by.Ralph Leonard In the history of Palestinian nationalist armed militancy against Israel, nothing compares to the so-called Al-Aqsa Flood, the rather profane name given to the joint Hamas-Palestin…
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October 7th Reaction
by.Ralph Leonard
In the history of Palestinian nationalist armed militancy against Israel, nothing compares to the so-called Al-Aqsa Flood, the rather profane name given to the joint Hamas-Palestinian Islamic Jihad operation that occurred on October 7, 2023, whether in the quantity and quality of violence and cruelty inflicted. Around 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, were slaughtered with a vast range of methods in the armory of fiendish brutality, from mowing down young ravers with assault rifles and grenades, raping women in their homes, and credible reports of the torture of families—by torture I mean slicing off fingers, an eye gouged out—in front of each other before burning them alive. As I’ve written previously, this was less Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and more Pasolini’s Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.
Since then, the Israeli government has sponsored screenings of Bearing Witness for journalists, the political classes of various Western countries, and other select audiences. This 45-minute compilation of uncensored footage was filmed on GoPro cameras by Hamas irregulars themselves, some of whom were likely drug-fueled; it captured only some of the worst brutalities inflicted on Israeli civilians.
In some sense, these screenings are “propaganda spectacles.” The Israeli government is of course trying to get back the international goodwill it initially received after October 7 but squandered due to its obscene bombardment of Gaza in retribution. The Israeli government, following the cliche of never letting a crisis go to waste, is obviously making propaganda of the real atrocities of October 7th to rationalize inflicting a catastrophe on Gaza; they’re not “merely” mowing the lawn (to invoke that demonic euphemism) as they have in previous years; they’re uprooting it. And yet, propaganda doesn’t always involve falsehood; it can involve things that are factually true.
Indeed, a considerable chunk of the Left, especially the so called “decolonial” crowd, has had a range of disgraceful responses to October 7. The conspiratorial minded latched onto any factoid to dampen the magnitude of the massacre, even going as far as rubbishing documented and verified atrocities against Israeli civilians. Others rationalised it with bogus analogies to slave revolts. And others even brazenly celebrated it as an act of “decolonization” because in their mind Israeli “settlers” for once were humbled and paid a price for the siege on Gaza, which Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall insulated them from.
I realise that any critique of Hamas can provoke eye rolls among leftists. It seems indecent now, especially as thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli bombs in the name of “eradicating Hamas.” It’s also as if to censure Hamas too harshly is to somehow denigrate the dispossessed and give ammunition to Israeli propaganda. B
ut Hamas are not the wretched of the earth; they are a political outfit with their own agenda, representing one wing of the Palestinian national bourgeoisie, no less craven, opportunistic and gangsterish than the gangsters of Fatah in Ramallah. And because they are a political outfit, they are subject to the same ruthless criticism that comes with being a political agent.
The issue is not whether what Israel’s subjugation, dispossession, and humiliation of the Palestinians, or the blockade on Gaza specifically, is atrocious and ought to be opposed. Of course, it should be. The question is how it is to be opposed and to what end. In this sense,
the objection towards Hamas isn’t simply “moralistic,” but also political. They are a petit-bourgeois religious nationalist outfit whose political goal if it came to fruition would erect just another ethnocentric, bonapartist, capitalist dictatorship. Their use of terrorism as a method of social change and political pressure reflects a forgoing of mass self-organisation and solidarity.
Leftists so often make a fetish out of “resistance” without realising the implicit conservatism of such a mantra. It assumes that what you’re “resisting” is ultimately so permanent that you can only hit back against it, which in turn produces more repression and violence. There is no transformational, internationalist, revolutionary approach. Indeed, the struggle for proletarian socialism gives way for tailing behind petit-bourgeois nationalist chauvinism.
We know that the crisis ignited by October 7 is not going to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. It won’t make the conditions of Palestinians better, only worse. We know from the experience of the Lebanese civil war and the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran that what Hamas is offering will not lead to progress and emancipation. In simple terms,
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are not now, and will never be, the vehicle for Palestinian liberation. Indeed, they are its gravediggers.
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