The New Frontier of Settler Colonialism

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Republished from Michigan Specter.

In early June, a video went viral of a Palestinian woman arguing with an Israeli man. “Yakub, you know this is not your house,” says Muna El-Kurd, a resident of Sheik Jarrah, to a man who has been living in some part of her family’s property for years.

“Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back,” he replies, in a Brooklyn accent, “So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?” He throws his arms in the air in an expression of ostensible innocence and confusion. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. It’s easy to yell at me, but I didn’t do this.”

“You are stealing my house,” she insists.

“And if I don’t steal it,” he replies, “someone else is going to steal it.”

How Did We Get Here?

Settler colonialism is often seen as a thing of the past. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world are populated primarily by the descendants of people who took that land by force, drove out or slaughtered the natives, and claimed it as their God-given right. It is generally accepted that the world was shaped by these forces, but we are rarely willing to see this process as continuous. Even the left, critical of power and skeptical of narratives that ignore the modern implications of past atrocities, tends to frame the continuation of imperialism primarily as neocolonialism, or unequal relationships between countries maintained by debt, corruption, regime change, threats, and cultural hegemony by which developed governments and corporations drain money and resources from the third world without resorting to the older methods of colonization. This framework, while useful, places the world of colonial annexation, direct governance, and settler colonialism firmly in the past.

White European settler colonialism, specifically from the western European countries, has been by far the dominant form of settler colonialism in recent centuries, and arguably in all of human history. Europe, led by the British Empire, carried out settler colonial projects in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Nearly all settler colonial territories eventually became independent of the Empire, but imperialism continued. The United States was the leader in this, securing most of its territory after independence, but it was not the only one. Apartheid in South Africa and Canadian sterilization of Indigenous women, to give just two examples, existed long after British control, but no one could deny the shared origin of this oppression and the continued cooperation and connections between these states, especially in the military and intelligence fields, but also culturally, linguistically, and economically. In all of these countries, settler colonialism is not a process that is completed or one that has ended. Indigenous people are still marginalized and oppressed, and they are forced to exist in a system set up by the colonizing forces. It would be a mistake, however, to view internal repression as the only descendent of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism continues to find new frontiers, most notably in the state of Israel.

Historical Parallels

Israeli settler colonialism is really a continuation of the same process that European settlers started in the Americas hundreds of years ago. White settlers, marginalized in their homelands, but generally viewed as superior to the natives by the great powers of their day, invaded new territory and drove the native peoples out. They stole the land and the resources on it, exploited the native inhabitants while destroying their economy, culture, resources, and way of life.

The process of Israeli settler colonialism is much the same as American settler colonialism. Both the United States and Israel began as important projects of the British Empire. Violence and ethnic cleansing against Native Americans and Palestinians, in the bloody so-called Indian Wars fought by European powers and later the United States and Canada and events in Israel like the Nakba, forced Native people to flee their homes, relegated to locations the colonial power had no need of yet, west in America, east in Palestine. Once a region is conquered and integrated, the frontier moves. Palestinian self-governance, legally at least, exists only in a group of physically divided areas, places in the West Bank labeled as “Area A” and “Area B”, and of course, the Gaza strip. (In reality, Israel controls security in Area B, and completely surrounds these areas and Gaza, controlling emigration, immigration, and trade, making actual Palestinian self-governance a fantasy). Native Americans were deported to lands far away from their homeland, and the US government has even attempted to send Palestinians out of Israel and Palestine altogether, like when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice suggested that Palestinians could be resettled in Argentina and Chile in a meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in 2008.

On the other side of the colonial state, the direction they came from, things look similar as well. Israel does the majority of its trade with Europe and North America, including the profitable weapons trade. Early America traded heavily with Europe as well, and its cotton plantations, maintained by slave labor and existing on stolen land, shipped massive amounts of cotton to Europe to help fuel the textile industry and industrialization. Both countries may be considered “Nations of Immigrants,” but both are quite discriminatory in the type of immigrant they populate their territory with. For America, it was blatantly white supremacist, prioritizing a small group of peoples seen as the most advanced, and gradually growing to include other people considered white.

Jewish immigrants to the United States, so long as they came from white, European countries, were tolerated much more than immigrants considered racially inferior. Though they faced violence, discrimination, and marginalization in a conservative country dominated by Christians, Jewish immigrants received recognition as valued members of society by people such as George Washington and equal political rights. The tolerance of Jewish institutions was not the same reality for other ethnic groups living in America at the time. Again, because it needs to be made absolutely clear, this does not erase the reality of antisemitism, especially in institutions and from individuals that promote white supremacy. Rather, Jewish identity and whiteness are intersecting identities, not mutually exclusive ones.

Israel has faced accusations of racism from its Jewish citizens of non-European origin, including accusations of police brutality, discrimination in school enrollment, and even forced sterilization. This is compounded by the fact that Jews living in the so-called “developed” world, typically meaning white-majority countries in Europe and North America, simply have greater opportunities to move to Israel. The advantages of living in the “developed” world (their greater wealth, higher levels of education, easier transportation to Israel) allow Jews living there to move to Israel more easily than Jews living in poorer countries. This reality, while it is a result of global capitalism and white supremacy and not any aspect of the Zionist movement, effectively privileges white immigrants to Israel.

Race, Religion, and Civilization

There are also important parallels to draw between the settler colonial ideologies of Israel and America. Israelis claim that the land is theirs due to their ancestry, but ignore the fact that many Palestinians have descended from the ancient Jewish residents of Palestine. Zionists like Ber Borochov and David Ben-Gurion accepted this and saw the Palestinians as descendants of the Israelites who had stayed on the land. This is not to say that Palestinians have some special status over other people because of their ancestry, or that any Jews are somehow “not real Jews,” or that race is a metric that dictates a particular allocation of power or land. It does show, however, the inherent failures of relying on abstract and contradictory concepts like race and descendancy over thousands of years. Israeli ideology relies on the idea that Israelis are somehow more tied to the land than the people who live on it now, and who have lived there in recent history. Israeli ideology relies on claiming a difference in ancestry between the Palestinians and Israelis. The only difference that can be reasonably discerned is the European ancestry of the Israeli colonizers.

An important clarifier is the distinction between the Zionist movement of Jews, mainly from Europe and the Americas, and the historical existence of Jews in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews have always lived there, but their simple existence is not Zionism. Zionists may seek to tie these Jews to their cause, but the core of Zionism is the movement of Jews from outside of this territory, with the backing of Europe and America, into Palestinian territory. That is a settler colonial project. Zionist ideology appropriated the right of Palestinian Jews to keep living where they were to justify a larger project of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.

Americans also steal a component identity of those they colonized, even as they sought to replace that identity. Individual white Americans from the participants in the Boston Tea Party to Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have dressed up as Native Americans or claimed Native American identity without evidence or any cultural link. We took the name Apache for a helicopter, we took the Powhatan word tamahaac for a missile, we took the word Ojibwe word mishigami for our state, our university, and the Michigamua club here at the University (renamed in 2007 and disbanded in 2021), where members would disrespectfully appropriate Native dress, custom, and names. These identity thefts are key to settler colonialism. As the connections native peoples have to the land are severed, the land must be reconnected, even if sloppily and artificially, to the new inhabitants.

Both colonizers claimed to be more civilized than the colonized, sometimes in explicitly racist language, sometimes not. We hear over and over how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East despite it having near-total control over millions of people with no say in their own governance. The early United States claimed to be more civilized in its day too, promising “liberty and justice for all” while maintaining slavery and calling itself a republic, “by the people, for the people,” even when voting rights were restricted to a small elite of wealthy white men. We hear the same narratives of development, that Israel is “making the desert bloom,” and that America tamed a vast, uncivilized and unpopulated wilderness, and that the wealth of both is a sign of their superior industry, talent, and work ethic, or even of God’s favor.

God’s favor is actually tied with civilization in other interesting ways. According to many Jews and Christians who use God as a justification for colonization and expansion, Israel was promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible. The ideology of Manifest Destiny also relied on God allowing his chosen (white) people to conquer the world and convert the natives from their religions, which were represented as uncivilized, savage, and infantile, into members of the Christain religion, which was seen as the religion of the civilized, developed world. The Pope himself would proclaim the rights of European colonizers to the land they conquered. Mormons, like the Puritans before them and the Jews after them, were an oppressed religious minority who led the charge of expansion, believing God wanted them to.

In much the same way as Ashkenazi Jews (along with Italians, Irish, and others before them) have gained some degree of “whiteness” and integration into structures of white supremacy, the Jewish religion has gained some degree of legitimacy in the eyes of American Christians. Some conservatives will talk about “Judeo-Christain Values,” a confusing term that ultimately serves to drive a wedge between Jews, Christians, and “enlightened” western Atheists who allegedly hold these values, and Muslims, who allegedly do not and are therefore deemed to have an inferior civilization. Exclusionary ideologies are anything but consistent, and as they lose power, they can expand the in-group to unite against a new outgroup. This has led to bizarre political alliances and support, such as American white nationalist Richard Spencer praising Israel’s political system, or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has praised Nazi collaborators and used antisemitic language to refer to his enemies, a “true friend to Israel.” Many early American settlers were marginalized in Europe for their religion, but that did not stop the Christians from uniting themselves against some other, more distinct religion or group of religions.

The Frontier

The creation of Israel is not just a copy of the United States but an extension of the United States. Its colonial efforts are also American colonial efforts. The United States provides $3 billion to Israel annually in military aid, as well as billions more in loan guarantees. The US State Department changed its position on settlements under Mike Pompeo, supporting the obviously illegal project. In the private sector, an entire network of American nonprofits support Israeli settlers in Palestine, and many American and European corporations are closely intertwined with settlements and do business with the Israeli government. Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, previously ran one such foundation funding the settlements. The Israeli Land Fund, funded by American donors, has assisted in the eviction of a Palestinian family in Sheikh Jarrah. Its founder, the deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, and a settler living in a Palestinian neighborhood, Aryeh King, has worked hard to increase Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. King, while on his visit to Sheikh Jarrah on May 6, even wished for the death of a Palestinian activist who was shot by police.

The recent forced evictions and other police violence are not unique to East Jerusalem. King is also supporting the eviction of residents in Silwan, another Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The land from which Israel clears the houses may actually be used to expand a biblical theme park called City of David National Park, run by a settler group called the Ir David Foundation. Nothing exemplifies the Israeli colonial project more than the destruction of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods to make room for a park named after a king who lived some 3,000 years ago where settlers and tourists can look at ancient artifacts. Tourists to Israel are predominantly Christian, and a plurality of them travel from America to visit Israel.

It is not just American money, but American people who help drive settler colonialism. US Citizens make up 15% of the settlers in the West Bank. It’s a familiar phenomenon: Americans, on the frontier, traveling inland and claiming new land for themselves and their people, building a homestead, and arming themselves to fight the people who lived there before. America didn’t stop when it got to California, or even Hawaii, it just sought out new avenues for colonial expansion.

Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, the twin brother of Muna El-Kurd, went on Democracy Now! and explained the altercation between his sister and the settler that began this article and how it represents a broader settler colonial project.

“Can you explain this scene? And talk more specifically about what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah right now,” asked Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!.

“Absolutely. The scene that you saw, Amy, is a scene of colonialism. People often think that colonialism is this archaic concept or a concept of recent memory, but in fact, it’s alive and well in Palestine. And this is a colonizer that happens to be from Brooklyn, as you can hear by the accent, who decided to find a home in my backyard. This happens because we, as a community of refugees in Sheikh Jarrah, have been battling billionaire-backed, often U.S.-registered settler organizations that employ these people to come and live in our homes and harass us and intimidate us…What’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah today is nothing short of ethnic cleansing.

“…You know, I know it sounds bizarre that an Israeli settler is taking over half of my home, and likely they will be taking over the entirety of the neighborhood should no international action be taken. But it’s not as absurd when you put it in the context [of] how the state of Israel came about. It came about by destroying and burning hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian cities and villages and taking over Palestinians’ homes. Today, all over historic Palestine, there are settlers who are living in homes that were once Palestinian.”

Sheikh Jarrah Is Not a New Event! It is Our Relived Generational Trauma

By Nazek Jawad

Growing up in Damascus, I didn’t realize the occupied Palestinian territories were a separate political entity from Syria, until I was in fourth grade. Up until then, I thought it was a part of Syria. This is how present the Palestinian cause has been in our daily lives. The shadows of generations of Palestinians, who were forced out of their homes, followed us in schools, in the streets, and in our homes. The shadows of the Palestinian “Children of the Stones” shared our desks with us in the classrooms. We grew up with the open wound of Palestine. We grew up with the pain of women protecting their olive trees from being uprooted by military tanks. With the agony of the stolen childhood of Palestinian kids, who looked like us, but had to become men at ten years old to defend their livelihood, their homes, and their families. 

In 1993, while the usual images of the Israeli destruction of Arab land in Palestine were on the front page of one of the daily newspapers, on the back page was an image of Hillary Clinton with Big Bird. I remember gazing at that image, staring at Big Bird’s fluffy yellow feathers and rounded big eyes. I felt sunnier just by looking at Big Bird. I stared at Clinton’s cheerful smile and in my eight years old mind I gushed to myself: It must feel lighter to exist on the other side of the world, without the weight of all what’s happening here- life tastes differently there, it is not as salty! That brightness of the image illuminated how life feels like, without the weight of an existential threat looming in the background.

Every night when the clock hits 8:30pm, it was the time for the news segment, a time for another Palestinian tragedy. In my child mind I would think to myself: Is this the one? Is this the tragedy that would finally get the world moving to help us end this misery? Does the world know what’s happening? Is everyone around the world watching the news? 

Silence. Silence was the answer to all my questions. Silence was the world’s answer to all what was happening.

You see, in a child’s mind the sense of humanity remains untouched and pure, from all man-made divisive concepts. You don’t know nationalities nor borders. All what you know is humanity. You understand people around the world as a continuum of individuals around you-you imagine them like your neighbors. When a suffering happens, it doesn’t matter on which side of which border it took place-in your mind, the world exists in one stretch. What matters is the world’s response, and its absence has always aggravated me, and later when I grew up, it pained me, as I understood the world is choosing to stand still while we bleed.

In geography classes, we practiced the map of the Arab land with all its pieces intact. Where the world map outlines Israel, we wrote Palestine! That was our form of defiance. It was our small way of claiming our agency, and resisting the injustice of land dispossession. That small dose of self-made justice felt very empowering. It helped ease the frustration at times, especially on days when the American UN ambassadors raised their hands to veto a UNSC resolution condemning an Israeli aggression. So, there you go! For each one of your vetoes, we will draw a map. We will mark Palestine with capital letters. We will hang the map on every wall. On every door. On the sun! That land is Palestine, and all the millions of dollars sent in aid to Israel will never be enough to erase Palestine from our consciousness, from our being. 

You see, a child’s mind does not understand politics, but can feel hostility. We didn’t understand the political calculation behind the imperialist aggression against our region, but we felt the animosity against us. To be denied a mere condemnation, we knew our suffering is not seen. We knew the wailing of Palestinian mothers over the dead bodies of their children and the ruins of their homes is not heard. We felt the rejection. We are not wanted, not even to exist on our own land. But, what does a child do when they are rejected? They fight back claiming the very identity that has been taken away from them by force! It simply did not matter what all American Foreign Affairs Secretaries planned and negotiated and announced with Israeli and Arab leaders. For us, these borders that we practiced and perfected, are the borders of Palestine.

In history classes we learned about the Israeli occupation, the failed Arab revolution to free Palestine, and all the UN resolutions. We memorized the dates of every peace treaty, the names of the towns of every massacre, the numbers of deaths, and the names of all the Arab martyrs. We gazed at images of the Golan, the occupied part of the Syrian land, which we knew we will never see, not even in our dreams. A land that is only a couple-hours’ drive from Damascus, but seemed impossible to reach. It’s beautiful, I always thought. I could almost smell its scent out of the page of my book, but I could never touch it. This wound grows to be another extension of you. The loss becomes your shadow. Your land is who you are. As you grow older, you move around the world knowing your existence is simply incomplete. 

After every history lesson, we had so many pressing questions for our teacher: Where is the world from what’s happening? How is this massive generational injustice even allowed to continue in an advanced world? Isn’t this the same world that preaches to us about international law and human rights? Well, what about our rights? 

Once again. Silence. Silence was the answer to all our questions. 

But there’s no such thing as silence in a child’s mind. A child’s mind will always find answers. We realized then that our human value is not equal to others. We learned at an early age that it didn’t matter whether our cause is a just cause, our human suffering is insignificant to the rest of the world because we are weaker. Only those who are strong can move the world when they are touched. 

I always thought, how unfortunate for us that the world doesn’t measure our strength by the thousands of years of our civilization. It doesn’t measure our strength by the hospitality of our homes, the tastefulness of our food, the craftiness of our people. Somehow, by some arbitrary measures, which we didn’t decide, we ended up on the weaker side, while our survival over that land, and the creativity and endurance it takes to continuously inhabit a place for thousands of years, measured up to nothing. 

When you are a victim on the weaker side, the world sits in silence watching, desensitized to your bloodshed, and when you resist, the world roars pointing at you calling you a villain. When all liberation movements around the world are celebrated, while you don’t even have the right to resist-you realize then that you don’t matter. It’s that simple. It’s that painful. 

For seventy-three years we have been reliving the same devastating images, hearing the same condemnation statements, frustrated with the same inaction. For seventy-three years, the only thing human race has been successful in recycling is human misery, and an agonizing inaction to this misery.

This relived trauma in our region has been passed down generation after generation, because no one can wash away the daily lived sense of loss. We simply don’t have the privilege to forget. We don’t have a choice but to feel the pain of our missing pieces. How can you forget when all you feel is the pain of that void?

Today, with all what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah, I am thinking about the entirety of the region where I come from, that has been subject to injustice that feels as ancient as time. When the world is celebrating technology that reduces physical distance, this region feels more isolated than ever. I will never understand such cruelty. How could a place that has given so much to the world, a place that has been a safe haven to so many civilizations, be faced with such harshness? What could be worth of unconceivable amount of human suffering?

I will never understand.

Which Red Flag is Flying?: Communist and Anarchist Solidarity in Afrin

By Marcel Cartier

As aspiring Sultan Erdogan's assault on the radical democratic experiment in Afrin is repelled by Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and other nationalities who comprise a diverse, multi-ethnic region, two red flags are now flying at the front lines. One of these is of course of the occupying, fascist Turkish Republic that is fighting alongside Salafist Free Syrian Army (FSA) units, as NATO's second largest army has made common cause with some of the most regressive figures imaginable. The other flag represents a diametrically opposed tendency, that of the international movement of the working-class. This blood-soaked banner of revolution and the sacrifice of the proletarian struggle is held up with pride by the communist internationalists fighting alongside the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) to defend the sovereignty of Afrin, of Syria, and the revolutionary ideals of the Rojava Revolution.

The Left and Syria's Proxy War

The complexities of Syria's war - now entering into the eighth year of bloodshed and unrelenting agony for the people of this land so connected with the genesis of civilization - have often been extremely challenging to navigate for an outside observer. For those on the radical left, this has been a conflict that has often exposed key differences between tendencies in terms of how to assess not only the region, but the world situation and character of international actors in what has been far more than simply a civil war.

In the initial days of the so-called Syrian 'uprising' in the Spring of 2011, the western left largely assessed events through the lens of optimism in light of the mass protests that had already swept Tunisia and Egypt. The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, who had seemed untouchable for three decades, galvanized revolutionary forces in the west who were often far too accustomed to the idea that 'doing the impossible' was precisely that - impossible. History seemed to now be proving differently, showing that sometimes decades can be captured in mere days or weeks.

While some Trotskyist groups in the west had initially thrown their weight behind the mainstream 'Syrian Arab' opposition that was grouped around what became the 'Free Syrian Army', communists from more 'orthodox' parties (those who supported or at least defended the Soviet Union and socialist bloc until its final demise in 1991) tended to support the Syrian government and leadership on the basis of the country being a target of regime change attempts by the western imperialist powers, particularly the United States. (An illuminating example of this enduring fixation by Washington on establishing a client regime in Damascus can be seen in aa 1986 article by conservative commentator Daniel Pipes, who referred to Syria as the 'Cuba of the Middle East' due to its support for national liberation movements such as the Palestinian struggle -- what the U.S. would argue was support for 'terrorism').

Although the often bitter arguments that engulfed the western left in light of Syria's descent into war - occurring almost simultaneously with the NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of the nationalist government of Muammar Gaddafi - led to an even more pronounced fragmentation of an already divided radical movement, it would be inaccurate to say that the dividing line was simply between 'pro Assad' and 'anti-Assad' forces.

At the time, this is how I assessed the situation myself - I refused to see the possibility of any 'third way' that went beyond the limitations of a very narrow dichotomy. This was itself evidence of the western left often having such an obsession with losing that we refuse to see beyond the bounds of what appears to be possible at the present juncture, no matter how limited and oppressive it may be. Daring to imagine has become something so abstract and remote that we cannot even begin to take it seriously.

The possibility of a 'third way' in Syria only became visible to most forces in the western metropoles after the declaration of autonomy in the northern areas of the country by Kurdish revolutionary forces of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the Spring of 2012. Unlike the 'Arab opposition' that declared Assad the primary enemy of their cause and turned their guns toward Damascus, the so-called self-administration that was formed in the areas known by Kurds as 'Rojava' (for 'west' Kurdistan) declared that it wasn't interested in 'regime change', although it did seek the democratization of the country along federal lines that would give recognition to Syria's multi-ethnic and diverse character. This led to a degree of cooperation with the Syrian state in agreeing de-facto lines of demarcation, with Syrian Arab Army forces pulling back from the areas that fell under the control of the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) in Aleppo, for instance. In other circumstances, Assad repositioned his forces away from Northern Syria to fight rebels preoccupied with overthrowing his Government. Upon this vacuum left by Assad forces, Kurds announced their own administration body, built on the principles of radical democracy, gender equality and multi-ethnic harmony. Even with the declaration of self-administration, however, it wasn't really until the battle of Kobane in late 2014 that the Kurdish question in Syria emerged on the world stage.

Communists and The Rojava Revolution

During this heroic resistance to the fascism of the so-called Islamic State, a considerably higher degree of attention began to be given to the Kurdish question in Syria by not only the mainstream media, but understandably so by the western left. After all, it was the forces of the YPG and YPJ who espoused the most progressive, leftist politics of all of the military formations operating in the theatre of Syria's war.

Due to the ideology of the Rojava Revolution being linked with the theoretical points espoused by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan in his 'new paradigm' - among them that the Leninist conception of revolution was outdated and that a 'non-state' system showed the path to a free, dignified and socialist society in the 21st century - this movement was deemed by many Marxist critics to be 'anarchist'. A considerable amount of support began to be given to the Rojava project by western 'libertarian socialists', many hostile to 20 th century socialist revolutions, and even the PKK's original orientation as a Leninist national liberation movement. This often put revolutionary Marxists and Leninists in a knee-jerk position of opposing the Rojava experiment, and often refusing to look into it in any considerable degree of detail.

However, a substantial number of Turkish communist organisations didn't take such a simplistic approach to the 'democratic confederalism' being offered by the PYD as an alternative to capitalist modernity in Syria and the region. For many of these Turkey-based formations and parties, Rojava was part national liberation movement, part radical, feminist, democratic experiment. Perhaps they didn't see it as explicitly 'socialist', but it was important to engage with and to participate in.

From 2012, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP), until then operating primarily within Turkey's borders, began sending cadres to Rojava to defend the revolution. Among the MLKP fighters who joined the ranks of the YPJ was Ivana Hoffmann, a 19-year old German woman who had joined the party abroad and joined the Kurdish movement's caravan of martyrs when she was killed in March 2015. Ivana's example would serve as the basis for other internationalists to join not only the MLKP, but for the Party to push for the creation of an internationalist organization that would aim to build on the legacy of communists who had flocked to Spain to defend the Republic against Franco's fascism in the late 1930s.

In the summer of 2015, the International Freedom Battalion (IFB) was officially declared at a ceremony in Serekaniye. The show of leftist unity at the announcement of the IFB's formation is an important lesson for revolutionaries across the globe. Groups that had previously been at odds with each other in Turkey now joined hands in struggle. The United Freedom Forces (BOG), itself a coalition of leftist fighters from Turkey that had been declared the previous year, now joined the IFB on the initiative of the MLKP. There wasn't time nor the luxury of ideological squabbles preventing the unity of forces in the face of barbarism. Other groups that joined the IFB included the Turkish Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) and its armed wing TiKKO (Workers' and Peasants' Army of Turkey). Beyond the region, communists from Spain played a key role in the IFB's consolidation, with the Reconstruction Comunista (RC) sending cadres to fight in the spirit of solidarity their ancestors in the Spanish Republic knew all too well. This historical link also inspired Marxists from Britain to join the IFB under the banner of the Bob Crow Brigade, paying homage to a major figure in their country's trade union movement.

The Hammer and Sickle on the Frontlines at Afrin

Of course, the level of solidarity expressed with the Rojava Revolution by communists across the world - both in terms of events organized at home, as well as in those actually coming to Syria to be willing to give the ultimate sacrifice - isn't comparable in scope to the tens of thousands who volunteered to fight Francoism. Syria has been a far more complex and divisive war to grasp, on the one hand. On the other, the intervention of major foreign powers into the conflict, especially Russia and the United States, shifted the dynamics of solidarity with the Kurdish-led forces who were spearheading a women's revolution rooted in direct democracy. For many Marxists, military cooperation with the U.S. - 'tactical' or not - meant that at least explicit solidarity with the Rojava experiment was off the table.

However, the Turkish communist groups operating in Rojava seem to have navigated this relationship with great nuance and a spirit of critical solidarity. For sure, the presence of the United States within the borders of Syria is a nuisance at best for the fighters of groups such as the MLKP and TKP/ML. Based on my experiences on the ground in northern Syria, it is fair to say that for many fighters of the YPG and YPJ, that relationship is perceived the same way. However, the communist groups generally take a more critical line toward this cooperation than the Apoists (supporters of Abdullah Ocalan in the PYD and PKK and their umbrella organization, the Union of Kurdish Communities [KCK]).

Almost two weeks into Erdogan's misadventure in Syria, the hollowness of U.S. 'support' for the YPG and YPJ has been made blatantly obvious. This hasn't surprised the Kurdish movement in the least bit, as the writing already appeared on the wall for the U.S. to 'drop' the Kurdish forces after the liberation of Raqqa. Although still cooperating in Deir ez-Zor with the YPG, the tacit approval of Washington for Erdogan's bloody, genocidal incursion into Afrin has spelled out that although the U.S. and YPG may have had mutual, overlapping interests in Syria for the short-term, there was no more of a potential long-term unity that existed as there had been between the Soviet Union and western imperialists who united against Hitler's fascist aggression during the Second World War.

This should reveal to communists around the world that the fight to defend Afrin is a struggle to safeguard the basic principles of the oppressed, and their efforts in establishing an ecological, grassroots, feminist democracy. Marxists should support such a fight and vision of society, even if having some ideological critiques of the model of 'democratic confederalism'.

Fighters from the International Freedom Battalion are now flying the deep crimson flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle at the frontlines in Afrin. Daring to defy Erdogan's neo-Ottoman aspirations in Rojava as they defied his government's fascistic and assimilationist policies in Turkey and Bakur (northern Kurdistan), Turkey's red militants fight shoulder to shoulder with their YPG, YPG, Syriac Military Council, and other progressive anti-fascist forces.

In an interview with ETHA News Agency, MLKP commander Viyan İsyan described why his Party is taking part in the resistance in Afrin, saying "This revolution is an example to the peoples of the Middle East. Our fundamental duty is to defend the Rojava revolution by any means necessary. The defence of the revolution and its gains will also carry the revolution to the peoples of the Middle East…Defending Afrin is defending honour. Defending Afrin is defending the future. Defending Afrin opens the way for other revolutions…We want them to not surrender to Erdoğan's fascism, we want them to set the streets on fire. We call them to press against the borders of Rojava. Because these borders are unnatural. We call our peoples to action. The resistance of Afrin is a historical resistance. We call on our peoples to uphold this historical resistance…We want it to be known that we will not abandon Afrin. The YPG/YPJ and the people of Afrin will not abandon Afrin. As communists, we will not abandon it. We are here until the end, no matter the cost. Victory will be ours."

Echoing the sentiment expressed by the MLKP, the TKP/ML vowed to crush Turkey's occupation and attempted stifling of the revolution by calling all oppressed people to the ranks of the resistance. In a video message, the Party's military formation TiKKO declared its role in fight against Erdogan, saying "In its attempt to occupy Afrin, the fascist and genocidal Turkish state has shown itself to be the enemy of the oppressed Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen peoples, and the working people as a whole. After being subjected to occupation and massacres by the ISIS fascists, the peoples of Rojava are now undergoing occupation and massacres at hands of the fascist Turkish state with the invading Turkish troops bombing villages and murdering innocent children and civilian workers."

The Critical Need for Internationalist Solidarity

At this moment in which the imperialist powers have made clear that they have no genuine regard for 'democracy', in which their support for NATO's second largest army has trumped any possible semblance of half-hearted support for a Kurdish radical movement that aims to sweep aside capitalism, the left needs to reassess its relationship to the Rojava Revolution.

Communists are taking part in the heroic resistance in Afrin, aiming to protect a society being reshaped along egalitarian lines. The spirit of internationalism which is present in this struggle isn't necessarily one of full ideological unity - there is plenty of struggle taking place within the Rojava Revolution between Apoists, communists, anarchists, and other leftist forces. Where the revolution is headed is being fiercely debated, but in an atmosphere of mutual solidarity and respect, not the hostility and narrow-mindedness that often permeates the leftist environments and movements in Europe and North America. This revolution's vibrancy and richness of diversity is being defended at the frontlines. This result of this struggle will have major ramifications for the future of the international communist movement, and for humanity more generally.

This was originally published at The Region .