Tag Archives: Hamas

Solidarity with the Palestinian people (3 of 3) – Solidarity with Hamas?

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National demonstration in support of Palestine, Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill / The Irish Times

In the previous post I stated that the October 7 attack by Hamas precipitated the current genocide in Gaza, as in to hasten the occurrence of something; hastily, or suddenly.  This does not make Hamas responsible for the genocide.  This responsibility belongs to the Zionist state and to its US sponsor as well as those states that have also supported and defended it.  As the first post made clear, this includes the Irish State, which studiously permits and facilitates the transfer of weapons and munitions from the US to Israel.

The responsibility of the Zionist state for genocide should not be a surprise, since the state itself is a settler colonial creation founded on the dispossession of the native Palestinian population subject to repeated expulsions and attacks.  The viciousness of the Zionist state and of its response to any challenge has routinely been disproportionate and the evolution of Zionist politics from labour to far-right reflects the logic of its existence.

All this does not excuse Hamas from criticism that it provoked an attack for which it was totally unable to defend the people that it claimed to represent.  This is essentially the argument of the Counterpunch article that I referenced before and which is illustrative of the arguments presented in the previous post. 

On the Oct 7 attack the Counterpunch article states that ‘Hamas must have known that Israel would react with massive destruction in Gaza after the October 7th attacks’ and that its  ‘military strategy was suicidal and poorly planned, also entailing war crimes against civilians which the leadership must have known would lead to the total destruction of Gaza.’  It further argues that ‘those who wish to engage in deluded fantasies like endless military confrontation having been the only avenue available to Hamas are quite deficient in their analysis which is bereft of intellectual rigor, to say the least. This sentiment is often felt by those attempting to appear the most revolutionary by taking what they perceive to be the most radical position.’

The failures of Hamas flow from the nature of the organisation: ‘the bulk of Palestinian resistance fighters—the actual fighters of Hamas and other entities—are acting out of anger and a desire for revenge, as the majority of them have lost family members due to Israeli attacks’; however ‘Hamas’ leaders . . . have climbed to the apex of power amongst the exploited and now seek their own privileges, power and financial gain.’

Hamas are described as corrupt ‘kleptocrats keen on getting rich, content with the privileges they possess in real life, and if they’re assassinated or killed in combat by the Israelis, then they believe they’ll be absolved in the afterlife—as Islamic fundamentalists do.’  An example of their corruption is provided – ‘Hamas had agreed to let the PA develop Gaza’s natural gas fields in exchange for a portion of the profits during negotiations with the US, Israel and Egypt. Simply put, Hamas’ leaders had decided they would sell their own people out to the Americans and Israelis—who effectively control the PA—in exchange for a cut on the back end.’

It is ironic therefore that the authors of the article argue that this is the alternative to HAMAS’s militarist adventurism and that the example provided by the Irish peace process is one to be emulated.  The Irish example helps point to why they are wrong.

The success of the Good Friday Agreement, such as it actually exists, is largely due to the failure and unpopularity of the militarism of the IRA.  What is wrong with this peace process is not that this militarism was abandoned but that without it the IRA and Irish republicanism generally had no political alternative to British imperialism.  The circumstances in Palestine are radically different from the North of Ireland, including that there was never any threat of genocide to the nationalist population.

So, while imperialism in Ireland and the Irish state are genuine in seeking a pacified Northern state with nationalist participation in the local administration, the view that ‘for now only a two state solution along the 1967 borders seems even remotely achievable’ after ‘Palestine [is] developed and modernized under US-Israeli-PA rule’ is hopelessly optimistic and misguided.  The two state policy has been endorsed by most of western imperialism for a long time and shown to be a fraud.  The Zionist regime has rejected it and, as the authors explain , its initial support for Hamas was precisely to help prevent it.

On its own, their proposal for the economic and social development of the Palestinian areas (under what currently could only be some sort of imperialist rule) is not wrong.  It is better, infinitely better, than genocide, but it fails to appreciate that the policy of genocide and steps to ethnic cleansing are a rejection of it by imperialism and Zionism, and of itself is not a policy of the working class, rather than simply potentially the best current conditions to allow one to develop. 

The article, at best, falls into the familiar trap of providing ‘solutions’ that are not those of the working class because the working class cannot provide its own. It does this instead of accepting weakness and pursuing a policy of opposition, one that doesn’t pretend to the current possibility of socialist revolution.  The writings of Marx and Engels are replete with such a policy where the working class is too weak or undeveloped to impose its own power but should not therefore politically support that of the bourgeoisie.

One of the ways by which better conditions for a working class alternative can be created is a working class led solidarity movement that sees this as one of its tasks.  This involves opposition to genocide and western imperialist complicity but also an open policy of supporting a working class policy and movement.

This is a long way from the current humanitarian solidarity that refuses to take a position on the political solution while, in doing so, leaving reactionary forces to fill in the gap.  It involves hoping that imperialism will do what it has demonstrated it has no intention of doing; hoping the Zionist state will be forced by imperialism to accept it, and hoping the reactionary Arab regimes will play a positive role in pushing this along, as opposed to their current closer and closer accommodation with both imperialism and Zionism.

Back to part 2

Palestine and Ukraine – in what way are they the same?

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The events in Gaza and Israel have driven home lessons that should have been learned long ago.  

The role of the United States and western imperialism, including the EU in joining the suffocation of the Palestinians, has again come to the fore.  Some on the left, who have defended imperialist intervention in Ukraine suddenly find themselves opposed to its role now; but they cannot both support and oppose it at the same time.  Imperialism is not being inconsistent, but this left certainly is, for it cannot will the defeat of imperialism in the Mediterranean while willing its victory in the Black Sea.  Were their actions to have the least practical impact this would be obvious.

One prominent spokesperson has paraded their confusion, writing that:

‘No less unbearable is the precipitation with which Western governments (and a Ukrainian government that ought to know better about the legitimate fight against foreign occupation) have expressed their solidarity with Israel, very much in contrast with their muted reactions to Israel’s brutal onslaughts on the Palestinian population.’

Why, among all the supporters of the Western imperialist alliance and one that formally wants to join NATO – effectively fighting on its behalf, should Ukraine “know better” than supporting Israel? Both countries are effectively tools of the United States, receiving massive amounts of military aid and political support, which is reciprocated. Why would these capitalist allies of the US not see their interests as not only compatible but convergent? After all, the President of Ukraine has said he wishes to model Ukraine on Israel!

Of course it is possible to take one’s cue from the barbarity of the conflicts but, given the censorship of Ukrainian atrocities and highlighting of those of Hamas, we can take our cue from accepting what is presented to us in the West or reject both. Either way we fail to get to grips with the nature of either.

Of course, in the case of the Palestinians there is a context which these leftists employ to explain support for them, even when their struggle is carried out by religious fundamentalists, but this leads to two obvious problems.  First, all the moralistic rhetoric about civilian deaths as illustrative of the nature of the war in Ukraine, and justifying support for it, can hardly be sustained given the killing of civilians by Hamas.  And second, the context of the Russian invasion has to be explained, and not just by the credulous notion that selective ideas of Vladimir Putin are sufficient explanation.  The idea that Ukraine’s potential membership of NATO and growing military cooperation with the US might have had something to do with the invasion has been dismissed by the supporters of Ukraine as if in this particular war western imperialism doesn’t count!

The Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk City has parallels with the Israeli shelling of Gaza City as does the political influence of the far right in both Ukrainian and Israeli politics, despite the ignorant argument that because Zelensky is Jewish he couldn’t possibly entertain and celebrate fascists in the Ukrainian armed forces.  This ignores both Israeli criticism of Zelensky’s whitewash of Ukrainian nationalist participation in the killing of Jews in World War II and the participation of far right/fascist parties in the Israeli government.  The celebration of the fascist Stepan Bandera and his Ukrainian nationalist heroes with a national holiday, street names and iconography, unmissable in Ukraine itself and in photographs of the conflict, are ignored by this à la carte left. ‘Creeping fascism’ is presented as a threat across Europe apart from the country that has armed its fascists to the teeth.

The simple-minded parallel they claim is that both Ukraine and Palestine are oppressed peoples that we should support.  Except Ukraine is an independent capitalist state supported by imperialism; the Palestinians don’t have a state and getting one through a two-state solution is a delusion; many Ukrainians support Russia, including the majority in Crimea–do they not deserve ‘self-determination’? and a solution to the problems facing the Palestinian people must also be a solution for the Jewish people, raising all sorts of questions about ‘self-determination’ as their go-to solution.

If the two situations are so simply similar, why doesn’t the pro-Ukrainian left call on imperialism to arm Hamas?  (After all, Israel itself gave it a helping hand in order to combat the PLO.) Why doesn’t it call on the Palestinians to show solidarity with Ukraine?  Or do such suggestions seem incredible and thus illustrate the difference?

Does it not show that their support for western imperialism is a betrayal of the struggle of the Palestinians?  More importantly, does it not show the incoherence of these social-imperialists – proclaiming socialism in words but unable to coherently oppose imperialism in practice – going so far as to actually support it in Ukraine?

Only a class analysis, and not a moralistic melange that cannot withstand the test of reality, provides a compass through which to orientate through the major events that have carried us through the first decades of the 21st century.  The rotten and degenerated left that supports Ukraine simply doesn’t notice that its ‘socialism’ is irrelevant.  In Ukraine it supports the capitalist Ukrainian state and imperialist support for it under the flag of self-determination, with no role required for an independent working class position.  In Palestine its supports for the Palestinian demand for its own state has again no role for a socialist programme and begs the question why they do not support Hamas like they support the Ukrainian Armed Forces, with its fascist units – the real Red-Brown alliance they continually complain about in others.

In a world increasingly polarised and drifting more and more into conflict these ‘socialists’ will pick and choose which capitalist state or nationalist movement to follow but have lost the ability to distinguish separate working class interests.  Its socialism is an ideal that, while perfect in their own heads, has no grip on reality.

Solidarity with the Palestinian people

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“Shock” was the first word in ‘The Economist’ article following the Palestinian armed uprising in Gaza and Israel.  “Hamas must be made to pay for its atrocities” it exclaimed.

‘The Irish Times’ editorialised about the “appalling atrocities committed by Hamas” while stating that Israel is “not known for being proportionate or well-targeted”, which isn’t actually true.  The point of the violence of the Israeli state is complete suppression of the Palestinian population through violence and terror in which routine oppression is merely a background condition.  Its actions are proportionate to this objective and its targets are well suited to its aims.

The immediate question for the BBC was ‘how could Israel have let this happen?’  Not ‘How did it make this happen?’  How did its renowned intelligence services fail to predict it?  Not, how did they not understand that something like this was almost inevitable?

Immediately the viewer and reader is placed in the shoes of the Israeli citizen with the Palestinians as the ‘other’– one element of the stench of hypocrisy that hangs over Western commentary.  No ‘shock’ is ever recorded over the daily humiliation, oppression and murder of Palestinians by the Israeli state.  We never hear that ‘Israel must be made to pay for its atrocities’. In reality, the claimed failures of the Israeli security state to be sufficiently on top of the Palestinian people, and the “shock’’ of the “appalling atrocities committed by Hamas”, presage only more not very “proportionate or well-targeted” attacks on the open prison that is Gaza.

All the handwringing and dismay from imperialist politicians and commentators simply lay the ground for another round of Israeli terror, accompanied by sanctimonious and ineffectual declarations of ‘lack of proportionality’ and ‘targeting errors’– by those who have supported the Zionist State and its previous many ‘errors’ and ‘lack of proportion’.  The response by this state will be vicious and widespread but the media will not record this as the inevitable intensification of an existing policy that they have previously sanitised, by a state based on sectarian exclusivity and suppression of a whole people that is treated as almost less than human.  It will be considered only as unfortunate, not least for the democratic pretensions of the sectarian and racist state itself.

The US sponsor of the Israeli state, and its imperialist policing role in the region, has said it will send a carrier strike group in solidarity.  This too is a signal that the Israeli state can take the same response as the US did to what it calls its 9/11 – widespread demonisation of everyone it considers its enemy and inflicting overwhelming power against them.

The disparity of forces between the Israeli state, backed by imperialism, and Hamas and the Palestinian population means that a veritable massacre is inevitable.  Whatever about the audacity and bravery of those Palestinians who have joined Hamas and shaken the arrogance of the Israeli state, they cannot win.  It has been speculated that the uprising is a result not only of the growing desperation of the Palestinian people faced with increased dispossession and repression, but is also aimed at thwarting the moves to normalise relations between the Israeli state and some Arab regimes, particularly Saudi Arabia.  

However, whatever difficulties the uprising will create for this process, Saudi Arabia will not protect the Palestinian people from the Israeli onslaught. Saudi Arabia has interests separate and opposed to the creation of a democratic state, one that could promise an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people and of the deepening sectarian reaction among the Jewish population.

This population must learn that freedom and democracy for the Jewish people cannot be created by a state structured on imprisonment and oppression of the Palestinians.  The shift to extreme reaction and racism, including fascist-type figures in the government, is not accidental but the logic of an exclusionary state that will oppress not only those it seeks to exclude but police and repress democratic voices within. 

The first task for socialists across the world is to demonstrate against the mounting Israeli pogrom and show solidarity with the Palestinian people.  The uprising cannot succeed but its power will ultimately derive not from its temporary military successes but from the confidence given to the Palestinian people, exposure of the causes of the uprising and demonstration of the impossibility of peace or security in the region built upon Palestinian suppression.

This is the task of those seeking democratic advances in the region; not reliance on reactionary Arab regimes that have time and time again revealed themselves to be enemies of their own people never mind also of the Palestinians.  At some stage, when Israel has completed its immediate retaliation, the call will go up for negotiations, negotiation’s that have previously covered up for continued implementation of a settler colonial solution.

Solidarity must oppose the continued imposition of this ‘solution’ and argue for a democratic and secular state that can freely include Palestinian and Jewish populations.   This can only arise from opposition to Zionism and the Zionist state, which manifest the racist policy that justifies and implements Palestinian oppression.  Neither can it come from the reactionary Arab states or from Iran, which promote a politicised Islam in various forms in order to oppress their own people.  This is also true for the fundamentalist forces within the Palestinian people themselves: support for the democratic rights of the Palestinian people does not require that we endorse or support reactionary forces within them.

Neither Zionism or Islamism can unite the Jewish and Palestinian people, which cannot be done through the chimera of a separate state for both – the two state solution – but can ultimately only be achieved by the resurgence of a working class movement across the region.

The first step to this is opposition to the repression of the Israeli state, most immediately its mounting all-out war on the population of Gaza.  The Jewish population of Israel must be addressed by pointing to the results of years of repression by the Zionist state that has failed to protect them but has become more and more undemocratic within.  They cannot oppose the slide to authoritarian rule within the Israeli state while supporting it against the Palestinian people.