Decolonisation Isn't Pretty Or Complicated: When Violence Is Humanising

By Derek Ford

The first pro-Palestine demonstration called after the latest counterattack by a host of Palestinian forces on October 7, endorsed by Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition and others, put matters very plainly:

Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. Catching the enemy completely by surprise, the Palestinian resistance has captured over a dozen settlements surrounding Gaza, along with many occupation soldiers and military vehicles. This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies but armed confrontation with the oppressors.

Of course, the colonisers do not want to hear such realities and hypocritically condemn them as ‘violent’ and ‘terrorist.’ In Indianapolis, we had to keep our coalition together in the face of the fear-mongering by both Democrat and Republican politicians. Unfortunately, many on the academic ‘left’ – already predisposed to conciliatory readjustments – continue echoing the same talking points as the State Department.

Henry Giroux, for example, contends that ‘The reach of violence and death in Israel by Hamas is shocking in its depravity and has been well-publicised in the mainstream media and in other cultural apparatuses.’ For a ‘critical’ scholar, it should instinctively raise questions when one finds truth in the pro-Zionist media and cultural outlets and remains merely satisfied with noting the ‘one-sidedness’ of such coverage. Giroux goes further still, calling us to do more than ‘exclusively condemn Hamas’s atrocious violence as a violation of human rights’ and to hold Israel’s apparently asymmetrical violence to equal condemnation. ‘Refusing to hold all sides in this war to the standards of international law is a violation of human dignity, justice and democratic principles,’ Giroux proclaims.

Palestinian resistance: Armed love

I recommend revisiting Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he unequivocally denounces such false equivalences. ‘Never in history,’ he writes, ‘has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators if they themselves are the result of violence?’ It is rather the oppressors who trigger violence and ‘not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror.’ Furthermore, the counter-insurgency of the oppressed, the ‘violence’ or ‘terror’ they wield, is in reality ‘a gesture of love.’

For Giroux, however, Hamas’s heroic attack on October 7 is ‘brutal and heinous’ and ‘horrific.’ To be fair, he acknowledges that Israeli Occupation Forces have murdered more children than ‘Hamas.’ Yet he swiftly returns to the equation, arguing that both Israel and Hama are united by ‘the violence done against children,’ which is apparently ‘used simply as a prop to legitimate and continue the war and the ongoing death and suffering of children, women, and civilians.’

Simultaneously, in the article titled ‘Killing Children: The Burdens of Conscience and the Israel-Hamas War,’ Giroux commands us not to equate Hamas with Palestine. Fair enough; no single entity represents an entire people. Yet Hamas is one of many resistance forces operating under a united front, along with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Resistance Committees, the Al-Quds Brigades and countless others. This is beside the point: those of us in the US have absolutely no business telling the colonised how to resist colonisation, nor what armed groups should resist and on what grounds!

One wonders what such academics would have written about Nat Turner’s historic 1831 rebellion in Virginia. In August of that year, Turner led a group of six slaves to freedom. They killed their slaver, Joseph Travis and his family before traversing plantations to free more enslaved Africans by force. Along the way, ‘free’ Blacks joined their army of about 70 people.

They took money, supplies and weapons as they moved and eliminated over 55 white slave owners and their families. Their violence was not altogether indiscriminate, and, in fact, Turner ordered his troops to leave the homes of poor white people alone. Still, they killed children in their march towards freedom.

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Should we remember this remarkable uprising as a tragedy to be condemned, albeit less so than the violence of the slavers? No! We celebrate Turner’s rebellion as we do all revolts of the oppressed worldwide throughout history!

Their violence was humanising, a necessary measure to prevent them from enslaving others and part of a long tradition of insurrection that ultimately overthrew chattel slavery in the US.

No demonisation of the oppressed

After an amazingly long chase, once the slavers found and killed Turner, the white supremacist papers condemned him and his motley crew for their barbaric violence. How would you respond? ‘Yes, it was terrible, but slavery is worse?’

Things are different today. All imperialist wars are for ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights.’ So it was with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, you name it. In each instance, the propaganda is quickly absorbed by our critical intellectuals. I remember Noam Chomsky endorsing UN Resolution 1973, put forward by the ‘saviours’ of humanity like Italy and the United States on March 17, 2011, imposing a ‘No-Fly Zone’ over Libya. Of course, this only applied to the Libyan air force, not to the US and its NATO allies.

There was relentless propaganda about an ‘impending massacre’ in Benghazi when, in reality, the small armed uprising was on the verge of defeat by the massively popular (and, it goes without saying, flawed) Jamahiriya government of Moammar Gaddafi. It turns out there was no impending massacre, nor was there any validity to the accusations of ‘mass rape.’

The same is true of October 7, 2023. As it turns out, the Israelis massacred their own people. The air force admitted one commander ‘instructed the other fighters in the air to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence, and at a certain point also attacked an IDF station with trapped soldiers in order to help the fighters of Navy commando unit 13 attack it and liberate it.’ Yasmin Porat confirmed the Israeli army massacred civilians after the courageous Hamas counterattack and, moreover, said Palestinian resistance forces who ‘kidnapped’ her did not treat her inhumanely and did not intend to murder her.

For those with a cursory knowledge of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, this is not surprising.

No purity in the fight against oppression

Let’s imagine that the lies told by the State Department and distributed by their stenographers in the media were all true. Even then, why would anyone in the US or any imperialist nation that is currently sponsoring the Israeli genocide feel any need to ‘condemn’ or even denounce the heroism of those fighting back?

The answer is simple: standing up to the demonisation campaign is difficult, especially early on. Yet how many have heard the endless outrageous lies used to dehumanise primarily Black and Brown heads of state, governments, militaries, and populations? The real question is: how many of us have heard the retractions? How many of us have questioned our national chauvinism and privilege? Why would anyone entertain the notion that Hamas wants Israel to continue bombing its people and infrastructure?

It goes without saying that I don’t share a political allegiance to Hamas, and neither do the myriad forces uniting with them to defend their people – and the people of the region and world – from the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel!

Moral purity is an idealism only those cloistered in their academic offices can afford. Still, it’s a waste of money. I guess, at the very least, it shows us what critical academics are willing to criticise the oppressors and not the oppressed. Me? I’m unequivocally and proudly on the side of the oppressed.

The Imperative to Organize: What Palestine Needs from Us Now

[Photo Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu, AP]

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso and Salma Hamamy

On October 7th, the Islamic Resistance Movement — a Palestinian political and military organization based in Gaza better known as Hamas — began a multi-faceted attack against the settler colony of Israel. The operation included aerial rocket launches and on-the-ground operations. The attack marked only the latest bout of Palestinian resistance against the sieges, occupations, and ethnic cleansing campaigns that have fundamentally characterized the Israeli state, an entity built on these very atrocities since its founding in 1948. With a dreadful immediacy, Israel responded to the attack in kind, and then some.

The war crimes and genocidal exploits that have unfolded since the fighting began are too multitudinous to list in full. But suffice it to say that Israel has unleashed an endless shower of hospital and school bombings — collective punishment galore. As of December 18th, Israel has slaughtered almost 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 70% of whom were women and children. Meanwhile, the Israeli death toll stands at about 1,200. 

Immediately following October 7th, the United States predictably offered Israel — its client state — unconditional support. Soon thereafter, they expanded the gesture by offering military contributions and punishing domestic dissent. In contrast, the American public has largely opposed their government’s pro-Israel posture. An estimated 300,000 protesters marched on Washington in support of Palestine last month. The event featured speakers such as writer Mohammed El-Kurd, musician Macklemore, and lawyer Noura Erakat. It brought together groups from 22 states including California, Illinois, and New Jersey. Two of the largest labor unions in the country — the United Auto Workers and the American Postal Workers Union — have voiced their support for a ceasefire in the region.

Waves of pro-Palestine advocacy have overtaken social media, much to the chagrin of executives and algorithmic gatekeepers. Popular methods of demonstrating solidarity also include calling, emailing, and faxing politicians, donating to pro-Palestine organizations and humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, boycotting pro-Israel companies, and attending protests and direct actions such as strikes and walkouts. These tactics have all made major headway in nurturing a greater collective consciousness in the United States that supports the Palestinian cause and feels evermore compelled to apply liberatory praxis wherever systemic oppression rears its hegemonic head.

Meanwhile, the situation in Gaza worsens by the hour. The twice-renewed humanitarian pause that began on November 24th ended on December 1st, doing little to ameliorate the displacement, destruction, and brutality that Israel has subjected Gazans to for over two months now. The moment demands an additional layer of action on the part of comrades living outside the occupied territories. Beyond the more traditional forms of activism, we must also embody the organizer spirit in our daily lives. In other words, allies of the Palestinian cause must view our various social relationships and networks as breeding grounds for heightened awareness and collective action. 

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Individualized actions done in unison may spark a wave. But organized actions done in community build a tide. As agents in this transformational moment, we now have a responsibility — to our Palestinian comrades and to ourselves — to organize our immediate surroundings, ensuring that no stone goes unturned. Workplaces, friend groups, family units, neighborhoods, and the like all provide pre-established groupings within which communal awareness and collective action can grow. Beginning with the most promising group, the first step is to start organizational conversations with fellow group members.

These interactions can take many forms, such as further publicizing one’s support for Palestine, pushing back against pro-Israel rhetoric and apologia, wearing clothing that physically depicts solidarity with the Palestinian cause (e.g., keffiyeh), etc. But, generally speaking, the aim is to establish an accurate conception of the individual’s stance on the issue in question, making sure to note any potential gaps in knowledge or qualities that stand out as particularly ripe for agitation. These gaps may include an ignorance of Palestinian history, American ties to Israel, or Israeli ties to imperialist efforts abroad. Ripe points of agitation may include intersecting issues (e.g., the role of co-opted queer liberatory rhetoric in Israeli propaganda), points of reference (e.g., Israeli settler-colonialism as compared to its American counterpart), or personally relatable phenomena (e.g., labor exploitation as seen in both the occupied territories and the United States political economy).

Such efforts will provide a clear portrait of the group’s relationship to said issue. With this layout in mind, subsequent organizing conversations and broader discussions of majority opinion can begin. The hope is that, as this process unfolds, group consciousness will gradually increase, previously unaddressed imperatives will become glaringly obvious, and collective action will inevitably form. From here, discussions to determine group-wide initiatives will become ever more commonplace, until they eventually culminate in a collective decision to pursue a democratically agreed-upon program. 

This organizational method embodies the full meaning of collective action where the reach of individualized initiatives falls short. It penetrates our existence as atomized subjects of imperial capitalism by forcing a collectivization of ideology, commitment, and praxis. It also creates a sociopolitical infrastructure through which we can continue to wield collective action going forward, whether it be for Palestine or for any other issue.

The engagement with the Palestinian cause we’ve seen from Americans in the last couple of months most definitely comprises a host of noteworthy waves, many of which have significantly toppled political affiliations and institutional prestige across sectors. But, now, only the embodiment of an organizational spirit by each and every one of us will do the work of constructing a tide — one that may just push us over the revolutionary edge into a world where Palestine is free, from the river to the sea. 

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Salma Hamamy is a Palestinian student-activist and the president of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Michigan, known as Students Allied for Freedom and Equality.

The Mask Has Slipped. Don't Let Them Put It Back On.

By Harry Z

In December 1964, in a fiery speech to the United Nations, Che Guevara undressed the hypocrisy of those who were attempting (unsuccessfully) to overthrow the Cuban Revolution: 

‘Western civilization’ disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals … it must be clearly established that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression of the peoples of the world, and of a large part of its own population.

James Baldwin echoed Che, just a few years later:

All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

The zionist assault on Palestine has once again exposed the dark underbelly of the west’s so-called free and democratic values. Their cynical idealism melts into hypocrisy with each American-made missile that obliterates a Palestinian neighborhood.

This hypocrisy proclaims the importance of the press while massacring scores of Palestinian journalists; extolls sovereignty in Ukraine while arming settlers in Israel; opportunistically “defends” women's rights in Afghanistan while bombing schools and hospitals in Gaza; cynically vetoes ceasefire resolutions supported by the vast majority of the world while supporting those who openly proclaim their desire to erase the Palestinian people from history.

The same self-righteous liberals who dutifully cheer on wars of aggression, from Iraq to Grenada, under the pretense of ”defending democratic values” — the same Americans who celebrate the slavers and perpetrators of a genocide who fought the British in a “Revolutionary War” — these hypocrites chastise the Palestinian people for resisting extermination with a revolutionary counter-violence of their own.

In their surrealist calculus, mass theft of land, concentration camp conditions, kidnapping and torture of political dissidents — these are valid, state-sanctioned violences.

But to throw a rock at a tank, to kill a settler, to dare protect your own dignity and humanity with violence of your own — that is terrorism.

A Yemeni blockade in support of a people on the brink of extermination is an unacceptable violation of international law, a terroristic campaign — yet the decades-long, murderously cruel blockades imposed on Cuba and Gaza, against the will of nearly all nations on earth, are barely worth a mention.

In these moments of heightened political consciousness, the empire stands naked, cowed, on trial before the world’s watchful masses. The stubbornness of the resistance brings an anxious sweat to their brow, the weight of a thousand genocidal lies forces their head to bow, and once again the mask slips.

In June of 2020, the empire and its domestic foot soldiers, the police, were similarly unable to hide behind their usual pretenses. In the face of a mass uprising which threatened their very existence, the police could only respond by brutalizing, kidnapping and denigrating the very people they claim to “protect and serve.” For a brief moment, it was eminently clear to all pragmatic observers that the police were not acting out — they were fulfilling their function, as they always have, of protecting capitalist property and disciplining the poor and racialized populations who resist the quotidian (and spectacular) horrors of racial capitalism.

But while it burned bright, this moment of radical possibility was crushed, co-opted and liberalized almost immediately. Five months after George Floyd was lynched by the state, millions of the same people who flooded the streets in June took to the polls to vote for one of the chief architects of mass incarceration and the war on drugs. The revolutionary horizon of abolition, initially propelled by the justified rage of the Black masses, was sanitized and co-opted by liberal politicians, artists and opportunists. Corporate diversity seminars and police “reform” bills took center stage. In most places, police budgets increased after the uprising.

Similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI and local police departments mobilized in a previously unheard of manner to infiltrate and sabotage Black and brown revolutionary organizations — and to kidnap, torture, harass, stalk and assassinate their leaders. It’s always telling which movements face the most severe state repression, for those are the movements which threaten the very foundations of empire. 

These organizations posed an existential threat — as Hoover famously wrote, “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country” — not only because of their commitment to domestic revolutionary practice, but because they viewed their work as deeply interconnected with the global third world struggle against imperialism. They understood that the capitalist and colonial imperatives which cripple the dreams and life chances of poor, racialized communities in the United States are the same forces which maintain apartheid states like Israel. The violent techniques of repression and eviction we’ve witnessed in Sheikh Jarrah and in the West Bank settlements are the same forces (police and property) viciously gentrifying our cities. Palestinians and Black Americans are victims of the same fascist techniques of police brutality, torture and incarceration. It’s no accident that revolutionaries like George Jackson found inspiration and common cause with the Palestinian struggle.

To make these connections and to organize on their basis is to strike at the very foundations of empire. When the leaders of the Black power movement aligned themselves with the leaders of socialist anti-colonial struggles across the Americas, Africa and Asia, they marked themselves for destruction. Faced with this existential threat, the US police state did not hesitate to reveal its fascistic character.

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In both of these moments, the mask slipped. The state could not hide its true function as the violent organizing institution of racial capitalism.

But, due to a combination of factors, chiefly state repression and careful ideological maneuvering, the mask was re-made — often incorporating crass representation of the groups it sought to repress and shallow nods to the symbolism of the movements it had just ruthlessly crushed — and donned once more. Black power came to be more closely associated with Black capitalism than revolutionary political practice. Nixon invoked the specter of Black nationalism and communism to rally southern whites around his revanchist political project. As Fred Hampton’s blood stiffened in his mattress, the long arc of neoliberalism, white power and mass incarceration took its vengeance. 

Armed with this history, we confirm that the death cult of empire is irreconcilable with our dreams of a just world. Its lofty ideals are no more than a charade, its claims to world leadership as fragile as Henry Kissinger’s rotting skeleton. 

With every stone, bullet and improvised bomb that the Palestinians hurl back at the occupying forces, with every market in Gaza that defiantly opens in the brief moments of quiet, with every doctor that works in the dark, against impossible odds, bandaging and stitching and mending while the occupation closes in, with every child that draws breath, in defiance of the wishes of the most powerful armies on earth —

With their humanity, their naked, honest humanity, the Palestinian people confirm that they — not the blood-soaked bureaucrats in Washington, nor the shameless journalists at the oh-so-revered New York Times, nor the murderous foot soldiers of global capitalism at NATO — are the true humanists, the real “leaders of the free world.” 

In Gaza, the empire faces its gravediggers.

And in each act of the resistance, a new world is born, kicking and screaming, fragile yet determined, beyond doubt, to survive. We don’t know what shape this world will take, or when it will mature, but we know that it will not emerge from Washington, London or Tel Aviv. Our new world will be nursed at a thousand sites of resistance, fed with the fruits of our labor which once swoll the bellies of our blood-sucking bosses, raised by freedom fighters in every corner of the world.

We owe it to the struggling masses of Palestine, of the Congo, of those in a thousand sites of resistance to the long tentacles of the US empire — and we owe it ourselves, to our domestic struggles for liberation — to never let those hyenas and jackals hide behind their false humanism again.

Before the forces of liberalism capture this moment, we must concretize our ideology, and hammer home that there is no reforming this beast which we are uniquely positioned to destroy. There is no humanistic mission to the US empire. There are no “mistakes” as we so often call our genocidal ventures into Vietnam or Iraq. 

To paraphrase the great Du Bois: This is not the United States gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is the United States; this is the real soul of empire — naked, drenched in blood, built by blood money; honest, for once.

The empire’s actions in Gaza are not tragedies or missteps but rather the predictable and historically consistent behavior of empire, from Wounded Knee to Jakarta, from My Lai to Attica — and with a Democratic president and “socialist” legislators in virtual lockstep with Israel’s genocide, we would be remarkably naive to pretend that the institutions of empire possess any capacity for reform. 

As just one example: we cannot return to a world in which The New York Times is regarded as the unbiased paper of record. The zionist mythology is nurtured and legitimized in their pages: the colonizer morphed into the victim, the colonized morphed into, at best, a historyless people, and at worst, a nation of terrorists. The ongoing Nakba — that ethnic cleansing by the Zionists, that cataclysm for the Palestinian people — erased from history, replaced with a collective amnesia about the violent foundations and maintenance of the Israeli state. And it doesn’t stop there:

From Korea and Guatemala in the 1950s, to Vietnam and Indonesia in the 60s, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile and Grenada in the 70s and 80s, Iraq, Afghanistan and the former USSR in the 90s and 2000s, Libya and Yemen in the 2010s — that deified rag has consistently ginned up support for US aggression and justified the tremendous violence we inflict on the rest of the world — crusade-like, in the name of anti-communism, democracy, human rights, “American interests” or whatever smoke screen our leaders and their loyal accomplices in the press concoct to distract us from the violence’s true function: the disciplining arm of global imperialism, the massacres, rivers of blood, tortures, loyally installed fascist dictators, carefully trained death squads, psychological warfare and sexual violence which puts anti-colonial, anti-capitalist movements to the sword for daring to challenge the profits and hegemony of Western multinational corporations.

These understandings have serious tactical implications. Our tactics must not, cannot stop with politicking and marches. As we have learned — including through the example of the Yemeni blockade — the cold heart of capitalist empire responds only to organized, frontal attacks on its economic organs and central nervous system. 

We cannot shame empire into a humanism it has never and will never possess. We cannot appeal to the conscience of a state which has none.

But we are uniquely positioned to strike at the soft underbelly of the beast. Israeli bombs, guns and tanks are designed by American engineers, who are trained in our schools and universities. These weapons are built by American workers, with American tax dollars, shipped through American ports and accrue huge profits to American capitalists. America’s vampiric financial institutions — Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, namely — provide the blood money which fuels the US-Israeli war machine. It goes without saying that the Israeli Occupation Forces maintain bone-deep ties to both local American police forces and national intelligence agencies.. If we aren’t positioned to resist the American transnational war machine, who is? Our capacity to resist is a question of will, not opportunity.

And if we are to resist, if we are to truly call ourselves anti-imperialists, freedom fighters, workers and tenants and students in solidarity with the peoples of the third world — whatever our lofty aspirations may be — that must mean, we must accept, that we are not working to reform empire — we are at war with it.

The United States, as we know it, must die for the world to live.

Muddled Interventions: Haiti, the UN, and Resolution 2699

By Binoy Kampmark

A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling natural disasters, tells a sad tale of the crippled Haitian state. Haiti’s political existence is the stuff and stuffing of pornographic violence, the crutch upon which moralists can always point to as the end — doom and despair that needs change. Every conundrum needs its intrusive deliverer, even though that deliverer is bound to make things worse.

Lately, those stale themes have now percolated through the corridors of the United Nations to renewed interest. The staleness is evident in the menu: servings of failed state canapes; vicious, murderous, raping, pillaging gangs as the mains; collapse of civic institutions as the dessert. It’s the sort of menu to rile and aggravate any mission or charity. 

Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, the constant theme in reporting from Haiti is that of rampant, freely operating gangs. Sophie Hills, a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, offered this description last October:

“Armed gangs have immobilized the capital, Port-au-Prince, shutting down the already troubled economy and creating fear among citizens to even walk the streets.”

October 23rd, 2023, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, reported to the Security Council that the situation had continued “to deteriorate as growing gang violence plunge[s] the lives of the people of Haiti into disarray and major crimes are rising sharply to new record highs.” These included killings and sexual violence — the latter marked by instances of rape and mutilation.  

To further complexify the situation, vigilante groups such as the “Bwa Kale” movement have responded with lynchings (395 alleged gang members are said to have perished in that gruesome way between April 24th and September 30th).  

Moïse’s opportunistic replacement, Ariel Henry, has served as acting prime minister, persistently calling for foreign intervention to right the worn vessel he is steering into a sunset oblivion. The last presidential election was in 2016, but Henry has opted not to schedule another, preferring the bureaucratic formula of a High Transition Council (HTC) tasked with eventually achieving that goal. When the announcement establishing the body was made in February, Henry loftily claimed that this was “the beginning of the end of dysfunction in our democratic institutions.” 

That rhetoric has not translated into credible change on the ground. The contempt for the HTC was when gang members posing as cops kidnapped its Secretary General.

In September, Henry addressed the United Nations hoping to add some mettle to the Haitian National Police, urging the Security Council to adopt measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to “authorize the deployment of a multinational support mission to underpin the security of Haiti.”

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The measure can be read as a stalling measure to keep Henry and his Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK) ensconced by using an external intervention to shore up a shaky regime. This is certainly the view of the National Haitian-American Elected Officials Network (NHAEON) and the Family Action Network Movement (FANM). In their September letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the organizations warned that “[a]ny military intervention supporting Haiti’s corrupt, repressive, unelected regime will likely exacerbate the current political crisis to a catastrophic one.” The move would “further entrench the regime, deepening Haiti’s political crisis while generating significant civilian casualties and migration pressure.” 

In its eternal wisdom, the United Nations Security Council felt that an intervention force consisting of Kenyan police, supplemented by assistance from other states, would be required for this mission. Resolution 2699, establishing a Multinational Security Support Mission led by Kenya, received a vote of 13 in favor, with Russia and China abstaining, citing traditional concerns about Chapter VII’s scope in permitting the use of force. “In previous practices,” remarked Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, “there have been precedents of abusing Chapter VII authorization.”

Resolution 2699 would entail a co-deployment with Haitian personnel who have melted before the marauding gangs. Thus, in the words of Mark Twain, history continues to rhyme (the US occupation, 1915–1934 and the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti [MINUSTAH] from 2004–2017).  

Armed gangs feature as a demonic presence in United Nations deliberations, regularly paired with such opaque terms as “a multidimensional crisis.” It is telling that the cliché reasons for that crisis never focus on how the gang phenomenon took root — not least those mouldering state institutions that have failed to protect the populace. Little wonder then that the Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia felt sending in armed elements was “an extreme measure” that unnecessarily invoked the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations.

Undeterred by such views, the United States representative Jeffrey Delaurentis noted that the mission would require the “inclusion of dedicated expertise in anti-gang operations, community-oriented policing, and children and women’s protection.” That Washington approved the measure can be put down to endorsing a policy which might discourage — if only in the short term — the arrival of Haitian asylum seekers which have been turned away en masse.  

Despite claiming a different tack from his predecessor in approaching the troubled Caribbean state, President Biden has sought to restrict the influx of Haitian applications using, for instance, Title 42 — a Trump policy put in place to deport individuals who pose a COVID risk, despite any asylum credentials they might have. Within 12 months, the Biden administration expelled more than 20,000 Haitians — or as many as the past three presidents combined.

Resolution 2699 also suffers from another glaring flaw. Kenya’s dominant contribution to the exercise has raised searching questions back home. Opposition politician Ekuru Aukot, himself a lawyer who had aided in drafting Kenya’s revised 2010 constitution, saw no legal basis for the government to authorize the Haitian deployment. In his view, the deployment was unconstitutional, lacking any legal backbone.  

In granting Aukot an interim injunction, this point was considered by the Nairobi High Court worthy of resolution. Judge Enock Mwita was “satisfied that the application and petition raise[d] substantial issues of national importance and public interest and require[d] urgent consideration.” The judge accordingly issued a conservatory order “restraining the respondents from deploying police officers to Haiti or any other country until 24th October 2023.”  

On October 24th, Judge Mwita extended the duration of the interim order until November 9th, when an open session is scheduled for the petition to be argued. “This court became seized of this matter earlier than everyone else and it would not make sense for it to set aside or allow the interim orders to lapse.” The whole operation risks being scuttled even before it sets sail.  

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. You can email him at bkampmark@gmail.com.

The History Behind the So-called "Israel-Hamas War"

(Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

By Dylan Jones

Where we start a narrative makes a big difference. If we start the narrative on October 7th, when Palestinian resistance launched rockets into Israel, then it’s easier to justify a military response from Israel. However, is this an honest place to start telling the story from? What different conclusions would we draw if we started the story from 75 years ago? Or thousands of years ago? Starting the narrative in a different place by adding historical context allows us to understand the obstacles to everyone's liberation in this situation.

First, I would like to acknowledge that there is no doubt important Jewish cultural and spiritual ties to Palestine. And indeed, before Israel was founded there were many Jews living peacefully alongside Muslims and Christians in Palestine. Palestinians have lived there since time immemorial, with genetic ties going back to the Canaanites[1]; they have social, cultural, and spiritual ties to the land. In this way, Palestinians are indigenous to the land. This is not to say that non-Palestinian Jews are not also Indigenous to Palestine, a question which I will show has absolutely no bearing on the current situation. An Indigenous person from a given area can also act as a colonizer/settler under the conditions of a settler colonial nation state such as Israel. This becomes clear when we analyze the last 75 years— since Israel’s founding.

The modern state of Israel has its roots in Western colonialism. Theodore Herzl in the 1800s defined the goal of today’s zionism, to create a home for white Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. He decided it could be in Argentina, Uganda, or Palestine. At this time, Britain controlled Palestine as a colony and, under the Balfour Declaration (1917), it promised an area of Palestine to the zionists in order to quell anti-semitism in Europe. Palestinians had no say in this decision. As tensions heightened due to Israeli settlers converging in Palestine and inevitably seizing property from its inhabitants, the U.N. announced a partition plan in 1947 which would designate over half of Palestine to establish the nation state of Israel. When Palestinians rejected the plan, Israel committed genocide to take it by force. In what is called the Nakba, Israeli military forces and vigilante settlers murdered 15,000 Palestinians overnight, displaced 850,000 people, and destroyed 550 villages. After this initial genocidal campaign, Israel took even more land than it was promised in the UN partition plan. To this day, Israel actively prevents those it displaced from returning. Israel meets protests asserting the right to return with violence.

Since the Nakba, over the course of decades, Israel has consistently evicted more Palestinians from their land, forcefully displacing families and entire communities. It arbitrarily imprisons Palestinians, including children. It has developed an apartheid system that denies basic human rights to Palestinians. There are policies of environmental racism such as not allowing Palestinians to drill for well water and spraying herbicide on Palestinian farms to destroy their sources of food and economic livelihood. This is state terrorism. This is a settler colonial state in operation. Israel is displacing, invading, ethnically cleansing Palestinians, and occupying more and more of Palestine in order to replace the existing society with its own.

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Israel regularly bombs Palestine, hardly warranting a few articles in mainstream news. But when the rockets launched on October 7th, mainstream news immediately stated condemnation. When a white Israeli citizen dies, it is news. When an Israeli bomb severs a Palestinian child’s head from their body, it is normal; we can immediately jump to justifications. Similar to its response to other Palestinian resistance, Israel is using October 7th to justify a second genocide, a second Nakba. Since October 7th, Israel has murdered more than 15,000 Palestinians, over 6,000 children, and over 4,000 women. They have blocked water and food. They have bombed schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. Israel has hundreds of child hostages but has the power to define them as prisoners. There are around 10,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel. Every hour, Israel drops 42 bombs and half of the population of Gaza is children.

According to Israeli officials themselves, the goal is not to hunt down Hamas but rather to seize this opportunity to murder and displace Palestinians living on the land Israel would like for its own. Netanyahu himself says “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy bible, we do remember,” referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites in scripture. This references a call to exterminate the entire population of Amalekites—every man, woman, child, and piece of property.[2] A former Israeli intelligence chief, Rami Igra on CNN said, “the non-combatant population in the Gaza strip is really a nonexistent term. All of Gaza voted for Hamas and as we have seen on the 7th of October most of the population in Gaza strip are Hamas”.[3] Imagine if the same outrageous claim were made about Israelis having voted for Netanyahu. The Israeli Minister of Agriculture, Avi Dichter announces, “we are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” “Gaza Nakba 2023”.[4] In this way, Israeli officials are clear that the intention is not to hunt down Hamas, it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Despite how clearly Israeli officials admit genocide and ethnic cleansing, western media still focuses on the “hunt for Hamas” narrative. We must reject this narrative and when we are asked to condemn Hamas, we should say instead…

Israel—as a terrorist, settler colonial nation state—is dependent on violence against Palestinians and it thereby jeopardizes the health and safety of its own inhabitants, rather than protecting them. It supposes that one people’s self-determination, rights, and lives have to come at the expense of others. Among Zionists goals are creating a safe space for Jewish people and creating a relationship with an important spiritual place to Jewish people living around the world. There are peaceful ways to do this that respect the existing Palestinian society. Establishing the theocratic settler colonial ethnostate of Israel erases Palestinian society. Therefore, the dismantling of zionism is the only truly just and safe path for Palestinians and Jews. If the Palestinian resistance stops its resistance, Israel will only continue its occupation, annexing more land, extra-judicially imprisoning Palestinians—including children (read: taking as hostages), and bombing Gaza. This characterizes life under the boot of Israel since it was founded. This does not advocate violent resistance as the only option, but points out that the root of all the violence rests clearly with the settler colonial state of Israel. Free Palestine is not a cry for retribution. It does not advocate violence against Israelis. Free Palestine means dismantling the social and political project of zionism and moving toward liberation for everyone.

I believe most people have wondered what they would have done during the holocaust when Nazi Germany slaughtered millions of Jews, Romanis, Sintis, people with disabilities, and others. I say emphatically you do not have to wonder what you would have done. What you would have done is what you’re doing right now for Palestinians living in Israel’s death camps. Attend and/or uplift: rallies for a permanent ceasefire, vigils, assembly meetings, sit-ins, and shutdowns. Call legislators and demand a ceasefire. Advocate for Palestine among your friends and family. Whether we would like to be activists or not, our tax dollars are funding the bombs eviscerating Palestinian people. At a moral bare minimum, we are called to be activists now. I do not believe I would have come to support Palestine if it were not for the values for love and kindness that my family and friends taught me. Now I call on all my friends and family to live out these values. Long live Palestine! Long live Gaza! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Notes

[1] https://www.brown.uk.com/teaching/HEST5001/Palestinians.pdf

[2]https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics

[3]https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/anderson-cooper-360/episodes/d61ee373-605b-4ec4-82dd-b0a9001d97a9

[4]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israels-far-right-palestinian-fears-hamas-war-rcna123909

When Economists Shut Off Your Water

By Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, Somo Abdi, and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah

Republished from Africa Is A Country.

The following account is based on ethnographic research that Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, and Somo Abdi conducted in Kayole Soweto, Nairobi in 2022.

In August 2020, people all over the development world started talking about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of results from a development randomized controlled trial (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto—a relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi—to pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.

There’s no doubt that water is a problem in Nairobi. As Elizabeth Wamuchiru tells us, the water system in the city has a built-in spatial inequality inherited from the British colonial era. Visitors to the city can readily see the differences between the cool, leafy, green neighborhoods of Kilimani and Lavington—segregated white neighborhoods under colonialism, now home to rich Kenyans, foreigners, and NGOs—and the gray and dusty tin-roof neighborhoods of Mathare, Kibera, Mukuru, and Kayole, home to the lower-income Kenyans excluded from Nairobi’s prosperity.

Today’s water system reflects this history of inequality. Nairobi’s water is harnessed from a combination of surface and groundwater sources; however, the city’s groundwater is naturally salty and very high in fluoride. Piped water systems, provided to upper- and middle-income housing estates, do not exist in the vast bulk of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where people must instead buy water from vendors—often salty water pumped from boreholes, or siphoned off from city pipes through rickety connections that are frequently contaminated with sewage. In the richer neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company, a public utility, sells relatively clean piped surface water for a fraction of the price paid by poorer Nairobians—a disparity that research has shown to often be the case in other cities in the global South. As the Mathare Social Justice Centre puts it, in poorer neighborhoods such as Kayole-Soweto, “water provision costs more, is less safe, and is less consistent than in other richer parts of the city.”

Researcher Irene Nduta in Kayole-Soweto.

Nairobi’s waterscape has remained opaque to its planners and administrators as well as its residents—both the elite that occupy the planned leafy suburbs of the city, and the urban underclass that lives on the fringes in a perennial survival mode. And while the city has witnessed major developments to improve access and quality of water, some approaches have only ended up reinforcing the economic inequalities in Nairobi’s waterscape. Such developments have often entailed technologies that are inappropriate for the context, “cut and paste” approaches to solving global South problems, and, in many cases, financing models that are covertly anti-poor.

The World Bank’s water project in Kayole-Soweto was a great example of these problems. Between 2016 and 2018, the World Bank and Nairobi Water Company implemented a project to build piped water and sewage connections in Kayole-Soweto among several other lower-income neighborhoods in Nairobi.

The project design was driven by the kind of “neoliberalism lite” that characterizes the Millenium Development Goals-era World Bank. The project’s water connections would be paid for only in part by World Bank grants. The rest of the cost would be borne by users, who would take out loans of $315 USD per connection, payable over five years at an interest rate of 19%. Each property would get a single connection, with a water tap and a flushing toilet. Under a program called Jisomee Mita (“read your own meter”), water meters would be digital, and billing payment can be made digitally via mobile phone. The project was framed as a “magic bullet” that not only embraced the supposed advantages of digitized systems, but also provided a financial model purportedly tailored to the needs of the poor of Kayole-Soweto.

As people in Kayole-Soweto told us, the project was plagued with problems right from the onset (some of these problems are even described in the World Bank’s own 2019 project evaluation). The water supply pipes were supposed to be buried several meters under the streets, but instead were scarcely buried below the surface of Soweto’s dirt roads, often allowing sewage to leak into the pipes. The sewage piping, which World Bank officials told community members would be eight inches in diameter, was instead four inches, thus resulting in constant blockages. No one was sure why implementation wasn’t done to the standard promised, but corruption was widely suspected.

One of the World Bank-built water lines running through sewage in Kayole-Soweto.

And, people told us, when trying to pay back their water connection loans, they found Nairobi Water Company’s billing and payment systems to be opaque at best and criminal at worst. One man told us: “I went and paid, but after paying it… I followed up on that payment, and… I was told that I haven’t paid this money. And I went back [and] I paid for it again. And that’s how I lost [Ksh] 4,900” (about $42 USD). Receipts are nonexistent; statements are nonexistent; people pay, and their money often simply disappears.

And while continuing to largely meet demand in the wealthier neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company has resorted to what it calls “micro-rationing” in Kayole-Soweto. Water is typically only piped in one day per week, for a few hours at a time. People will hurry to fill jerrycans of water for the week during these few hours—and if they’re at work when the water comes, then they’re out of luck. Often, Nairobi Water Company will pipe in salty borehole water instead of the clean water that residents were promised they’d receive. And, for many customers, water has stopped flowing entirely, for weeks, months, or even years at a time, with no explanation. But even in such cases, Nairobi Water Company still insists that people make payments on their water connection loans—paying down their debt for a connection that provides them with no water. “Unalipia hewa,” one man told us—“you pay for air.”

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The RCT: adding insult to injury

In 2018, two American development economists, Paul Gertler and Sebastian Galiani, started a randomized controlled trial (RCT) aimed at “improving revenue collection efficiency” on the debt that property owners owed on these water connection loans in Kayole-Soweto. Their argument: the problem with water supply in Kayole-Soweto isn’t any of the problems that we described above. The problem is simply that property owners aren’t paying their water bills, thus undermining Nairobi Water Company’s revenue and preventing them from supplying water. (Our finding was the exact reverse: many people stopped making payments on their connection loans out of frustration at water that flowed only a few hours one day per week, if at all.)

In order to test a punitive method for fixing this problem, these two economists turned to an RCT. The RCT, a popular method in development economics for the last two decades, is used to test a development intervention by (1) randomly dividing people into “treatment” and “control” groups; (2) giving some “treatment” to the first group, while withholding it from the second; and (3) measuring the difference in outcomes. While pioneers of the method were rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, critics are wary of the idea of development economists experimenting on the poor.

In this case, the economists, working with Nairobi Water Company and the World Bank, identified customers who were behind on their water connection loan payments, divided these randomly into treatment and control groups, and disconnected the water at treatment properties, but not at control properties. They found that disconnecting people’s water had a large positive impact on repayment rates (as one person put it during the Twitter controversy: “uh, duh?”). This is rigorous proof, they argue, that water disconnections can help improve a water utility’s revenue enforcement. The authors of this experiment don’t mention the myriad problems with Nairobi Water Company or with Nairobi’s water system more generally.

A map from the publication reporting this RCT’s results, showing how households in Kayole-Soweto were randomly assigned to “treatment” or “control” groups.

Now, let’s unpack this a bit. This experiment would have been ethically dubious in a context in which water service was working perfectly. This experiment is that much more ethically bankrupt in a context in which the water system is as woefully dysfunctional as it is in Kayole-Soweto. Just to give one example of the ethical acrobatics in the economists’ publication describing this project: research guidelines in the US, where both of these development economists hold professorships, dictate that research subjects are supposed to consent to participation in any research, let alone an experiment. The authors tell us that tenants whose water was disconnected had in effect pre-consented to disconnection by the fact of having signed a contract to get the water connection loan in which it is written that your water will be disconnected if you fail to pay. This very “thin” understanding of consent ignores the question of obtaining consent to participate in the experiment—and it also doesn’t apply to the tenants living at these properties, who never signed any such contract, and who also lost their water.

We told several property owners whose water was shut off during the experiment that the economists who ran this experiment said in their publication that the experiment didn’t cause any harm to these research subjects. (It’s important to note that most of these property owners aren’t rich—most of the property owners we talked to live in a slightly nicer unit alongside their tenants.) Matthew, a property owner we interviewed, told us how, when his property’s water was disconnected, several people living at his property—a disabled woman, as well his own 95-year-old grandmother—were forced into the indignity of defecating in basins, which his wife would dump in the Ngong River. Another property owner, Kelvin, told us simply, “We don’t have water and water is life. So, how can you say it doesn’t harm anyone, how, how?”

What can we learn from this?

Water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. Into this unjust context came, first, the World Bank, with a neoliberal project plan emphasizing “cost-sharing,” and with a naive and misplaced trust in the ability of Nairobi Water Company to carry out this project fairly; and, second, two development economists, who were willing to treat poor Sowetans like guinea pigs, and who simply took Nairobi Water Company at their word when the company said that the only problem with water in Kayole-Soweto was that people weren’t paying their bills. Were these just scare tactics to squeeze residents into paying for a service they deemed unreliable? Was this a question of the ugly side of a capitalist market model that is insensitive to the plight of the poor and continues to disinherit them of their right to the city?

The World Bank has, since 2000, stepped back from the stringent structural adjustment plans that the Bank imposed on one African nation after another in the 1980s and 1990s. They now tend to focus their energies on projects like this one, often implemented together with African governments, and often focused on enhancing state capacity to fill its citizens’ basic needs. But the neoliberal ideology, while toned down, is still there: the Bank’s insistence that users pay a large share of the water connection cost, via a private bank loan, is characteristic of this new and more subtle neoliberalism.

In relation to experimentation, and development RCTs, there’s something scary about the degree of power that Western academics can exercise over poor people in places like Kayole-Soweto. To be clear, we aren’t saying that this experiment is typical of development RCTs. In our research, we found this water disconnection RCT to be a very extreme example; most RCTs are conducted with fairly or even very good ethical practices. What this experiment shows, though, is that if a foreign researcher wants to carry out an unethical RCT in a place like Kenya, they can. Existing ethical safeguards are obviously not working.

In finding a way forward for the World Bank’s water project in Kayole-Soweto, we must defer to the demands of the Sowetans we met and interviewed. Repeatedly, they told us that they were very willing to pay for water—if that water service worked, and worked consistently. They told us that they wanted the World Bank to return to the community, to hold meetings with community members, and, with their input, to rebuild the water and sewage infrastructure in Kayole-Soweto to a proper standard. We believe that the World Bank owes this to the people of Kayole-Soweto.

As for the economists and others running RCTs in Kenya, the existing system of ethical safeguards clearly failed the people of Kayole-Soweto. We will set aside the argument that experiments conducted by global North researchers on poor people in the global South should not happen at all. The fallout from this experiment has led to suggestions for reforms to the research approval, funding, and publication processes, in order to ensure that ethical principles are actually followed. Echoing these suggestions, we would encourage actors in this research space to introduce mechanisms to ensure that safeguards are not optional but rather mandatory. And we believe that there should be an ethical mandate of genuine “equipoise” in development RCTs: researchers should be genuinely uncertain whether the “treatment” or the “control” is better for the research subjects. (In the experiment in Kayole-Soweto, that was obviously not the case.)

Finally, the Nairobi County government is currently debating a bill that could privatize Nairobi Water Company. We believe that privatization is not the solution for water in Nairobi. In the Kenyan health care system, for example, we have consistently learned that privatization does not serve the poor. Past examples of water privatization—in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the late 1990s and, closer to home, in Dar es Salaam in the 2000s—ended in complete failure. We strongly believe that reform and democratized governance—not privatization—of Nairobi Water Company should be part of the way forward. And in the context of the ongoing crisis over the escalating cost of living, we believe strongly that a privatized water company will be that much less likely to ensure that water is affordable (if not free) for even the poorest Nairobians. Water justice, as enshrined in Kenya’s 2010 constitution, must be made a reality for poor people living in precarious urban neighborhoods like Kayole-Soweto. We echo the words of Mathare Social Justice Center: “maji ni uhai, maji ni haki”—water is life, water is a right.

Adrian Wilson is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Faith Kasina is a community activist with the Kayole Community Justice Centre.

Irene Nduta is a community activist with the Kayole Community Justice Centre.

Jethron Ayumbah Akallah is a lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Maseno University.

Force Breeds Counterforce: On the Legitimacy of Resistance and its Methods

By Youssef Shawky

The widespread saying “to throw Israel into the sea” resonates with critics before advocates, and despite its unreasonableness in light of the current circumstances and arrangements, it carries within it a legitimate and logical right because Israel, since it has been invented, has been the one who always wants to throw the Palestinians into the sea. It seizes their land by implementing a depopulatory/substitutionary settler colonialism supported by a racist, religious ideology. As a result, resistance with a religious inclination is not only legitimate, but also a necessity in light of the cultural and historical characteristics of the Arab peoples and the ideological methods used by the occupation.

There is no escape from ideology; As it is the standard that classifies things and gives them different definitions and meanings. Humans, throughout their lives, indirectly interact with “reality,” resulting in a world of their own. That world is not the real world, but rather a world within which two types of relationships merge: imaginary relationships and real ones. If the individual is the first party in those relationships, the second party is the real material conditions of existence, which in turn consist of forces and relations of production, class, political and national power balances, etc. Thus, ideology is the expression of the relationship between the individual and her “world.”

Louis Althusser wrote that ideology is an imaginary representation of the imaginary relationships that a person gets into with the real conditions of her existence. Ideology is not an illusion, or a negative false consciousness, rather it effectively engages with real conditions.

This affirms that each conflicting party in any society formulates its own ideology in a way that serves the interests of the party in its conflict with the rest of the parties. The capitalists have their ideology, just as the proletariat has its ideology… and the two are in contradiction with each other. The same applies to the relationship of the colonizer with the colonized.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the explicit call for the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, or as the Zionist Finance Minister called, “dispersing them throughout the world,” has reminded many Arab writers of the term “depopulatory settler colonialism,” a colonialism which does not aim to exploit the local population in a system that appropriates surplus value and natural resources, as happened in South Africa and Algeria. Rather, it aims to seize the land of the indigenous people and displace or exterminate them to make space for settlers. Through this path, Zionist colonialism and the emergence of the State of Israel are similar to the emergence of the United States of America, with a clear historical difference that is not just several centuries separating the two events, but that Zionist colonialism occurred during the rise of national liberation movements, the awareness of the oppressed peoples about their rights including the Palestinian people, and the solidarity of the peoples of the Third World with them, especially the Arab peoples, who always emphasize the unity of their fate (and also their structural problems) with the fate of the Palestinian people. All of this created a strong ground for resistance, with which it is impossible for the fate of the Palestinians to be similar to that of native americans.

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The substitutionary nature of Zionist colonialism is the general framework within which the occupation operates from its beginning until now. It is the method that appears clearly in the defining moments in the history of the occupation. The first, of course, is the beginning of the Zionist gangs immigrating to Palestine and planning to gradually acquire the lands before eventually launching a war to establish a colonial state on 78% of Palestinian land. In 1967, the occupation adopted the method of displacement in the West Bank and the canal cities in Sinai and the Syrian Golan and, over the years, has gradually been fragmenting the West Bank with new settlements, aiming to finally annex it to the Jewish state.

This is what is happening today after the real threat that the occupation faced on October 7th. It is now trying to pressure the Palestinians of Gaza to migrate to Sinai or face the risk of genocide.

This does not cancel other frameworks of occupation that depend on the historical stage and the strategic goals implemented by the occupation towards the Palestinians and Arabs. There is an apartheid system within the occupied land of 1948, where the so-called “Israeli Arabs” are exploited and deprived of land and professional and social opportunities. There are also neo-colonial relations that include exploiting the natural resources of neighboring Arab countries and forcing them to open up to Israeli goods in a process of Unequal exchange through unfair economic agreements signed by local compradors.

As colonial methods diversify, ideologies accompanying them also diversify; from neoliberal ideology to pacification ones. This makes us wonder about the general ideology governing the course of occupation. Based on its depopulationary nature, this ideology is supposed to reject the existence of the Other, fundamentally. It does not just claim that the Other is less important or that she does not have the same rights, or is less intelligent, strong, civilized or beautiful...etc. All of this justifies subjecting the Other, exploiting her and denying her rights, but it does not stipulate the annihilation of the other or ending her existence. Rather, the “substitutionary ideology” necessarily rejects the existence of the Other because her existence constitutes a threat to the depopulationary entity.

The greatest representative of this tendency is the racist religious ideology that the Jewish state has espoused since its invention and is evident in all of its internal and external practices, laws, demographics, popular literature, daily conversations, and colonial ambitions, even in the state’s name, flag, and national anthem.

In fact, when Zionists kill Palestinians, they do not consciously believe that they are doing these actions “because they are substitutionary colonizers,” as this thought would reflect objective, concrete reality. They believe in something like: “We are defending our land, which is our right, based on the divine promise,” or “We are expanding our possession of more lands based on the same promise,” or “We must depopulate these Muslim Arabs who hate us so that we can protect ourselves” or that “we are God’s chosen people” and other religious racist ideas that are not just illusions but illusions that transform zionists into depopulatory colonizers.

While the diversification of colonial methods induce a parallel diversification in resistance methods, an armed resistance with military planning will always remain the most important and influential resistance. The other forms integrate with it, support it, and increase its strength and influence. When the general form of occupation is the genocidal substitutionary form that always and forever seeks displacement, settlement, and even mass murder, the only effective form of resistance to it is the military form.

Regarding the ideology of resistance, any party or group does not create its own ideology consciously and freely or choose from many alternatives. Rather, the ideology is formed simultaneously with the formation of the group. The nature and content of the ideology emerge due to several factors, the most important of which are the goals of the group, its cultural and social history, and the ideologies, goals, and strategies adopted by the surrounding groups (maybe conflicting ones). 

On this basis, we can understand why global Zionism has adopted Jewish racism as an ideological façade, and we can also understand the ideological nature of the resistance and its religious component. Just as substitutionary colonialism has a racist, religious face, it is not strange for the resistance to have a religious  “national liberation” face. This is not identity politics, as the religious aspect of the resistance did not discourage it from its liberation tasks, but rather an increased commitment to the tasks. The success of national liberation relies on formulating an ideology stemming from the characteristics and way of thinking of the resisting masses, and not in a condescending manner with imposing ideas on them, but rather by discovering the “special/local” way for the masses to be liberated so we, or they, can discover their own path of modernity.

This does not negate the attempts of islamists (originated from Al-Qaeda terrorist organization supported by US) to empty the Palestinian cause of its liberation content through the use of religion… but these attempts have so-far failed. The resistance axes, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, have engaged in armed conflicts with such Takfiri terrorists (ISIS, Al-Nusra Front, and Islamic State – Sinai Province). Hamas has officially separated from the Muslim Brotherhood since 2017 according to its charter, and much evidence supports that the religious-faced resistance has no relationship with political islamism, whatever its form.

Thus, the arab liberal intellectuals and some arab leftists who do not support the resistance under the pretext of its religious tendency suffer from a lack of understanding of the historical characteristics of their people, the way they think and feel, the time and manner of their movement and revolution, and the time of their latency and indifference. In doing so, many of them, who resemblr elitists rather than revolutionaries, play the role of cultural compradors hindering the organization of the Arab masses to liberate themselves from colonial and neo-colonial powers.

Building a Real Left: Not One That Condemns Resistance and is Without Palestinians

[Pictured: 500,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 4 for a historic march that recognized the Palestinian right to resist]

By Ben Becker

Republished from Liberation News.

We are eight weeks into the war in Gaza and into a protest movement that has swept the country demanding justice for Palestinians. It is remarkable how much the political environment has transformed in the United States in general, and within the U.S. left in particular on account of the mass mobilizations organized by genuine anti-imperialist forces, both inside the United States and around the world. An honest reflection must admit, however, that eight weeks ago, many of the liberal leftists and “progressives” were paralyzed, bending to the pressures of bourgeois opinion, practically abandoning the Palestinian cause, and reserving their sharpest vitriol for anti-imperialists rather than apartheid Israel. 

From the very start, anti-imperialists rallied to the side of Palestine and so were called apologists for terrorism by mayors, governors, the White House and liberal leftist publications in one united chorus. While for a moment that meant the real, anti-imperialist left was demonized, caricatured and written off as a marginalized fringe by the liberal leftist organizations and some prominent liberal “influencers,” two months later there is now a mass anti-war movement taking the streets every night with anti-imperialist politics at the very center, and it is the liberals who are isolated.

The spineless “plague on both your houses” position held by liberal leftists and “progressives” collapsed within a week as Israel began its genocidal bombing, and as the broad spectrum of left forces and Palestinians united to demand an end to the siege of Gaza and a ceasefire. But the initial awful reaction from big sections of ostensibly “left” commentators should not be forgotten, and in fact should be learned from. It reflects a recurring line of division that will likely reappear as Israel’s siege enters a new murderous stage, especially if Palestinians begin to strike back outside of Gaza. This division is not about ideological minutiae but a fundamentally different approach to the colonial question. It speaks directly to the question of what type of movement we aim to build — either one that is tethered to a section of the liberal bourgeoisie, and so vacillates alongside it, or one that seeks to build anti-imperialist politics among the working class and is oriented towards unity with the Global South.  

To review: Four days into the genocidal bombing and siege of Gaza, with a massive ground invasion pending, the West’s most prominent left-liberal intellectuals stood up and spoke out against … the leftists on the streets for Palestine. Naomi Klein, Michelle Goldberg, and other self-proclaimed “left” writers immediately joined the ruling-class mob howling at those who had dared to demonstrate in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and their resistance, in the days after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. They declared there can be no “credible” or “decent” left that does not condemn the tactics of the Palestinian resistance — and that by “valorizing terrorism, these voices on the left are effectively choosing to stop contending for power in a serious way.”

Goldberg proposed that the left should declare instead: “We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not to commit atrocities in Gaza.” The sentence is a marvel. The feelings of horror are reserved for the actions of Hamas — not Israel — while Israeli atrocities are presented passively, a potential thing of the future, which could be hopefully stopped by U.S. government “pressure.” Ignored are all the core questions: what about the longstanding Israeli atrocities and the fact that the United States has always facilitated and funded Israeli crimes? And what should the Palestinians do in the meantime? Apparently, anything but fight back.

For her part, Klein called for “An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.”

Sift through the poetics of this paragraph and this is essentially a call for the left to put equal distance from all the sides of the battle, so that it can achieve pure and unadulterated morality. How decent! Perhaps the Palestinians should lay down their arms entirely so the international left can keep our hands and reputations clean. Under this liberal position (using left phrases), it is fine to retain the moral and political position that Palestinians are in the right against occupation, but to be “consistent” this must be combined with a condemnation of Palestinians when they actually rise up against that occupation. This is nonsense: the “left” as an abstraction rather than a social force that accompanies the living struggles of our time and the real people fighting injustice. The true betrayal of left principles is to lapse into pure pacifism and abstract humanism so as to create distance from the oppressed.

That distance from the oppressed was made literal in the following days, when the protests with that political line were attended by shockingly few Palestinians and scarcely a Palestinian flag in sight. Meanwhile, the anti-imperialist forces who were so demonized and declared to not be “contending for power in a serious way” united a broad coalition rooted in the Palestinian and Arab community for the largest pro-Palestinian march in U.S. history, which was estimated at 500,000 people. That unity was not built by equivocating on the central issues of Palestinian self-determination, or pandering to the mood of the liberal bourgeoisie. Doing so would have not made the march bigger but actually doomed it. Instead, it put out a clear, unmistakable message that tapped into the mass mood of struggle and defiance felt by people of conscience from all communities. 

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Whatever initial isolation was necessary for anti-imperialists, the last month of mobilization has shown that a different type of broad unity can be built — not with bourgeois liberals — but by going directly to the base, and orienting to the majority sentiments of the Global South. Viewed from a global scale, it is the liberals who are isolated, and increasingly struggling to stay relevant. Look at the supposedly “decent” “left” represented by figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC: they have never been less relevant to the actual movement of history as now, when it counts the most. Sanders has stubbornly refused to even call for a ceasefire while AOC has scarcely been better – in two month’s time she has voiced support for the Iron Dome, then called for a ceasefire, and this week voted for a slanderous House resolution that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. 

Klein, Goldberg and company focused their arguments after October 7 on the killing of Israeli civilians and noncombatants as war crimes. But this was just a convenient way to mask what was really a condemnation of Palestinian armed resistance as a whole. It’s not as if they defended under the rules of war the Al Aqsa Flood operation’s killing of an estimated 280 Israeli military personnel, or its taking dozens more soldiers and even generals as prisoners of war. What they really want is for Palestinians to remain peaceful and committed to nonviolent forms of protest. A more sophisticated and explicit version of this argument was presented at length in a New York Times essay calling for Palestinians to commit to “ethical resistance.”

Of course, Palestinian groups will debate among themselves what tactics and strategies are correct to advance their national liberation struggle, as they have in each phase of struggle. But not a single Palestinian party or faction (aside from the widely hated Mahmoud Abbas) condemned the Al Aqsa Flood operation — quite the contrary. Klein, Goldberg, et al should ask themselves why not. It is because the Palestinian people have attempted every type of march, protest and petition only to see the noose tighten around their necks. 

The Great March of Return consisted of weekly marches in 2018-19 at the Gaza border. Those mass marches, peaceful apart from mere rock-throwing, resulted in 223 Palestinian killed by Israeli sniper fire and thousands wounded. There was no international hue and cry; the settlements expanded and Israeli society shifted even further towards fascism. Now four years later, the Al Aqsa Flood fighters returned to those same border fences and bulldozed them. It is no wonder why three-quarters of all Palestinians explicitly support the October 7 attacks, and 89 percent support Hamas’s military wing. 

The Palestinian people as a whole, as a nation, understand that those who made nonviolent revolution impossible made the shift to full-fledged armed resistance inevitable. So in their insistence on an international left that condemns armed resistance, Klein and Goldberg are effectively asking for an international left without Palestinians. 

Without question, the experience of war is horrific, and no images shock the conscience quite like those of civilian casualties, especially women, children and the elderly. These images seem to require no context or explanation; they instinctively shape our emotions, stir our desire for justice, and compel us to show solidarity with the victims. But this is how and why imperialist war propaganda works time and again. Even though some people can in retrospect see the folly of many wars, in the moment of crisis they are selectively presented certain images, so that feelings of empathy and grief are easily instrumentalized as pretext for an invasion. The demand in a war fever is to feel anger and grief, to set aside analysis and critical thought. Hidden of course are the years of images of civilian death and mass destruction on the Palestinian side, the stories of trauma and terrorism they’ve endured, the names of their children. The whole world has never been instructed to join in their grief and to insist on their right to self-defense and retaliation against those responsible for that terrorism. 

War is always horrific and any student of military history knows the so-called “rules of war” are routinely violated – in fact they are not really considered at all by military strategists when they make their plans. Look at the US “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, which was just another way of saying “strike terror” into the hearts of all Iraqi society. Look at Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Rolling Thunder” operation to completely destroy the northern part of Vietnam, killing an estimated 182,000 civilians in three years. Look at even the “good wars”  like World War II, when the U.S. carpet bombed cities in Japan and Germany that had no military purpose, intentionally causing mass civilian deaths as a way of psychologically terrorizing the enemy into surrender. But no one questions the righteousness and necessity of the war against fascism. Those U.S. leaders who directed those mass civilian deaths never faced a day in court for war crimes, but instead had schools and airports named after them. 

The Vietnam Memorial in D.C. lists out the names of 58,000 U.S. service member casualties in the war, an emotional display that stretches around 500 feet. But if it had the names of the Vietnamese deaths, civilian and combatant alike, it would stretch two miles. The way the war has been presented and is understood emotionally in the United States is, again, totally selective. The fiction is thus maintained that one civilized side wages war within the “rules” and only the “barbaric” wage war with terror. In fact, all modern war contains elements of terror.

For its part, Hamas officially says it upholds the rules of war and Islamic prohibitions on the targeting of women and children, disputing the dominant narrative of October 7, and says that the breaking down of the border fences allowed undirected groups of Palestinians to enter nearby Israeli settlements. 

But regardless of what exactly transpired, and who ordered precisely what, that cannot be used to confuse the basics of the Palestinian question. It is a struggle for national liberation against colonialism. It is not a war between two conventional armies. One side has a massive, high-tech and sophisticated military with advanced weapons systems, while the other side is a collection of guerrilla forces. The Palestinians have no military bases they control, no advanced weapons systems they can buy, no control over their own borders or airspace, no internationally legally recognized force to strike back against enemy states and to defend their population. This is a totally asymmetrical war, and for years it has been rocks versus tanks with nearly all the bleeding on one side. 

To win their national liberation struggle, Palestinians have tried general strikes. They have tried to get other Arab armies in the region to intervene. They have conducted dramatic hijackings to get worldwide attention, often designed for maximum spectacle with minimal civilian losses. They have tried peace agreements and negotiations (Hamas itself only turned to armed resistance after about a decade of this). They have tried international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns. They have gone to international courts and tribunals. The First Intifada was built on mass rallies and mobilization, largely led by the left, and it was only after the Israelis conducted a campaign of mass imprisonment and assassination of its leaders that the era of suicide bombings began. The failure of all the promised peace accords produced the Second Intifada, this time more violent. And now after years of losing more and more land, being asphyxiated by the millions, a new phase has opened. But it is one continuous national liberation struggle. 

The only real analogy left is that of the Native Americans or the Algerians, whose guerrilla struggles were not to win over the settler population — seeing that as impossible — but to strike back so that they might leave stolen lands and to show their own people through force that the enemy state was not invincible. Those battles too often involved the bloody deaths of non-combatants, and the anti-colonial fighters were called “savages” in the mass media of their day. But after years of broken promises and treaties, continuous encroachment on land, misery and humiliation, such armed resistance and violent eruptions became inevitable. And looking back, is there really any confusion about what was the side of justice?

As Israel begins a new round of murderous bombardment of Gaza, all responsibility for renewed bloodshed must be placed on the occupying power. The world sees clearly the genocidal and terrorist character of the Israeli armed forces. The task in the United States is to channel this into a mass social force that makes it untenable for the U.S. government to continue financing and arming the occupation. Out of the horrors of the present, many within the Palestinian community also believe they are entering a new phase of liberation struggle; this powerful movement must be prepared to stand with them.

From Genocide Denial to Climate Denial: How Palestine Will Save Us

Pictured: Protestors hold a rally for Palestinian liberation at the Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., on November 4, 2023. [CREDIT: CELAL GUNES / ANADOLU / GETTY IMAGES]

By Sarah Cavarretta

“I have a cause higher and nobler than my own, a cause to which all private interests and concerns must be subordinated.”

- Leila Khaled, October 30th, 2023

On November 8th, the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Social Justice in Palestine, Answer Coalition, and the Peoples Forum NYC organized Shut it down for Palestine, a national strike of students, healthcare workers, trade unions, and youth coalitions. This national strike followed weeks of demonstrations from tens of thousands of protesters in the United States. From youth groups blocking the Tacoma port in order to stall ships carrying weapons destined for Israel, to Jewish Voice for Peace organizers blocking all White house entrances and conducting sit in’s at Grand Central Station. The momentum is undeniable and global. This is the type of dual power, coalition building, and defiance of social participation we must regularly exercise in society.

In the past few months, the world has witnessed mass demonstrations of millions of people occupying public space to express their support for Palestine’s liberation. Indonesia had 2 million people occupy public space in protest of Israeli occupation. And over 1 million people marched in Washington D.C. demanding a cease fire. From Egypt,  Turkey,  The United States, and even Costa Rica, masses of people from all around the world recognize the brutality of this 76 year old occupation.

In less than two weeks, Israel has dropped over 20,000 tons of of explosives, surpassing the explosive force of nuclear weapons used on Hiroshima Japan in 1945. A total of 10,000 bombs dropped on a people without an military, in a swath of land only 6 miles wide and 25 miles long, with a population of 2 million people, half of which are children. Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, has not had access to water, food, or medicine for over a month, with no end in sight. Even with our best attempts to pause and reflect on the experience of 10,000 bombs in the first 12 days alone, the horror is unimaginable.

The sickening reality is there are multiple genocides occurring right now. From the Congo and Sudan to Palestine, the trivialization and misinformation of each of these examples is an extension of the broader denial that we are living through a mass extinction at the behest of private corporations.

Subduing the Masses

“The parallels are undeniable,” 800 scholars and legal experts wrote in an open letter warning that the Israeli bombing of civilian infrastructure like churches, hospitals, schools, and entire neighborhoods, which predominately kill civilians, all constitute acts of genocide. Additionally, shutting off all water access and food supplies is defined as a war crime under “collective punishment.” In fact, in years prior to the Hamas attacks in October, various human rights experts and organizations have all legally defined Israel’s occupation of Palestine as an “apartheid state constituting a crime against humanity.” Yet, the insidious framing of corporate western media continues to trivialize the actual power dynamics of this occupation. With inaccurate headlines like  “Israel’s war on Hamas” or “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” corporate media deliberately side steps the reality that Palestine does not have a military or functioning state. They are a people occupied in what has been described as “an open-air prison” or “large concentration camp” under constant blockades and military checkpoints by Israeli forces that have been committing a gradual genocide for 70 years.

Similarly, in 2020, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued their most urgent report warning the the world that we are approaching a grave threshold of social collapse with global crop failure on the horizon if we do not enact “increased and urgent” policy that reduces global emissions by 2030. Yet media outlets reported on this as another aspirational statement rather than a critical intersection. The first IPCC report was released in 1990 and its findings have been buried, minimized, and mocked for decades.

In July of this year, various scientific reports warned we are witnessing the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, one of the ocean’s most important currents, literally vital for ocean life and our entire existence.

Yet, year after year corporate media has trivialized the catastrophic and harrowing trajectory we are approaching. This pattern operates ad nauseam: Climate scientists and activists are arrested for their public protest and outcry of irrefutable data, inckuding the fact that North America lost 1/3 of all birds within 50 years. Or that the global loss of pollinators is a clear precursor to unfolding food insecurity. Or that the global destruction of coral reefs signals irreversible damage. The media has responded to all this information with apathy because corporate media operates at the behest of advertisers whose interests run contrary to environmental sustainability.

We are living through the 6th mass extinction driven by human activity as the result of capitalist hyper-consumption and over-production that exploits and disregards water, land, and people for profit. It’s not enough to denounce neoliberalism, but rather we must also know the institutions and multinational corporations who profit from our suffering. Most of all, we must have the courage to acknowledge that institutions contingent on the production of human suffering are illegitimate and can not be reformed. They must, instead, be abolished. Whether its genocide denial or climate denial, our institutions deliberately employ nefarious framing to subconsciously subdue our urgency and understanding of clear identifiable catastrophes.

Co-opting the System

Political thinker Mark Fisher deconstructs the patterns and dualities of capitalism in his book Capitalist Realism. Most of the efforts towards resistance or “anti-capitalism” are predictable forms of counter culture, like two sides of a coin. “Anti-capitalism” becomes a dance with the system, but nothing changes.

This is because the actual boundaries of society remain the same. Therefore, the options society produces for “change” or "resistance” are often self-limited to begin with. Change cannot come from within the system, and this framework is imperative to utilize when understanding today’s global failure.

The system simply does not offer effective mechanisms of reform because those who control these systems benefit from these catastrophes. Instead, political systems and governments shaped by capitalism are designed to reproduce appeasement through the hijacking of legitimate movements and well-intended institutions, whether through political campaigns, environmental movements, or International systems.

We need to look no further than the U.N. Climate Change Conference, which is also referred to as the Conference of the Parties (COP). Today, the COP has been completely hijacked by the fossil fuel industry.

Since 2019, Madrid COP25 had more fossil fuel delegates than delegates representing any single country. By 2022, COP26 in Egypt had more fossil fuel delegates than 10 countries most affected by climate combined. This year, COP will be facilitated by a petrostate with more fossil fuel delegates in attendance than ever before.

This pattern of institutional hijacking is the solidified model of U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon’s budget is over 1 trillion dollars every year, primarily awarding defense contractors and weapons manufactures (all private companies) with unchecked multibillion dollar contracts. All of which reinforces the never-ending rotation of former department of defense employees receiving high ranking positions in private companies like Halliburton, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Additionally, over 80% of military generals end up working for weapons producers.

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Irrefutably, this revolving door corrupts and incentivizes a conflict of interest when former military personal are appointed jobs with the same institutions whom they’ve been giving inconceivable contracts to. Recalling that these private companies are financed primarily by U.S. tax payers, we must acknowledge that this model of wealth distribution for private corporations comes directly at the expense and well being of U.S. citizens, depriving them of everything from health care and education to affordable housing and healthy food.

The cycle of violence abroad is also repeated domestically through unexamined policies that only pursue perpetual warfare. This trajectory is contingent on the continued annihilation of people both abroad and domestically. And these sentiments are not hyperbole, as the majority of U.S. police departments conduct joint training with Israeli Occupational forces. The results are brutal police tactics, refugee children in cages at the border, and mass surveillance, all of which are imports of Israeli violence sponsored by the U.S. Thus, the brutality that the U.S. creates and empowers abroad is simultaneously implemented back home, and vice versa. Because, under capitalism, there is profit to be made from brutality.

Deconstructing Power

The average person might be inclined to think the United Nations (UN) is a toothless institution, but it is not. Rather, it is the largest consolidation of western hegemony ever expressed.

The UN is made up of 190 member countries. Out of 190, only 5 are permanent members that hold veto power. These 5 countries — the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China — also make up the United Nations Security Council, the only UN body that can issue legally-binding resolutions and has the exclusive legal right to possess nuclear arsenals.

To further demonstrate western hegemony, 3/5 security council members (U.S., U.K, and France) are also the world’s largest military coalition responsible for the majority of war crimes in the past 50 years. It’s imperative to identify this reconfiguration of colonial powers to understand the system is working exactly how it was designed: to grant unmitigated power to the western (capitalist) world. This current representation allows the most powerful countries to be judge, jury, and executioner, while also representing the most brutally offensive forces in the world.

Recalling that the United States has over 800 military bases around the world and has not signed or ratified the majority of human rights treaties, its obvious the U.S. and its allies operate with total impunity.

Take for example the case of the International Criminal Court, established post-WW2 as the only permanent court with international jurisdiction. The Rome Statue, the treaty which gives life and authentication to the ICC, explains in Articles (5) that the ICC has jurisdiction in all matters concerning: (a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; and (d) The crime of aggression, and defines each in subsequent articles. Beyond these definitions, there are legal characteristics of crimes against humanity, such as the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and their infrastructure. This is a war crime for the same reasons that chemical and biological weapons are; because they have no singular target and predominately kill innocent civilians.

For the average person, this seems like a reasonable obligation for militaries. However, in 2002, U.S. President George Bush signed the American Service members Protection Act, a law that permits the “use of force” to invade the Hague in the event that a U.S. military member is ever prosecuted for war crimes.

Recalling that the ICC is a criminal court that only investigates the most egregious cases of war crimes, it is revealing that the U.S. already has a contingency law in place that justifies invading the Netherlands in the hypothetical scenario that its military forces are ever tried for war crimes.

In another demonstration of American exceptionalism and the disdain for international order, in 2020, Donald Trump canceled the visas and placed sanctions on ICC court prosecutors, Fatou Bensouda and Phakiso Mochochoko, for simply investigating U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.

The lesson here is that there is no way to sequester the power of the United Stats within today’s international framework.

building Power

When we identify that international organizations are nothing more than colonial extensions and will play no role in our collective liberation, it is imperative we take creative and brave ownership of the world we want to live in. Just as every generation has done before us. The United Nations, which is unduly controlled by the capitalist/imperialist West, has brought us to our current demise. Its function is contingent on mass suffering and, therefore, it will never be constructed in a way to liberate the masses.

Society is collapsing, but the world is not ending… yet. Every revolution, liberation, and social movement reveal that collective organization and radical disobedience are the only way to dismantle violent institutions. From weapons manufactures and fossil fuels industries to big agriculture and agrochemical industries, each one operates from a profit incentive and are directly responsible for killing our planet and its people.

This language and understanding must be mainstreamed in order to galvanize a conscious awakening of the masses. There is no going back now, as Israel’s brutality and genocide have polarized the global majority against western governments. And the US is eager and waiting to wage full-scale destruction. The world must be prepared to mobilize against this. 

When we recall that the system of chattel slavery existed longer than it has been abolished, we must draw courage to believe that a new world is possible. Every generation is called to take radical ownership over the world they want to live in. It’s a constant fight that requires the participation of everyone, everywhere, all at once. It starts with building power within our communities.

These sentiments can not be platitudes. We must internalize this as we prepare for the horizon. No one is absolved from participating in our collective liberation. Our future depends on it, and it starts with Palestine.

What Would A Just Peace In Palestine Look Like?

By Chris Richards

A meme on Twitter has been asking "Where do the Israeli Jews go?" as if this is the supreme gotcha and this question completely invalidates all discussion of Palestinian liberation, as if Palestinian self-determination automatically means rendering the entire population of Israel homeless and stateless. This ignores the fact that the mere creation of Israel resulted in 750,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians becoming homeless refugees. This also ignores the fact that, unless they have been naturalized as citizens in another country or are recognized as citizens of Israel, all Palestinians are stateless and have been for generations. The idea that justice for Palestinians automatically results in massive injustice for Israelis ignores that fact that restorative justice is in fact, not injustice at all. People whose homes were actually stolen when they were terrorized into abandoning them deserve their homes back.

The ethical gotcha behind "Where do the Israeli Jews go?" is that it would be unjust to put Israeli settlers in the same circumstances in which the Palestinians find themselves. This renders the vast injustice done to the Palestinians as a fait accompli that cannot be undone because it would cause even more harm. This would automatically eliminate the two state solution that American idealists and Israeli moderates have somewhat unrealistically clung to despite the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the unwillingness of any Israeli prime minsters who succeeded Rabin to risk the same fate. US President Joe Biden has been brandishing a two state solution as the ultimate and necessary solution to the "war" between the settlers and the Palestinians. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, if it is ethically beyond the pale to displace Israelis in the name of Palestinian liberation then any Palestinian state formed will be hopelessly undermined by hostile communities of settlers who will still see themselves as Israelis and reject Palestinian sovereignty over their communities. 

Let me repeat, as I said above, restorative justice is not injustice. This is not a question of generational guilt or punishing people today for crimes committed generations ago. The crime is still being committed. The crime is ongoing. The children of the thieves are not only living in stolen homes, but declaring their right to those homes and supporting the displacement or killing of more Palestinians so that more settlers can have homes. Former Prime Minister of Israel Naftali Bennett is the son of Americans from San Francisco who settled in Haifa after the Six Day War. It is not a coincidence that he advocates strongly for military expansionism. He was raised on a narrative of conquest and Israeli triumphalism. Well before the Nakba, Haifa was the scene of intense settlement by the Jewish Agency. A city that had 20,000 residents (of whom 6,000 were Jewish) in 1922 had a population of over 97,000 in 1948 ,and that larger population was 96% Jewish. The replacement of the Palestinian population with settlers didn't start during the Nakba. Ethnic cleansing is much older.

When this historical context is correctly understood then the following becomes clear: the two state solution requires an understanding that the Palestinians will not seek restorative justice past a certain point. The scope of justice allowed must be set by the party that did the harm and must commit to making restoration for justice to be possible. This is a dangerous situation that requires a maintained relationship of settler dominance and Palestinian acquiescence. If Palestinians do not acquiesce then their refusal to acquiesce puts us back in the same circumstances in which we began. The settler movement would have us believe that this is something for which the Palestinians, and not the settlers, are to blame. This is objectively false in the context of Palestinian history. The Palestinians are defending themselves from ethnic cleansing. Only sustained self-defense has prevented ethnic cleansing and population replacement at a faster rate.

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There is, of course, another obstacle to the practicality of a two-state solution separate from the question of its justice. This is the Israelis themselves.

The alleged centrist who succeeded Naftali Bennett as Prime Minister as part of a bizarre power sharing agreement between the Israeli far right and the so-called "moderates" called for a two-state solution at the United Nations. To Yair Lapid, a two-state solution depends on a "peaceful Palestinian state that does not threaten Israel."  This has generally been interpreted in policy terms by the so-called Middle East experts as a "demilitarized Palestinian state."  This means that the proposed two-state  solution proposed by many experts is one that is unacceptable to Palestinians because they would still have the IDF as a neighbor and a significant population of settlers, with no means to defend themselves. How is this fundamentally different than the existing occupation of the West Bank and containment of Gaza? Yet the Israeli state has the power to set the terms of the existence of the Palestinian state and the Palestinian people are supposed to accept this as established fact. If they do not, it is their fault.

Once more, with feeling: restorative justice is not injustice.

A real two-state solution, with a Palestine equipped to defend itself, is a surrender to the settler fait accompli in the first place. It requires an act of acquiescence to happen. If the Palestinians are unwilling to acquiesce to only partial justice then it is impossible. These are objective facts. When the settler movement is so powerful that the Israeli state cannot even propose a true two-state solution, but must instead add impossible demands that only make Palestinian acceptance less likely then we must accept that the Israeli state is not serious about a two-state solution. A serious effort would involve every possible concession that would make acquiescence more acceptable to the Palestinians. The Israeli state has never engaged in such a peace process.

This brings us to the question I ask in the headline. What does a just peace look like?

It also brings us to the question of the meme and the settler movement. Where do the Israeli Jews go?

Only the Palestinians can answer the first question. I am a white American, which makes me a settler myself. I can't tell Palestinians what a just peace in Palestine looks like anymore than I can tell the Modoc what a just peace with the US government would really look like. That's why I support the land back movement and believe that the United States should be legally forced to honor its treaties with Indigenous nations. We should reject the arrogance that might lead us to suggest or force a solution to the question of Palestinian liberation. We should instead support the Palestinians in their struggle against the settler movement. Only the Palestinians can determine what a just peace would look like and what they are willing to acquiesce to short of "from the river to the sea." If they're not, only they can make that decision. We should still support them.

Once again, restorative justice is not injustice.

The settler movement's question remains. Where do the Israeli Jews go?

Only the Israeli Jews can answer that question, and their answer has no authority to determine whether or not the Palestinians should acquiesce to anything less than their full liberation. Most white Rhodesians chose to go to the UK, Australia, South Africa or Latin America when the Bush War ended and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Most white Kenyans stayed in Kenya after Kenyan independence, at one point the Black Kenyan government made white man Richard Leakey the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. Most white South Africans remained in South Africa after the legal end of apartheid and the institution of formal legal equality and liberal democracy within the South African state. Far too many Israelis will choose to fight for the Israeli state, at least in the near future. What they do when the Palestinian struggle is won is up to them. If they commit crimes against the Palestinians that make them unwelcome, whose responsibility is that?

I still believe peace in the Middle East requires justice in the Middle East.