Full Support to Al Aqsa Storm
For nearly a quarter of a century, the United States, its western allies, and any tinpot dictatorship anywhere in the world with a weak Muslim minority, has reigned unrelenting terror against Muslim peoples under the rationale of the Global War started by the American President Bush. Under Obama, this war, and particularly American involvement in this war, was expanded beyond any limitations of time, space, international law, or long-accepted norms of war. These events have left an immortal scar in many, many Muslim peoples and the history of the religion itself, forever. This has only confirmed what has always been known by many of them; that the national independence of the Muslim peoples, in whatever form it may take, free from the foreign intervention of imperialist powers and their collaborators, is a necessity for them to live in peace.
Under the aegis of the Global War of Terror, persecution of Muslims changed from being a hushed secret to openly flaunted and praised. No longer do fascist genociders have to operate in the shadows or with a veil of legitimacy. Now, no Muslim needs any trial or conviction, even charge, to be summarily executed, remotely, in droves. In recent years, we’ve seen a number of genocides and settler-colonial campaigns aimed at displacing Muslim people from their lands and properties, so that these lands and properties can be taken over by some fascist somewhere. I’ve personally seen these events carried out unrepentantly in both India and Indian-occupied Kashmir. History also seems to have already forgiven and forgotten the examples of the Rohingyas and any other number of peoples.
In 2021, as the United States were forced to finally leave Afghanistan after decades of heroic struggle by its native people, I was one of the only people from outside of Afghanistan to unequivocally declare my support of the liberation of the country, and posted multiple articles to this blog in support of it. Some of them have now been removed, but this is because I used a wrong understanding of Marxist ideas to defend my point, not because I was wrong to voice my support for the independence and liberation of Afghanistan. I was intensely disappointed by the so-called “progressives”, “anti-imperialists”, etc, elsewhere in the world, and their flagrant cowardice on this matter.
In 2022, I was further disappointed that these same “progressive” “anti-imperialist” “Marxist-Leninists” not only refused to condemn, but actively proclaimed their support for, the start of a new era of European war, a clear war for the repartition of capital rather than for any liberatory or revolutionary purpose. The only voice of opposition to this war came not from western “anti-imperialists”, “progressives”, or “Marxist-Leninists”, but from a small anti-war movement within Russia, which was quickly silenced. Not only was this movement repressed by Russia, but this repression was met with no international outrage, and the Russian anti-war movement with no support or sympathy, in a chauvanist west which seemed to feel like they’d had it coming for being Russian.
The world likes to believe that it supports Palestine. Progressives, self-proclaimed and otherwise, all over the world, consider themselves strong in their pro-Palestinian position. But had there been any remaining anti-war movement in the world, the above-mentioned events of the past two years would not have proceeded as they did.
It is for this reason that Hamas commander Mohammad Deif is correct in calling not for “voices for peace and justice” in the aggressive countries that support and enable “Israel”, ie most countries today. It is very obvious that no such voices exist, even if many would love to imagine themselves to be such voices.
Instead, he has called on the Muslim peoples of the world for support, military and moral, as an operation takes place to liberate his land from Israeli occupation. Thousands of rockets have been fired by what is very clearly a wide-ranging and sophisticated organisation with wide support among the Palestinian people, and an unknown number of fighters have escaped the open-air prisons of Gaza and the other militarised territories, setting foot on their land for the first time in decades, intent on liberating it from colonialism and occupation.
Representatives of the settler-colonial entity, which has never sought to establish internationally-recognised borders of its own, have arrogantly claimed that this is an “infiltration” and so forth, as if the Palestinians are somewhere that they do not have a right to be. Their slanders against the Palestinian people, their claims that Hamas is not a representative of them, etc, are sure to increase over the course of this operation, as they have in previous escalations of this long-standing conflict.
Not only all Muslims, but all progressive, anti-imperialist, communist, and Marxist people of the world are obligated to lend their support and defence to Palestinian liberation, as it exists, in the real world, today, without making ideological demands of it from their positions of ignorance and weakness. We are also obligated to maintain these positions against whatever slanders and attacks may be ahead.
It is my suspicion that many who initially voice support for this operation will waver and fall off in the coming days, weeks, months, years, even — until as long as it takes to liberate Palestine once and for all. Some of these people will be Anglophone internet users who fancy themselves progressive or whatever. Some of them will be Muslim and Arab “leaders” who will be forced to show their true colours.
“Israel” is better-armed, and has the might of the United States, the European Union, and the rest of the bourgeois colonisers of the world behind it. Yet the advantage is Palestine’s. In the main, this is because the Palestinian people have been steeled for now the greater part of a century against some of the harshest brutality that has existed on Earth in that time. They will view Al-Aqsa Storm not as an aggression or a danger but as a long-due relief. The bulk of the “Israelis”, however, are coddled tourists who will hug their blankies and cry. They, too, will be showing their true colours in short order and quickly fall in line behind the hardened, knowingly-fascist elements of “their” “country”, as the only option remaining to them. They lack the spiritual strength to maintain any other position. I’ve met many people with similar mentalities to them. As deep as the anti-progressive rot has gone in the western countries in North America and Europe, it has in its favour that it was at least once upon a time more than a veneer. There was once something to rot. No such thing is true of the “Israeli” colonisers.
But an important element of the Palestinian advantage is political, that the people of the world will be on their side.
Whether or not those people include the self-proclaimed “progressives” and “anti-imperialists” of the western countries will not be a decisive part of how events unfold in Palestine in the time to come. It may enable or prohibit greater or lesser shows of military-like brutality against the Palestinians, as has been the case for decades. But it will not be decisive as to the outcome of the conflict. Events to come in the Arab countries, especially those neighbouring the occupation, will be far more important. It is the fear of Arab retaliation, not the fear of western judgement, which will inform the actions of the corrupt and incompetent Netanyahu government, which of course understands only one language, neither Hebrew nor Arabic, nor, for that matter, English.
However, it is these pivotal moments in history that reveal the true colours of the self-proclaimed heroes of the working class. It is important for all looking for friends and allies to take notes on whose axe falls where on important matters like this.
