Communism

Thank you for the essay. I learned (or perhaps unlearned) a lot from it, and have more than enough links for further reading.

However.......

I hope that you will eventually find Hamas' line on the issue of state secularity, because "Hamas not secular!!!" honestly has been my biggest, like, liberal brainworm wrt the Palestinian liberation conflict, and the essay didn't manage to fully excise it from my noggin.

So my take on the war basically has been, "Support the PFLP and other explicitly secular leftist/anti-Zionist groups in the region; support the flight of Israeli refugees and their welcoming back to their true homelands around the world; support aid for Palestine, food, medical supplies, psychological support, so forth; support sabotage of Israeli infrastructure and economy; support strikes/resignations and sabotage at foreign weapons and munitions factories supplying Israel; agitate against Zionism; support Jewish and Palestinian communities around the world; etc." — so basically, every way to support the Palestinian cause except direct support for Hamas (which I guess is really just, like, indirect support for Hamas, anyways...)

I have seen comparisons between Palestine now and China under its occupation. Essentially the type of stuff that Lenin wrote about in A Caricature of Marxism & Imperialist Economism, which I recently listened to S4A's audiobook of. That the struggle for national liberation must be fought first before a socialist revolution can take place, and so all groups fighting for national liberation must be supported, including those which are not socialist or secular — that this lays fertile ground for socialist revolution later on. This is how things played out in China: the CPC and KMT fought alongside each other against Japan, and then the CPC fought against the KMT and pushed it to Taiwan.

This feels like a lot to gamble on, though — essentially that after the liberation conflict, there will be another conflict where the folks who we uncritically support will very definitely and certainly win — although... a free Palestine, even under a (")reactionary(") leadership, is still going to be better and more humane than the settler-colonial regime, so... What point am I even trying to make here?

...Honestly, I don't know.

Some final notes:

• Some non-leftists seem to be under the impression that non-Jewish Palestinians want to expel Jews from Palestine, and I do not understand this. Aside from the fact that Palestinians are just not bloodthirsty savages, and that Palestine has always had Jews, and all that... Once the colonial system has been torn down, its last vestige would just be millions of highly skilled and educated immigrants, which is pretty useful to have after a liberation war, right?
• The current war, I've heard, has allowed for more "parallel governance" or however you call it to emerge in the region. That as infrastructure is destroyed and the Israeli government focuses on the war effort, that common people are replacing government services with their own popular ones. I don't know much about this but it was mentioned in connection with anarchism.

I'm also curious about the history of Labor Zionism and of religious and ethnic minorities in the region, in particular Circassians. Can you point me to any good resources about these topics?

I listened to the Trueanon episode with Norman Finkelstein and I think he articulated things pretty well. Basically what else were they suppose to do? If they'd broken out of the fence and then threw down their guns and stood waving protest signs there they'd have been massacred and Israel would have claimed they were armed.

If they'd broken out then all ran away, Israel would have launched a massive effort to hunt them down and kill them and it would have been pointless, no liberals would have done anything, it would have been ignored (he brought up how some Palestinians escaped a maximum security prison, got back to Gaza and there was celebration, until within 48 hours the Israelis had murdered all 3 of them).

They tried the whole peaceful approach in the great march of return, they were gunned down, snipers murdered kids, they shot out people's knee-caps condemning them to joblessness, a life of no prospects and suicide. So what else were they supposed to do? And the only answer that makes sense from liberals who support this is to quietly sit there and die so the liberals can later feel badly about it.

So there's only one bad side. And it's the side that hasn't taken peace or giving the Palestinians a state seriously. It's the side where western governments ignore horrendous atrocities against children for years, decades, openly documented with video and photo evidence, they don't pressure Israel to do anything in all that time other than maybe hide it better. It's the side that ignores settler terrorism.

Gaza “kidnapped” 200 settlers and that’s a war crime apparently. It’s not really, but whatever. Let’s say it is. Israel has killed 7000+ Palestinians in retaliation, now likely more than 10k as they cut off communications in Gaza last night.

Speaking of which, dont they risk killing those very hostages they are using as an excuse by doing that? By airstriking Hamas bases they might kill the hostages, and they know that, I assume. I don't see how anyone knowing about the IOF strikes can't see that all the posturing about the hostages and civilians is nothing but excuses.

Terrorism is bound to rile anyone in the US up, though it has a remarkably low mortality rate.