the correct ways of rebellion, underestimate the Palestinian people, as if they were not already rebellious, as if they were not involved in the resistance in a thousand ways, as if they cannot judge for themselves what the right ways are, and with no sense of responsibility, push a line of disarmament and non-organization within the slaughterhouse, only to promote the doctrine of their political subservience to the military rule’s monopoly, as the genuine liberal colonialists that they are.
On the actual ground, Gaza, the quality and size of the war production of the Palestinian resistance shows, in real terms, what the historical evolution of social horizontality means. Both the arsenal and infrastructure of resistance, with their particular characteristics within specific cultural and political conditions, express the breadth and depth of creative participation and social cohesion in relation to the conflict with colonialism. The main weapons of resistance are improvised. To manufacture the available quantity of rockets and various explosive devices required a huge amount of work. In addition, it required working space and an equally vast transport network. Even more work was needed to build the underground forts, which serve almost all the activities of the combative forces, and not only their cover at the time of close combat. In other words, this is an infrastructure project that serves far more needs than the classic concrete forts, such as those of the Maginot and Metaxa lines, with all the work being done underground and in incomparable territorial density. Additional work was required to ensure that all work was done invisibly and that no information would leak, within a geographically tiny space, overrun by people and which comprises the world model for technocratic surveillance and espionage.
None of these tasks, in the given guerrilla warfare conditions, could have be done for 30 pieces of silver or under gunpoint. Only volunteers with credibility for their dedication to the cause could accomplish this feat. A pan-popular army of unparalleled cohesion density, with no historical precedent, prepared the counterattack against the zionist class enemy and the long war of attrition. The conditions demanded an unprecedented density in the unity of social and armed resistance, and the revolted Palestinian people brought the evolution of humanity towards social self-direction one step further. A step further within the tightest universal prison, a step over an abyss that had to be bridged for us all to move forward, lest we be swallowed up by the history of capitalist and state rule.
In order to carry out the multidimensional program of the aforementioned work, improvisation was needed at all scales, in all phases. It is impossible for a structure of tight vertical direction to carry out all the interdependent productive objectives in the given conditions. It may be difficult for the individualist mentality that permeates part of the anti-capitalist movement to grasp the concept of coordinated self organization, its radicalism and its evolutionary force, but the revolutionary people are putting it into practice. I will not tire of saying it, the historical evolution of guerrilla struggle is the main natural field of development of the fractionally synthetic autonomy of the human animal, because it aims at its liberation from its cultural cannibalism and has developed explosively in the capitalist era, which has unified humanity in a negative way.
At this point we must note something that the guerrilla organization of the Kurdish Freedom Movement constantly emphasizes: capitalist technology is not capable of defeating determined resistance. The self-sacrifice, cooperativeness and resourcefulness of social resistance are capable of annihilating all the mechanical means of the enemy, its one-dimensional way of organizing and its inherent predisposition to take precautions by increasing distances and obstacles. Victory over modern industrial warfare depends on appropriate tactics, strategy and logistics, but it derives, like guerrilla tactics, strategy and logistics, from the moral forces and collective intelligence of the revolutionary people. Hamas has developed homemade rockets into precision guided systems and has expanded its arsenal with effective portable anti-tank and anti-helicopter missile systems, also of its own design. The ideological dogma that considers the proletariat capable only of tearing up bricks of the pavements, is a vile insult to the working class. If euro-elitism cannot understand that beneath the soil of Gaza a temple of popular culture has been built, catacombs that cut the legs off the modern empire, and if it cannot comprehend insurrection beyond setting up barricades with rubbish bins, it is because of insufficient imagination, but more fundamentally, because of insufficient determination.
Horizontalism is not a question of preference of certain closed communities, but a question of breaking down class relations, political heteronomy, all inequalities and especially the conditions of polemic power on which they are based. By what yardstick would horizontality be measured if, while the community of the oppressed filled the coffins, the masters stood unmoved like the columns of the Parthenon?
The authoritarian critique to the means of insurrection, a critique that is certainly directed against the insurrection itself, attempts to define what is ‘of the peoples’, in the way that bio-political critique validates totalitarian rule and its genocides by abolishing political self-determination. The juxtaposition of the 1st Intifada against the armed Palestinian resistance, by recognizing an uprising as popular only when unorganized and unarmed masses are involved, denies the people their status when they organize, arm themselves and try to fight back on as equal terms as possible. This reverse insurrectionalism is no different, neither in political position nor in morality, from the imperialists’ sarcastic statements, “We are against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people”, at the same time that they have unleashed their gendarme to slaughter the rebellious people. In the real conditions of Palestine (and beyond), denying the popular essence of armed resistance means not only to agree with the liquidation of armed resistance, but also, to give masked consent to genocide, since the separation of Hamas from the Palestinian people is precisely the pretext for the dehumanization of the entire Palestinian people, who have been branded as the “shield of terrorists”. He who holds the weapons defines the scope of the hostility. The movements that denounce the armed popular resistance of Palestine have nothing to offer up against the imperialist total massacre, that is being advertised live as the upcoming political management of the entire global South. To settle for throwing a rock or two, not to strike at those who ensure their well-being through displacement and genocide, but instead to implore them for humanity. The means do not tell us what the end is, but they do tell us what it is not. The separation of armed struggle from insurrection is certainly not a friend of Palestine, it is not a friend of political autonomy, nor of social liberation; it cannot go beyond the vortex of serfdom to military rule.
Unfortunately, calls for non-organization and disarmament are also heard from collectives active around the Kurdish revolutionary movement. How do they forget from one announcement to the next, the armed struggle in Rojava? Have they not understood the decisive contribution of the PKK’s party-popular guerrilla movement in the development of the entire movement over half a century? Have they never heard of the declared People’s Revolutionary War and the unity of its four fields: guerrilla, youth and women’s uprising, direct social self-defense and socialist workers’ movement? Have they overlooked the account of the battle of Heftanin (2020) and the evolution of its lessons in the three-year all-out war that followed in the Medya Defense Zones? Today’s Kurdish guerrilla resistance promotes itself as a model for the whole world.
Let’s see what the comrade from the colonial hinterland has to say about the issue of diffuse struggle: “Dana El-Kurd, a Palestinian academic, in her book ‘Polarized and Demobilized- Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine’ makes the argument that the Palestinian struggle is not only anti-colonial, but also anti-authoritarian in its roots. During the days of the first Intifada, Palestinians had a vibrant civil society, spontaneously organizing local committees to coordinate struggle, and address the needs of local communities. This uprising was democratic in its nature, and was fought against the will of the PLO. Even within the PLO, as Edward Said argues in his book ‘The Question of Palestine’, the structure was organized in a very democratic way, with internal discussions and open criticism, in complete contrast to politics in the Arab world, an area filled with reactionary regimes and self-appointed dictators and out of touch monarchs. The Palestine liberation movement was always the most democratic and progressive movement in the region, and inspired many other anti-authoritarian movements and uprisings, some of them we saw during the Arab Spring, and many are still ongoing. Many argue that the defeat of the Palestinian left in Lebanon, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo accords and the rise of political Islam have changed the picture, but I think many of the original characteristics are still in place.
Having said all that, I can’t really say that Palestinians ever had an anarchist movement per se. Palestinian anarchists do exist, but like among Israelis, it isn’t really organized as a movement, nor can I say it’s a popular idea. I do believe though that even if the name anarchism isn’t being used, Palestinians do tend to organize in an anarchist way, without calling it like that. New guerrilla groups in the West Bank in recent years like the Lion’s Den in Nablus, Jenin Brigade in Jenin and Balata Battalion in Balata refugee camp organize in a non-hierarchical way and are non-sectarian in principle, open to all the different factions to join. These youth groups are completely outside the control of the Palestinian Authority and the old politics of factions and parties, and their unpredictable, spontaneous nature is challenging to the Israeli authorities.”
It is logically consistent to note that the reproduction of imperialist koinonismos in the libertarian movement and the aberration of “insurrection, not armed conflict”, are expressed by a plethora of ideological schools that either openly oppose the platformist tradition or tend to smother the organizational approach within the boundaries of the national field and of legitimacy. The current class struggle demands that anarchist revolutionary organization be in its constitution borderless and guerrilla. The world that rises will be shaped by those revolutionary organizations that fight and take roots simultaneously in all corners of the Earth. If we anarchists miss this calling, the responsibility will not belong to history. From a historical evolutionary point of view, I reckon that these days are the last chance for anarchism, until the imminent collapse of capitalism, to become a real force for change. The fighting comrades in Kurdistan, Armenia, in the land of the Mapuche, in Palestine and perhaps in other parts of the South that do not come up in the northerners’ maps are paving the way.
The question of bankrupt anarchism and bankrupt leftism
The statement of the Federation of the Anarchist Era, Afghanistan-Iran (9/10/23) (15) exalts the polemics of imperialist social democracy. The condemnation of the October 7 revolutionary initiative is not limited to the act itself. The act is placed entirely in the sphere of the war between powers. The condemnation of Hamas adopts the rhetoric constructed by the genocidal and counter-revolutionary imperialist propaganda. Violence is denounced not as a method but as a tautology of statism. The distinction between civilians and resistance goes to an extent that is constitutive for political meanings: on one side are “peoples” as passive subjects without class determinants and on the other side are governments, which are equated as an ideological category. Referring to the specific field, however, the announcement focuses its aggressive assertion on one pole of power, the Islamist one. And peace is not put forward as a pragmatic perspective, always under the yoke of colonialism, but as an ultimate goal and at the same time an accepted social status which was destroyed by the resistance’s initiative. Peace and security.
Since when did security, the main pretext for state and imperialist terrorism, become a revolutionary project capable of inescapably canceling the struggle for freedom and equality? The conflict has begun anew, here is the evil, according to the statement. As if the years-long siege of Gaza by a nation of settlers were not one-sided war. And as if the preceding, “peaceful” status were not based on the threat of the new status, that is, the “final solution”. Did this particular anarchist collective ascertain from the prisoners of the Gaza strip that the state of their genocidal peonage is acceptable? This statement is an exaltation of voluntary servitude, transposed on the peoples by an ideological elite. Are the Iranian insurgents to be deemed deluded, as they fight for their freedom by risking their lives and continuing while the regime’s murderous terror intensifies? Let them be left to the peace and security offered by submission to power… Why is it that in one place freedom is life and in another place, where there is no guarantee of survival and tranquility, freedom is superfluous and the needs of the settlers (peace and security) are prioritized? Simply because the Federation of the Anarchist Era chooses enemies and friends based on localist criteria. Since the Palestinian resistance is led by forces linked to the regime we are directly confronting (Iranian), we are siding with the polemic of the colonizer. This reflects zero political autonomy and a scant utilitarian internationalism. This is of course campism with a sectarian motive. Idealistic neutrality, speaking in the language of counter revolution, is the most insidious form of campism. In the interpretation and utopia of the Federation, anti statism is the completion of liberalism, with class relations remaining intact, with the crimes of imperialism and zionist ethnic cleansing and counter-revolution going unpunished, with memory trashed.
By disregarding the fighting Palestinians and by nullifying their discourse, which declares that this is a war with colonialism, the statement reduces the war to a question of ideologies. The meaning that the Western ideological trend wants to imperiously impose is to strip the real class-political subjects of their class-political determinations. From the point of view of fundamentalist liberal consciousness, ideology is an illusion, without which citizens can peacefully regulate their relations. In the train of thought of liberal metaphysics, Thomas Hobbes’ classic scheme, which describes the state as a necessary evil for the safeguarding of the “social contract”, makes more sense than the version of the Federation, which regresses as to the determination of the cause: if ideology is the cause of the state and of war, then what is the cause of ideology? The answer, if we adhere to this theory, is illusory consciousness. Everything comes down to a question of enlightenment. And as usual, enlightenment is not aimed at promoting direct revolutionary action, but at preventing it and promoting class pacification. What does this metaphysics have to do with the revolutionary anarchist tradition? Nothing, not with any revolutionary tradition. Anarchist ethics and vision is the spawn and development of direct struggle, not an offshoot of bourgeois koinonismos and pacifism.
The reduction of this conflict to ideology agrees with the imperialist ideology about the “war of civilizations”. The aforementioned statement takes this provocative polemic beyond its general formulation; it targets the side of the resistance, describing its ideology as reactionary and inhuman, with the only evidence being its resistance activity. In this way, the counter-revolutionary terrorism of the colonialist regime is transformed into the logical and inevitable consequence of the unacceptable provocation of the resistance. Having assimilated itself to the counter-revolutionary line of imperialist ideology, due to its sectarian perspective, the Federation culminates its attack on the Palestinian resistance by reproducing the pretext of the colonial militarists for the massacre of the Palestinian people: “using innocents as human shields”. How obvious, the army of colonialists is bombing the Palestinian people, slaughtering their children, pushing them towards the Sinai desert, and attacking them on the route, in order to free them from the terrible power of Hamas! Journalists, nurses and international volunteers, who are unaware that they are being used as human shields by the barbarians, are bombarded by the progressive forces in order to free themselves from this delusion! There are several ways to endorse genocide. Erdogan has literally put his signature on drones that are hitting Rojava and Basur. The Federation of the Anarchist Era and others have put their signature on the bombs that flatten hospitals, schools, temples and refugee camps in Gaza and have put the blame up front on the resistance, with their polemic pen. A sign of the bankruptcy of anarchism in the era of liberal illusions.
The so-called libertarians who blame Hamas equally or primarily for the suffering of the people of Gaza are, like the imperialists, silencing the fact that the people of Gaza have been condemned to an exhausting blockade because they elected a government that disobeyed the colonialists. All those who criticize Hamas at the moment it attacked the wall and the settler prison guards are, like the imperialists, demanding that the Palestinians abandon anti-colonial resistance. They demand it by means of genocide. Their anti-statist or democratic sentiment is encapsulated in the disparagement and abandonment of the Palestinian people to genocide because they chose the “wrong” leadership.
According to the logic of liberal fundamentalism, the PKK is responsible for the razing of the Kurdish towns of Bakur in 2015, during the war of Democratic Self-Government, and the Kurdish youth should not get organized with the YDGH and YPS, but against them. In this way one sides with the special warfare of the Grey Wolves and of Mossad.
The Palestinians’ self-organization which the authoritarian liberals, so called libertarians, advocate, will never happen, because it is a historically arbitrary metonymy for submission to zionist colonialism and imperialism. The Palestinian people do not lie in wait for the luminaries of imperialist koinonismos, they are self-organizing in their daily uprising, in their armed struggle, in their survival, in their mutual aid and in the care of the wounds of genocide. The most radical form of self-organization is the collective memory of the martyrs, which turns into revolutionary organization and an endless river of revenge. Only this self-organization that rejects voluntary servitude and the inequality in life and death can be internationalist. Yes,there is a problem. If a statist religious party is leading the resistance and anarchism seems to be on the opposite side, there is a historical problem for anarchism.
Koinonistic neutrality has a common intersection with the leftist defense of counter-revolutionary regimes which are antagonistic to NATO imperialism, around which they complement each other. They both derive from the denial of proletarian and social political autonomy within the unremitting war of capitalism. Pacifist idealism, by denying war, makes the people a passive subject, compromised in the world class hierarchy, while statist anti-imperialism also makes the people a passive subject of the world class hierarchy, unable to change the general relations without the mediation of bourgeois power and unable to change the class and political relations at the grassroots level. This opportunism is a by-product of the historical bankruptcy of marxism. By investing in Islamism in order to have an effective anti-imperialism, leftism comes to terms with its historical end and changes sides, since political Islam was the investment of the imperialist counter-revolution in the South. It is common, and historically explicable, for would-be leaders of the left to shift from one pole of power to another on occasion, in order to hold the position of would-be leadership. It has happened even in the most radical revolutionary organizations. The adherents of the anti-NATO front of Iran, Russia, China or even Turkey, support the counter-revolution in order to continue having a say about the anti-imperialist struggle, because it is necessary for them to gloss over the defeated anti-imperialist strategy of Leninism. Since the leadership has been historically defeated, it demands that the people become servile too. This pretentiously anti-imperialist opportunism, being unable to lead the living subjects of resistance in the global South, refers to Khomeini and Saddam Hussein (16), the butchers of the proletarian movement, of the revolutions and of the marxist left in Iran and Iraq.
The arab and islamic states have sold Palestine out, many decades now. No state will take on a clash with NATO, unless its own existence is threatened. No bourgeoisie can lead the resistance to the end, because it will not risk its own existence, as Bakunin pointed out. The history of the PLO is yet another example. We saw how the Iranian counter-revolution sucked up the execution of Soleimani. No state will seriously go to war over Palestine. No state will throw more resources into the battle for Palestine than are necessary to spend in order to strengthen its own position in the inter-state power relations, by undermining its antagonizers. The pro-Palestinian war crowns are a preventive protection of the counter-revolution in the Middle East and are specifically aimed at maintaining discipline in the armies and paramilitary militias of the arab and islamic states. The above positions and predictions were written before Nasrallah’s backpedaling statement, which confirmed them. Also, before the Houthis take up action, but with knowledge of their expressed threats. The Houthis are a community that recently faced a genocidal war and remains under siege by local exploiters, NATO powers, the saudi monarchy and the Emirates, with the active participation of the greek army.
The revolutionary resurgence of Palestine, the worldwide popular mobilization, especially of the muslim world, and the surge of imperialist terrorism with unprecedented brutality, put the anti-imperialist struggle at the forefront of the internationalist social movement. In the Middle East, the urgency of the popular anti-imperialist resistance strengthens the need to overthrow the state-capitalist regimes, whether religious or purely bourgeois, dictatorial or parliamentary. The opportunists who support the counter-revolution in the name of anti-imperialism also undermine the anti-imperialist resistance, because they have betrayed its popular basis. On the other hand, liberals who separate the social revolution from the anti- imperialist resistance are dividing the popular uprising, giving away living radical forces to nationalist and religious fascism and thus undermining the social revolution.
Turkish fascism in particular, which incorporated Palestine in its neo-Ottoman conquest plans, is doing service to NATO imperialism, in parallel with zionist fascism. Turkish fascism is spreading war, fascism and genocide in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Europe. However, it doesn’t make a move, unless it serves the interests of American or Russian imperialism or both. Neo-Turkism was a child of imperialism. Turkish islamic-fascism is the product of the imperialists’ desperate plan to dismantle the revolutionary movement in Kurdistan and the turkish territory. The same plan that led to the transnational conspiracy to capture Abdullah Ocalan. Erdogan’s anti-imperialist speeches are also part of the special counter-revolutionary war that the Turkish state is waging in cooperation with all imperialist and regional reactionary forces. If the AKP-MHP regime offered any support to Hamas, it did so only to undermine revolutionary internationalism, to strengthen the repression and genocide in Kurdistan, to promote its colonialist plans, which also involve Palestine, and to enhance its negotiating position among the hegemonic powers of the World War III imperialist war. Behind the facade, the flow of oil and steel from Turkey to Israel has not been interrupted, according to a recent article (17), and there is direct military involvement of Turkey in the genocide of Palestinians, as the zionists use the Kürecik Radar Station in Malatya province.
Turkish fascism likens israeli fascism to the Islamic State, just as israeli fascism also identifies the Palestinian resistance with the Islamic State, the demon that NATO and the colonialists bred together. All the massacres carried out by the I.S. inside turkish territory were the plans of the MIT, and of the current Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan personally, as were also the anti-Kurdish assassinations in Europe. On the same day that the Palestinian revolutionary attack took place, the Turkish air force bombed a mosque in the Makhmur refugee camp in Basur, as part of the ongoing war against the social forces of democratic con- federalism. (18) An Israeli army spokesman sarcastically mocked the Turkish regime’s genocide accusations directed at Israeli fascism, pointing out that they are doing the same in northern Syria. Zionism, no longer having anything to gain by adorning imperialist humanism, speaks candidly: only we, the blessed ones, are human – the rest are just flesh, useful for our progress. Neo-Ottomanism is compelled to usurp the revolutionary movement. At the same time that the mercenaries of turkish colonialism in Rojava rape and murder women because the women’s revolution is gaining ground and femicide is multiplying in the turkish territory, Erdogan’s wife and daughter are crowning themselves as leaders of the regime’s “pro-palestine” movement. The political alignment with the staged manipulation of revolutionary internationalism cannot be justified, it has no innocence.
Imperialism must be defeated militarily wherever it lands or places its war proxies. Only the popular movements can achieve this. The zionist military rule must be defeated. In order to socially deconstruct the zionist organization, it is necessary to defeat it in war. Only popular resistance can achieve this. Turkish colonialism must be defeated. The Revolutionary People’s War of the Kurdish Freedom Movement and internationalist confederalism is achieving this. Fascism must be defeated everywhere, the insurrections must win by means of the political autonomy and military might of the proletarian social forces.
Anti-imperialism or social revolution, fascism or imperialist democracy, multiple poles or a single pole in the global capitalist order, european enlightenment or jihadism, anti-occupation or workers’ struggle, war or self-organization, insurrection or armed resistance, Palestine or Kurdistan? Artificial dilemmas. It is the job of the bosses to make such enforced divisions on the internationalist social revolution. The most important consequence of revolutionary anarchism is the immediacy of its commitment to the entirety of all particular points of struggle. This alone builds the cohesion of the revolutionary social front.
In these days of the crucial frontal confrontation with NATO terrorism in the Middle East and in the metropolises of the North, revolutionary internationalism has the responsibility to promote solidarity with the Kurdish and Palestinian resistance on a undivided basis. (19) It is crucial for the revolutionary social and anti-imperialist/anti-colonial character of any expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people to not neglect the task of highlighting the conflict in Kurdistan and informing about the current intensity of colonialist attacks in northern Syria and Armenia. At the same time, contrasting the social gains of the Kurdish movement against the Palestinian resistance is unacceptable. As organizations of the turkish- kurdish political front point out, “we support the struggle of the people of Kurdistan and Palestine without any ifs and buts.” (20) Sectarian attitudes are expressions of the conditions of repression of revolutionary internationalism. In practice, the state-capitalist leaderships that organize the military and bio-political rule of the Middle East and of the whole Earth are the same for both Kurdistan and Palestine. The same imperialist directorates, the same war industries, the same energy trusts, the same logistics chains.
As a revolutionary internationalist movement we have a duty to promote the arab-kurdish alliance, which has spread the social revolution in NE Syria and is defending the battle front against the turkish occupation. To promote it wherever we struggle.
From the message of an HPG guerrilla of Arab origin fighting in Medina of Basur (Siyar Ereb, 14/10) (21): “As a member of the brother Arab nations, I now take my place in the Free Movement. I joined the guerrillas to respond to enemy attacks. I am very happy and proud of this. […] Genocidal wars are being waged everywhere. […] We will resist until we fulfill our defensive duty and defeat the invading forces. Arab peoples must support this honorable struggle. Our young people need to join this struggle and fight against fascism.”
And the account of an internationalist fighter a few years before: “An experience full of hope? There are many in this case too. I can juxtapose another man whom I met, who is a boy from Raqqa, an Arab. He willingly chose to leave Raqqa. He was a worker in a garage, he was 15 years old, and, while at work, a civil guard approached him, one of those who in many Syrian cities goes around like they are a king and does whatever they want, who said to him: “Show me how you pray”. And after he prayed, the guard told him: “You are phony, you don’t believe, you don’t pray right”. Well, the boy said: “I am here in my city, I am working, and here comes someone who is not even from Raqqa to bother me and tell me I don’t know how to pray”. And so he decided to leave and to migrate to the North. In the end he joined the YPG because he saw the Kurdish people like people who behave in the opposite way to what he had experienced.
He was one of the first Arabs to join a force that was initially 100% Kurdish. I met him one year after this happened, and we were in the same Unit. He is an impressive person. Aside from the fact that he explained his plan to me, which was that he would participate in the liberation of Rojava which has then to become the liberation of all Syria. And he wanted to go fight in Turkey, in Iran and in Iraq. “Finally afterwards we will be able to liberate Palestine and in this way also Lebanon”, he would say. And if there was a need also in Italy, he would come here to fight too. He is a person, almost illiterate, who had never seen anything outside of Raqqa, of Kobane and maybe a bit further, but he has a genuine will and perspective, a real one. I am speaking in the present tense, even though I unfortunately cannot be sure if he is still alive, since I left him in September, and in Syria life expectancy is rather short. I fought by his side, and as a fighter he is just impressive, indescribable. There were scenes that, to a westerner like myself, seem like they come out of a movie, how a person can fight like this. As a proletarian and a man with no education, illiterate, condemned by his life to a limited reality, he is a revolutionary of the highest levels in history imaginable. This is how I know that in the north of Syria there are thousands like him, and this is inestimable.
I can say his nom de guerre, Zagros Raqqa, because no one in Rojava uses their real name…
The biggest lessons are two. The first is that there is an inequality, a divide, and I already knew this, between the West and the Middle East, or maybe between the West and the rest of the world. It is so great that you cannot imagine it, it cannot be described, and unfortunately, it is not even enough for one to go there and fight in order to bridge the gap, in the sense that it is a divide between those who have everything and those who have nothing, between one who is well and one who is suffering. This is a realization of the seriousness of this situation, made mainly by the one who goes to fight in such war situations.
The other lesson is that the revolution is just and necessary, however, when we say ‘revolution’ we must be conscientious about the gravity of this word in the sense of the pain, the tragedy and the pain it brings about, because a revolution is still a turning point for society, it is an upheaval of society that doesn’t happen peacefully, even though it is necessary, and so we should not use this term lightly. We don’t need to imagine simply that it is a ‘beautiful thing’. Those who think like this should better give up on politics and do something else, while it would be useful to have people who understand how terrible it is to have to have a revolution, but who continue to think it is necessary.” (Davide Grasso, former YPG fighter, Italy, September 2017)
Stories of spies and saints
“Palestinians have determined to proceed without their Western custodians. Decolonization is a grueling project, generally beyond the acumen of those weaned in comfort. The professional classes are stuck in bourgeois abstractions (from which they derive so many rewards) or profess a material politics they don’t in reality support. They demand a bloodless liberation, but only without the colonizer’s blood, even as the native bleeds out in full view of the world. They demand a revolt without consequence, a caucus of pristine victims politely asking to stay alive. They have taught Fanon but ignored his observation that decolonization ‘cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement.’
These erstwhile liberals don’t need to consult Palestinians to see how wrong they are. Zionists have been explaining for decades that Israel must be defeated by force.” (A Voice from Palestine) (22)
It is undeniable that Hamas is working with states. It does not hide it, since it is not ashamed of its statism. It is also plausible that the revolutionary initiative of 7 October was aimed, among other things, at significantly changing the inter-state power relations in the Middle East and at overturning the political relations as regards the imperialist hegemony. As Hamas confirmed after a month of fighting (in an interview with the New York Times), the initiative was founded on a decision to break free from the long and exhausting siege of Gaza, at any cost.
None of the above facts implies that the stated purposes are contrary to the will of the Palestinian people. This implication presupposes as an arbitrary rule that the people always choose peace, even when that means their long-term extermination, over desperate resistance. The lackeys of genocidal colonial peace silence the fact that the news of the invasion against the colonial fortress was greeted with mass celebrations in the besieged Palestinian territories. (23)
No one on the planet could have interpreted Hamas’ move as the product of anti-state struggle, nor of course as independent of any state assistance. However, the statist mediation of popular interests does not make these interests entirely artificial and alien; it does not cancel the existence of needs determined by the class-oppressed communities and exploited classes themselves, which are assigned to the political mediation of an agent of power. From the anarchist point of view, political mediation is a historical problem, precisely because there are always proletarian and social needs, which are confused with antagonistic needs wherever authoritarian mediation takes place. The idea that any mediated will expresses false needs and only hostile interests, expresses a vulgar aristocratic anti-popular elitism. As if the people are a thoughtless passive entity that will be redeemed only when it is enlightened by some blessed ones, or by chance.
Why should the upsurge of the Middle East or even of the whole Earth be a hostile prospect for those who permanently live and die inside the furnace of colonialist rule? How else will Palestine be liberated, if the colonial fortress is not blown up like a powder keg and thus, if the whole world does not flare up first? The scaremongering about ‘escalation’ is a central propaganda line of the imperialists. If there is a specific problem with state mediators here, it is their inherent incompetence and their insufficient motivation to engage in the anti-imperialist struggle to the degree that is necessary for the liberation of Palestine. The ideological elites of any social democracy have even less of a motivation and zero capacity.
In Greece, a group that brandishes an understanding of politics as an interplay between agents, surpassing even the greek Communist Party, added to the above that “the destruction of Gaza and the displacement of its inhabitants was and is among the plans of Hamas’ agents, was intended and indeed is a precondition for its continuation.” (24) This conclusion negates the fundamental axiom of the state that state expediency takes precedence over all other expediency and therefore of the interests of its citizens, because it completely equates the interests of Hamas with the interests of the supporting states and their interests with the interests of the enemy states (NATO, Israel, etc.). This is the typical Hitlerian reduction (propaganda manual in “My Struggle”), historically anti-Semitic, of all antitheses to the dark designs of a principal enemy. This mystical reduction is the pretext for stripping the meaning from the antitheses and subordinating them to a simplistic monolithic ideology. In this case, the contradictory factors in the imperialistic management of the Palestinian genocide are blatant. It has been shown by official documents that the colonialists are seeking the complete displacement of the disobedient people. But the vassal Arab states do not want the surplus Palestinian precariat and the displaced Palestinian resistance in their territories. Neither do the European imperialists. That’s why the Egyptian junta keeps them corralled in the slaughterhouse. Which state and why would it want the Palestinian resistance to diffuse, except the settlers, who have their own special interest as a priority? The NATOists have pulled out of the drawer the case of a collaborationist palestinian state, the ideal plan for them, however, as much as an open war was necessary in order to attempt the definitive annihilation of resistance throughout occupied Palestine, so too a war makes the prospect of annihilation unrealistically idealistic. The national disregard for the Palestinian Authority, its total weakness on an international level, the resistance’s ultimatums to Abbas (5-6/11/23, Organization ‘Children of Abu Jadal’, from inside the police forces of the Palestinian Authority), and the attack on him (7/11/23, questioned by the Palestinian Authority and the imperialists) confirm these lines, which were written prior to this. The interpretation that open war was a priori necessary and legitimate for the colonialists and imperialists, and by implication, the October 7 attack was a pretext, turns the causes and practical consequences upside down, with a preconceived position that resistance is irrational. Why would the imperialists seek to feed and diffuse anti-colonial anti-imperialist resistance, why would they want to compromise the relations of the Arab states with Israeli colonialism, why would they want to increase Iranian-Shiite influence and to hand over to the mediating Turkish hegemony more bargaining cards, while the Hamas state was quietly managing the Gaza camp? Why would the Iranian regime want the Palestinians scattered around rather than at the feet of the Israeli hinterland? There is only one answer: because this is how it suits the ideology that says that the powerful are always powerful and that they inevitably pull the strings of history.
All the current complications have one driving premise, which alone gives them coherent meaning: the settlers’ and NATO’s expectation to eliminate Palestinian resistance, because on October 7 it manifested itself powerfully. With the unhindered prolonged mass massacre of the people of Gaza, with the repeated bombings of refugee convoys, hospitals, schools and churches turned into refugee shelters, with the killing of 101 volunteers of the UN humanitarian mission (until 12 November), the targeted killing of dozens of Red Crescent nurses and doctors (an article published on 19/10 reports 192 deaths since 7/1025 and of 40 journalists (by the first week of November), the imperialists are sending the message to the people of the whole world, that those who do not get used to poverty, exclusion, displacement, incarceration and slow death, will be brutally exterminated. Resistance is not the pretext for this coordinated operation of global terror, it is its cause, its enemy. The ‘agents’ game’ theorists are capable of making up any nonsense in order to interpret the facts to suit their simplistic ideology, always against the resistance.
The more specific interpretations of the hypothesis that the attack on the colonial fortress was carried out to provoke the war and impose a new occupation of Gaza or an imperialist protectorate regime, refer to marine hydrocarbon deposits and pipelines. Some also link Turkish involvement with competition for energy routes. These interpretations have the advantage of reducing political conspiracies to specific economic interests and thus pretend to flirt with an anti-capitalist or even anti-imperialist perspective. On the specific field of conflict, it is a stupid ideology to suggest that while there was a semblance of capitulation there were more obstacles to the exploitation of the undersea resources west of Gaza than have now arisen due to open warfare. The only ideal footing of this view is the total disparagement of the Palestinian resistance or popular resistance in general. On 7 October a dynamic of total collapse of the colonialist organization was triggered, but the pseudo-intellectuals of the North could see nothing but the endless development of imperialist domination.
It is not only that they cannot see in any other way than through the language of subjugation. They can neither think in any other way than in the mentality of capital. The usual talk about oil is not class analysis, it is vulgar political economy. Besides, something that is a key issue in capitalist competition everywhere, energy resources, is not enough to describe and explain anything relevant to the specific forms that the class-political struggle takes. Then, politics is reduced entirely to the sphere of political economy and, as a corollary, war falls into the category of political guise. This scheme, of course, comes from the most extreme liberal school.
The conspiratorial pseudo-understanding of the October 7 revolutionary initiative offers the greatest ideological service to genocide, having eliminated the existence of resistance by statute. We can passively watch the massacre without guilt, since everything is pre-designed and inevitable and there is no popular resistance on the ground. The aforementioned group spews out its fatalism on the Palestinians: “The residents of [Gaza] are complying [!] with a directive from the Israeli state and are moving from the north to the south despite UN complaints that Israel is imposing a collective punishment, calling the ultimatum ‘horrible’.” Too much compliance by the elite of koinonismos.
Simplistic reductions in order to get rid of the real contradictions are also expressed in more subtle tones. E.g. (from another group’s text): “Hamas is an Islamist organization. Huge differences of all kinds separate us from it, including – but not limited to – the tactic of targeting civilians. Keeping in our hearts the days of the Palestinian intifada, we stand always and wholeheartedly with the Palestinian people and their resistance, but we see ourselves as far removed from any Islamist formation. We cannot ignore the fact that Hamas’s growth is largely due to its strengthening by Israel itself during the period when it was trying to weaken the secular and progressive forces of the Palestinian resistance. In a similar way, the US was funding and arming Islamist forces as a counterweight to the socialist and communist movements in the Arab and Islamic world. The truth is that Israel chose the enemy it considered most easily manageable. What it was trying to achieve (and it succeeded) was to reverse the internationalization of the Palestinian question (which was the greatest conquest of the resistance until the 1990s) and turn it into an issue of the Islamic world alone. This role was played by Hamas. A role destructive to the movement’s prospects. However, we cannot ignore the fact that at the moment Hamas is also the result of decades of oppression and humiliation of a people. That the young people, born and raised in a prison, seeing their families slaughtered again and again, are siding with those who oppose the inhuman conqueror with arms: and that, unfortunately, is Hamas, even though it is part of the problem and at the same time has the role of oppressor for the Palestinian people themselves.” I skip the points where all the positions of imperialist social democracy of counter-revolutionary pseudo-insurrectionalism, which I analyzed at the beginning, are reproduced. We go forward from the fact that, in the last century, political Islam was promoted by the imperialists to inhibit and reverse the revolution in Asia. The aphoristic ideological lumping together all Islamic movements, belongs precisely to the methods of this imperialist strategy, it reproduces the projection of religion as a dominant field, it vindicates Christian racism, since it recognizes the internationalization of a problem of the South only insofar as it speaks in the language of the North and, above all it veils, behind the conspiratorial mysticism, the class and political dynamics that lead an Islamic organization to the leadership of a resistance movement, the left to decline and anarchism to irrelevance, wherever this has happened. Authoritarian Euro-socialism gets away with an “unfortunately”. Without exaggeration I can say that this attitude does more damage to internationalist solidarity than the practice of provocation through funding (such as the scenarios about the funding of Hamas).
The revolutionary answer to political Islam is not atheistic fundamentalism, which can only dictatorially and colonially become a political identity. The answer has been given practically and effectively on the ground by the Kurdish Freedom Movement: democratization of Islam, in the way of social resistance, not in the way of imperialist assimilation and subjugation. Idealist abstractions and totalitarian aphorisms offer precisely the easy escape from the task of the struggle to transform contradictions. In this particular conflict, the clearest answer to the ideological construction of the ‘religious war’ comes from the joined mass demonstrations of rabbis, priests and mullahs against the zionist military rule.
The fundamentalist koinonismos of the above-mentioned group (that uses agents’ game rhetoric) had led it to nationalism a few years ago (the Macedonian issue). Now it mocks “the general prompt for victory to the weapons of Palestine”. It indirectly advocates refusing to support the resistance and accepting colonial peace, so that a new state is not imposed on the Palestinians and does not annihilate dissidents and insurgents, as if they were secure until then. As those who joined arms with Ukrainian fascism say, Zelensky’s racist regime offered more freedom for anarchists and they expect the same from an ideal post- war renewed bourgeois democracy. Revolutionary anarchism is not positioned laterally, and so from my own position I answer that it is the axioms of koinonismos, not the prompts of revolutionary solidarity, that are general and abstract. Victory to the arms of the specific organizations that are fighting the colonialists, victory to their struggle against the colonialists. No political conflict justifies undermining the anti-colonial struggle. To leave no room for intentional confusion, I note that resistance to Palestine’s long-term ethnic cleansing is not an isomorphic phenomenon with Ukrainian-NATO nationalism, nor with the Iranian counter-revolution, despite its nationalist anti-NATO interests. The differences between these struggles are predominantly class-based on a global and local scale, and moreover political.
Biopolitical ethics, based on its self-valorization, extends its polemic claims to a general and absolute distinction between the supposed revolutionary discipline towards it and the subjects who oppose it and are thus placed in the category of the authoritarians. The elitist project of denouncing real resistance begins with the rape of history and the proclamation of the sovereignty of colonialism over memory. In the words of the aforementioned groups: “No purge can ever and nowhere be a project of revolutionary movements”. Incidentally, the severity of the October 7 attack, across the colonialist entity, was not an attempt at purging, nor did it mean that the liberation of Palestine requires the extermination of all settlers. From the text of the aforementioned group: “The October 7 methodical massacre of hundreds of civilians, youth, children, women and elderly, carried out by the butchers sent by Hamas to carry out this religious ‘duty’ on the road to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the hostage-taking of old people, young children and women, the display of savagery even on the bodies of the murdered, is now added to the pantheon of similar acts of savagery that adorn the history of every form of power. But they will never be written in the pages that adorn the history of the struggles for social liberation and dignity, in the pages that adorn the world history of uprisings and revolutions of oppressed and exploited people.” Gentrification against “savagery”.
Should we erase from revolutionary proletarian history the Makhnovists who set up machine guns and shot at the bourgeoisie and the feudal lords at their feasts? Butchers, when they threw into the furnace of a locomotive a priest-snitch of the German colonialists? (26) The CNT fighters, who during the revolution of ’36 stormed the monasteries and spared no one? The barefoot Somalis who two and a half decades ago paraded as trophies on spikes the flesh of the American soldiers of a downed helicopter, under whose history should we register them? Popular hatred is the heart of liberational evolution, as Walter Benjamin had noted. It is the task of imperialist social democracy to extinguish proletarian hatred, replacing it with appeals for mercy to the theocracy of capitalist war. Thus koinonismos concludes its positions with abstract pacifism. E.g., “Stop the Israeli attack on Gaza now. Stop now the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza.” Which forces will stop them and how? Not to ask how the return of the Palestinians to the main occupied territories will take place.
The moderate view of the aforementioned comrade with colonial citizenship, restores historical and contemporaneous truth, opening up as topic of discussion the humanitarian law of war. “The images coming from southern Israel the day of the attack 7th of October were of course very hard to process emotionally.Nothing to celebrate about the massacre of many civilians, and by all definitions and standards this is a war crime. Things should be seen in of context though. Also, there are zero examples in history of a pure, ‘clean’ resistance movement and liberation that didn’t kill innocent people. Be it resistance to apartheid in South Africa, the British colonization of India, the fight against slavery in America and resistance to nazi occupation throughout Europe- in all of those cases innocent people died. This is not to justify, but the demand of purism from the Palestinian liberation movement alone is unrealistic. The bigger responsibility is on the occupier.”
The Geneva Convention binds the parties to abide by it regardless of its violation by enemy forces. In any case, no state abides by it. Besides, the inter-state law of war does not apply to internal war, since the internal enemy is not presented as militarily distinct and with represented responsibilities. Indeed, only revolutionary armed forces are self-disciplined in the law of war. The Kurdish Freedom Movement is an example of such an attitude.
Does the imperialist humanitarian law of war consist a revolutionary self-worth? For biopolitical ethics, yes. But biopolitical ethics is grounded on the regime of class power inequality, biopolitical terrorism and biopolitical racism, and it is articulated so as to perpetuate these. The biopolitical ethics of war revolves around the ‘civilian’, but he is defined by the archetype of imperialist citizenship. The guerrilla and his community first and foremost, the unruly government and its supporters, the pariah state and its citizens, are excluded from bourgeois law. In this case this applies to all the people of Palestine before and after October 7. The citizen who joins arms with, who votes for and finances the class war of the tyrant is the definition of ‘civilian’, with the archetype of the innocence of the capitalist, the politician, the technocrat, the media baron, the soldier and the cop, who become targets of the revolutionary struggle. The identification of the ‘civilian’ with the ‘unarmed’, masks with the feudal aristocratic code of values, the protection of the capitalist-state division of responsibilities, from its war machine. Imperialist humanist law transforms the genocidal settlers into ‘the people’ and the people into an exemption from bourgeois civilization. That is why the UN officials do not say, “what Israel is doing is genocide,” but they say, “what is being done may amount to genocide.” The boundary between the recognizably real and the typical speculation is deeply classist and savagely lethal.
Thus, subservient koinonismos and pacifism put forward the historical legitimacy of the unstoppable century long genocide as “living in harmony and respecting diversity”. Diversity indeed, where one slaughters and steals the land of the other and the other is slaughtered and persecuted in exile. Some good comrades proposed the mutual rapprochement of the arab and jewish populations on an internationalist and proletarian basis, through the realization that they have nothing to divide and that they can coexist without religious differences, as they did for centuries in the region before the creation of the state of Israel. Both the myth and the utopia are equally true and necessary, but are interspersed with the real history of class struggle. The state of Israel also comes in the way. A history and a present that fatally divides Palestinians and settlers. The former have nothing but chains and death. The others have everything, have seized it with savagery and maintain this relationship with even greater savagery. “Israelis have the right to call the area home”, say some anarchists. “Because whatever happened in the past, all these people live there now.” Except it didn’t happen 3,000 years ago. The present class-political regime of the Palestinian land is the capitalization of the ethnic cleansing (not a vague ‘whatever’) that began in the recent past, a few generations ago, and continues unabated. The koinonists suck up to the colonialists, but the colonialists are not impressed by pacifist cajoling.
On the contrary, a single experience proved capable of instilling humanistic feelings, moderation, a sense of equality in a small part of the colonial nation: the hostage-taking of loved ones. The murderousness of the October 7 attack produced a consciousness of the insurmountable vulnerability of the dominant clan, and mass hostage-taking produced the prospect of a peace with a little more freedom for the class oppressed, which would not have been conceivable without the universal equation to death. “All hostages, for all of their prisoners”, chant the protesting settlers who are turning against their war-mongering government. The fact that these deeply and broadly nationalistic subjects still form the only opposition within the militaristic nation today, demonstrates something important. Dialectically, the barbarians’ method creates social progress, because it brings to light the means and subsequently the motives of capitalist civilization.
The vile tyranny says, “what’s done is done”. Restorative justice for the massacred and displaced Palestinian people requires the uprooting of the settlers. Projecting the ideal consent of the settlers to a peaceful settlement as a precondition, reflects the hypocrisy of imperialist social democracy and glosses over class ethnic cleansing. Revolutionary law directly restores cosmic harmony by the edge of the knife. “Whatever is necessary for the return”(27)
These days my soul dwells in the basements and rubble with the dying fighters who wait and stoically greet the settler army. Revenge! Revenge for all the history of tyranny. Revenge for the bloody hypocrisy of the imperialists and colonialists. Revenge for the children of Palestine. Unconditionally with Spartacus, for the fall of the Empire.
“So it is fortunate that insurrection and revolution still remain absurd, because this is precisely what still remains their only potential to win”(28) Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis November-December 2023 Domokos Prison
(1) In 1990, the term “κοινωνισμός” [koinonismos] was introduced in the critical thinking of greek speaking anarchists, which is literally translated into english as “socialism”. The word socialism has been conveyed into the greek language without etymological transformations (in greek: “σοσιαλισμός”). The term koinonismos means something different from socialism, so if we were to translate it as socialism based on the language roots, it would result in serious confusion. Writer and translator of this text jointly decided to use the direct transliteration from the greek to english, the word koinonismos, adding this linguistic and conceptual note. In short, the meaning of the term koinonismos, as was first expressed, was the political invocation of an ideologically artificial social whole, which, in communication practice, entails the reproduction of those ideological forms that are produced and infused by the state and capital.
(2) International statement of the clubs (10/10/23) – fcstpauliathensclub.wordpress.… %b5%cf%84%ce%b9%ce%ba%ce%ac-%ce%bc%ce%b5-%cf%84%ce%b7%c%bd-%ce%b4%ce%ae%ce%bb%cf%89%cf %83%ce%b7-%cf%84%ce%bf%cf%85-%cf%83%cf%85%ce%bb%ce%bb%cf%8c%ce%b3%ce%bf%cf%85-%cf%84%ce%b7%cf%82-s/, Statement of the Turkish club (28/10/23) – twitter.com/StPauli_TR
(4) tn: The term conspiratorial is the nearest translation of the term that the writer in this text uses to refer not to conspiracy theories, but to an understanding of politics as an interplay between agents or proxies.
(10) A recent interview with three FAUDA members confirms the commitment to the unity of the resistance and adds the information that FAUDA is involved in the guerrilla struggle. One comrade states that their anarchist movement has opened up a path of popular self-sacrifice. Regarding Hamas, it deconstructs NATO propaganda and describes the political dialogue and cooperation of anarchists with other organizations in the resistance. Importantly, they points out that all resistance organizations have an inclusive political position for all religious communities. The case for Islamic dictatorship is imperialist black propaganda. Just as the addition of a new, Palestinian state is a case of imperialist designs. Anti-authoritarian criticism of the claim of a two-state status and the separation of religious communities throws the discussion off course. Maoists (PFLP), confederationists (DFLP) and pacifist democrats (such as Mussa’ab Bashir, used as a reference by certain ideological opponents of the Palestinian resistance), Islamists (Hamas and Jihad) and anarchists (FAUDA) agree as a program on a single inclusive polity. Such were the declarations of the Israeli constitution as well. Only the imperialists and the would-be exploiters of the Palestinian resistance want two states. But the crucial question is whether we are defending the colonial state as the agent of potential coexistence, against historical and current revolutionary realities, or are we defending the right of the oppressed to reorganize social culture on their own terms, correcting the accumulated injustices? For anarchism the answer is self-evident. Whether the Palestinian revolutionary polity will claim recognition from the inter-state matrix and take the title of state is nobody’s business outside the Palestinian resistance, just as it is nobody’s business outside the Kurdish resistance, the claim of official recognition for the confederation of N-E Syria as a constituent state entity of the unified Syrian territory. (The interview: theanarchistlibrary.org/librar… )
(11) The revolutionary South responds to the a-historical critique that describes anarchism as a eurocentric project. Only the anchorage to the post-Bakunin deconstructivism, that eroded the anarchist movement after the dissolution of the First International, can see in anti-imperialism conceptual and practical boundaries to anarchism. For example, “Anarchists in the Sahel” (18/9/23), (alerta.gr/archives/33233 ). Marxism had to go beyond the imperialist philosophy of its writings, with Lenin. Revolutionary anarchism never had that problem. From its birth it ventured all over the Earth.
(14) One group writes, “Clearly, we do not intend to dictate to the oppressed and exploited how they should fight […]”. Just before they wrote, “The only self-defense that we recognize -ethically and politically- is the collective social self-defense and social counter violence that the exploited and the oppressed co-opt to emancipate themselves and to shake off the bonds of authority over them”. What does this group mean behind the unclear invocation of collectivity and cooption? And who cares whether these here pharisees of anarchism recognize the Palestinian resistance as self-defense or not? To put the question in a different context: a person who has suffered patriarchal violence, do they need the opinion of these conclaves so as to decide whether to resort to the police, to the state, or if they will cut off the balls of the rapist or whatever else? This same group, ten years ago, in order not to spoil the self interest of some of its members, had covered up an attack against a squat, legitimized by the fact that they refused to recognize the squat as a community, refused to recognize the community’s egalitarian institutions and practices, the political dynamic proletarian social development taking place there, its autonomy in social self- direction and its self-defense. This is what “we do not recognize” means in the world of violence and terrorism: let Netanyahu do his dirty work. However, the Palestinian resistance is winning and the aforementioned squat, which offers refuge to the persecuted and has not put any terms on the Palestinian resistance, is still standing.
(16) Artistic intervention for Palestine, ΚΕΔ – athens.indymedia.org/post/1627… & avantgarde2009.wordpress.com/2… Two months after writing this text I received a text from Solidarity with migrants entitled “The avant-garde of retrogression: notes on the pro-russian and pro-china political tendencies in the greek society” (athens.indymedia.org/post/1628…). The political line of anti-american campism and its political conclusions that this text describes, make up a stance of active counter-revolution on the field. Political directions and practices that are anti-labour, anti-feminist, pro-imperialist and pro- fascist, anti-internationalist and totalitarian. The text correctly argues that the two tendencies inside the pro-Palestine movement are clashing and they will continue to do so. I will further note that this clash is not related only to the movement for Palestine. The fields of struggle are intersecting as is shown in the text. Social-fascism is lurking everywhere and is manifesting itself respectively to political priorities. The contradictions of the social-fascist lines are interesting. Eg, political subjects who converge in their defense of the Assad regime and in their anti kurdish stance, and who have allied in the past as a friendly opposition to SYRIZA in the re-negotiation of the greek state’s position in the imperialist pyramid, have taken antagonistic positions in the conflict over (or against) the capitalist-statist public health control. The former, who openly defend the anti-NATO imperialist front, openly supported the resistance to the unhealthy health-control repression and the dictatorial bio-technocratic subjugation. The latter, who are intensively trying to take the lead of the movement with reformist positions, joined arms with the vanguard of capitalist and statist progress. Despite this, the leftist group that the aforementioned text is denouncing has not “infiltrated” the movement; it comprises one of its constitutive subjects. Particularly in reference to the Palestinian struggle, where the subjects of the struggle are collaborating with state agents in their periphery, it is illogical to demand that the struggle be cleansed of statist ideological tendencies within the solidarity movement. In general, I have put down at length my arguments against the automated logic of exclusions.
(19) A simple practical example: Larissa, solidarity gathering for the Palestinian and the Kurdish peoples, from Dugru Squat- athens.indymedia.org/post/1627…
(24) The massacres of Hamas, the brutality of the Israeli state and the imminent global conflict, Syspeirosi Anarxikon- anarchypress.wordpress.com/202…
Abolition Media Statement on Editorial Decisions Regarding Palestine and Anti-Colonial Resistance
As a news source for revolutionary movements we consider it vital to spread the perspectives and action reports of anti-colonial resistance groups, regardless of whether we, as anarchists, are in complete agreement with their politics.
In regards to Palestine, the historic resistance to occupation by the most brutal and formative of settler colonial projects is of extraordinary importance for the international revolutionary movement. It is always important to analyze the revolutionary forces in a given struggle, then examine the larger context and then position solidarity efforts in a more pinpointed manner. As a news source our work is primarily the former.
The left forces in Palestine (PFLP and DFLP) are supported by revolutionary groups around the world, including those based in Rojava, and have, or had, historic military alliances with forces fighting the colonialists, including the Black Panthers. The success of their struggle will strengthen the international revolutionary cause. The PFLP and DFLP have vocally and publicly formed an alliance with other local resistance groups in Palestine and beyond. While those groups may not reflect our political ambitions, it is important (especially as militants not based in Palestine) to not leap to judgment but to try to understand why they would do this and to appreciate the merits of such an approach. While we are aware of ideological differences between the groups that are currently in alliance, it is important to honor their choices and strengthen and support them while they are currently fighting together against the brutal colonial system of apartheid that is backed up by the enthusiastic support of the US and other Western countries. Additionally, it is helpful for us to understand the tactical and strategic approaches of the only groups in the world having a material effect against the genocide of the Palestinian people. Throughout history, there have been several examples of organizations and individuals who differ politically, but who we believe anarchists should clearly support in their efforts. For example, the FLN in Algeria, Nat Turner in the US, or Pancho Villa in Mexico. Many of these actors had questionable politics from an anarchist perspective, but in terms of anti-colonial struggle, they were very important for pushing liberatory movements forward. We do not view struggles against oppression as a zero-sum, black and white process, but a complex process that unfolds with waves of contradictions and tensions that will change with the world situation.
It must also be appreciated that there is an ongoing genocide in which Western radicals have a tremendous degree of complicity. The burden is on Western radicals to fight against the barbarism doled out by the countries they reside in. The well-being of people around the world and the relevance of anarchist politics depend on it. It is with this in mind that we make the editorial choices that we do. We want to see greater degrees of organization and far more complicity in anti-colonial struggles. Western anarchists need to know about these struggles, be aware of the actors, study their tactics, etc. Unfortunately, anarchism is not a prominent political tendency in the world today, nor is it associated with the most poor, culturally excluded, or those struggling against imperial domination. We hope to change that. By featuring both explicitly anarchist actions and anti-colonial warfare strategies, we hope to bring these struggles into anarchist consciousness and intent, as well as to raise awareness about anarchist political ideology with those who are already fighting for liberation.
We are exceptionally aware that the world situation is rapidly changing and that many of the actions of the United States and Europe are driven by fear of a non-white, non-Western global hegemony. We are also painfully aware that the imperial powers have ruthlessly colonized the global south, massacred its people, installed puppet governments while fighting tooth and nail against left wing forces. The collapse of the left in the global south is from this process and now the situation is vastly more complex.
We know that without a viable anarchist movement in many places, it is sometimes difficult to sort through who to support. However, it must be pointed out that there is hypocrisy in the harsh condemnations of resistance groups in Palestine from some anarchists, who were more supportive toward anarchists fighting in a NATO-backed military alongside fascists in Ukraine. Why was it acceptable for the anarchist movement to ignore or even endorse the far right in Ukraine and the Ukrainian state but not to give a mouthpiece to anticolonial resistance combating an ongoing genocide?
These are the questions we grapple with. We think the movement would be in a stronger place if it worked through these questions and took advice, or listened to global south and anti-colonial voices more than the Euro-American ones that dominate these projects.
We are aware that our positions are not the most popular within Western anarchism but we feel strongly that to become relevant again and to do the right thing in terms of the history of humanity, it is important that Western anarchists also grapple with these questions and consider perspectives outside their own.
Finally, the process of anarchism is founded in questioning and understanding other perspectives, and not just adhering to hard and fast rules. We hope that our readers will see the importance and value of bringing these connections and questions to the forefront of anarchist consciousness, and that we can strengthen international connections as we strive to support the courageous resistance of Palestinian people in the face of genocidal colonialism.
As the genocidal campaign against Palestinians continues, so have the outcries from supposed anarchists in the West against any expression of solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance. Recently, a post by the Kolektiva moderation team called anarchists who seek to learn from the Palestinian Resistance “deeply delusional” and “dripping with performative machismo.” While our platform was not directly referenced, the same post linked to an article called “Abolition Media’s Authoritarian Entryism,” a hit piece on our media site. We therefore find it necessary to make our intentions clear and to investigate exactly why a site claiming to be anarchist would slander coverage of the Resistance, even if our accusers are too cowardly to mention us by name.
Whether these anti-Resistance “anarchists” are merely ignorant or are intentionally misrepresenting our position, their reasoning is imbued with the liberal Zionist thinking typically found in New York Times editorials. For instance, Kolektiva condemns those who “openly celebrate Operation Al Aqsa Flood, the attack carried out by Palestinian militants on October 7th 2023.” Another recent article in a similar vein, “Towards Another Uprising” refers to October 7th as “the bloody incursion of Hamas into ‘Israel.'” This repudiation of October 7th betrays an opposition toward all forms of resistance of the oppressed. Like the revolts of enslaved people in Nat Turner’s uprising or the anti-colonial revolutions in Haiti and Algeria, October 7th broke through the normality of the daily humiliations and the oppressive violence that permeates everyday existence in a settler colonial society. While this anti-colonial rebellion may not neatly fit the criterion of purity demanded by the Kolektiva armchair critics, the hysteria and outright lies parroted from corporate media about October 7th is a massive endorsement of US State propaganda.
Kolektiva has accused Abolition Media of being “uncritical cheerleaders for authoritarian Islamist paramilitary actors.” This is a distortion of our position about publishing Palestinian Resistance statements, and the factions who are supporting their goals. While publishing such statements should not need an explanation for self-respecting anarchists, we published our reasoning when we wrote a “Statement on Editorial Decisions Regarding Palestine and Anti-Colonial Resistance.” In the statement, we wrote, “As a news source for revolutionary movements we consider it vital to spread the perspectives and action reports of anti-colonial resistance groups, regardless of whether we, as anarchists, are in complete agreement with their politics.” Our stance remains the same today.
Historically, anarchists have formed alliances and expressed solidarity with anti-colonial groups, regardless of differences of ideology. During the Spanish civil war, anarchists formed a pact with the Moroccan Action Committee and the anarchist Pierre Besnard even proposed breaking the anti-colonial leader Abd El Krim out of a French prison on the island of Réunion. Much like the leaders of Hamas, Abd El Krim was a brilliant guerrilla tactician and a devout Muslim, who used Islamic principles to help unify an anti-colonial alliance that proved quite effective in defeating better armed French and Spanish colonizers in the Rif region of Morocco. His victories led to the creation of an autonomous Republic of the Rif in 1921.
Decades later, anarchist BLA fighter Kuwasi Balagoon expressed solidarity with international anti-imperialist struggles, writing, “Imperialism must expand or die, and even as the pigs escalate their military and political offensive, they have lost their grip increasingly throughout this world, despite their wolf tickets, because the peoples of Cuba, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Libya, Angola, Tanzania, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Grenada, and other lands have put their heads and hearts together to devise no nonsense methods to drive the Americans out. If we do the same, we will obtain the same results. In fact, we will obtain greater results, because our liberation would mean a greater decline to imperialism than any of the previous people’s victory and reaction would be weakened to a corresponding extent.”
Speaking from Attica prison in New York state Balagoon euphorically praised Hezbollah’s first attack against the US war machine in Lebanon stating, “I think it’s beautiful! I thought that thing with the truck (the truck bombing in 1982) was incredible… we have a lot to learn from them and we will.”
In the tradition of Kuwasi Balagoon, revolutionary anarchists today are calling for studying the tactics and strategic victories of anti-colonial Resistance in Palestine and applying lessons to Resistance within the belly of the beast. These calls have been dismissed by Kolektiva as “delusional”, “reckless” and “dripping with performative machismo.” It is not delusional to apply anti-colonial tactics within the heart of the empire. It has been only four years since the Minneapolis precinct was set on fire during the George Floyd uprising and in the ’60s and ’70s, these types of armed revolutionary actions were nearly everyday occurrences. To consider these actions to be reckless comes from a position of attachment to the comforts afforded to these so-called anarchists in the West. These comforts can be directly linked to their complicity in the genocide in Gaza and more broadly to the pillaging of the global South and the racism that is used to justify these imperialist conquests. Moreover, to say that calls for direct action against Zionist targets are “dripping with performative machismo” is an insult to all those women who have taken up armed resistance against Zionism, including figures like Layla Khaled and Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, as well as slander to all those female, trans and non-binary anarchist revolutionaries around the world who are committed to fight for the movement.
Finally, Kolektiva asserts that anarchists who propose taking revolutionary actions in support of the Palestinian people “promote a ‘unity of fields’ strategy that imagines themselves as a fifth column of the Iranian military.” Kolektiva is here duplicating a common Zionist smear tactic, asserting that the Palestinian Resistance and all those who express solidarity with the Resistance are controlled by Iran. One need only to read the many first person accounts from Gaza and the West Bank to understand that the Resistance groups of Palestine are a genuinely homegrown phenomenon, supported by and totally enmeshed in their communities. Furthermore, the regional Resistance to imperialism emerged specifically out of Western excesses in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. It is woeful to see that Kolektiva would try to deploy the ‘outside agitator’ narrative to discredit the resistance and its supporters. This misunderstanding, again, stemming from US and Zionist propaganda, is something Abolition Media is committed to countering with its articles.
Kolektiva is using these belligerent accusations as an excuse to censor anti-imperialist viewpoints from their social media platform, a practice which is the opposite of what anarchists have fought for historically. How far they have come from the legacy of anarchists who, like Emma Goldman in the context of American nationalism during World War I, fought against State censorship.
The counter-revolutionary position of these so-called anarchists who censor support for Palestinian Resistance, coupled with the condemnation by some of these same “anarchists” of Michael Reinoehl for taking up arms against a fascist during the George Floyd uprising, and the clear support many of them have maintained for Ukrainian fascism makes it clear that it would be foolish for Black and Brown people to gamble their freedom with these people. We would like to be very clear to comrades from colonized communities, internally and externally to the imperial core — be extraordinarily careful in your relations with this tendency, as it is fundamentally aligned with the interests of white supremacy, colonial arrogance, and the Euro/American genocidal drive for power consolidation. While enjoying the economic fruits of Palestinian genocide and the brutal destruction of left-wing movements in Central and South America, Kolektiva, and other “anarchists” in the West carry blood on their hands with their clear support for one of the last settler colonial projects in the world.
As the divides between settler and colonized, right and left become more stark in the current political climate, more and more supposed revolutionaries will be forced to show their hands and clearly articulate their positions. It will no longer be possible to hide behind the mask of insufficient ideologoical purity to hide an essentially colonial position. It is a good thing that we will be able to see everyone for who they actually are. At Abolition Media we are proud to uphold the anarchist revolutionary tradition and unapologetically stand on the side of those who are fighting Western hegemony and we invite everyone in good faith to join us on this trajectory.
Further reading:
The Palestinian Revolution and the Rift in the International Movement — Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/pos…
Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis: Response to the Week of Revenge for Comrade Michael Forest Reinoehl, Who Was Murdered by Government Order abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/pos…
Abolition Media Statement on Editorial Decisions Regarding Palestine and Anti-Colonial Resistance abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/pos…
So this is worrisome @Gargron and #Mastodon have no way to comply with these draconian age-verification laws. This leaves it up to the instance providers. Jeezus.
You already know my thoughts. Not geoblocking the traffic opens you up to civil and criminal legal penalties. This includes mastodon.social who's by far the largest porn instance on the fediverse!
Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it's up to individual server owners to decide.
The article makes it seem like it was a badly worded statement! Instances can do registration by approval, so they can use whatever mechanism they want to do age verification if they choose to; and, admin notes let them store the info on profiles if they want to. So, it's still up to each instance to choose whether to comply, but their framing as reported was unfortunate. I asked Andy Piper if they could release the statement (or some public sttaement), he said they're working on it.
I found out that my whole family's DR isn't practicing family medicine anymore and I guess we have a new DR. Nobody even mentions anything?! At least we still have a Dr though.
@von he was such a caring DR, so I am pretty sad. Like he would give you his cellphone number to text what you're kids rash looks like. Dr Grover 🙏 youtu.be/PWY1sH92xOo
Hope, B.C., has the highest number of overdose deaths per capita in the province, and medical professionals and advocates are raising the alarm about the gro...
A young man confronts his mother over her damaging his sexuality. She, of course, denies her wrong doing. She is dismissive of his pain and shows extreme ent...
this is a bit of a minor update but I added two new subreddits to #GAGSProject! r/GWAQueer and r/GoneWildAudioGay
in order to make room for them in the search results UI, I switched from using tabs to a navbar. I think I like this approach more because it communicates information explicitly that I was trying to communicate implicitly in the past - although this navbar format might be a little less intuitive to folks who are used to the UI language of tabs
also, I added a new button that lets you save your gender preferences and blacklist. in the past whenever you submitted a search, your preferences would be saved, but there was no way to save them without submitting a search
🌲🚀🌲
in reply to mia (developer mode) • • •Most maths has nothing whatsoever to do with numbers so it fucking well should be
If you find it lmk