Your response to Rob Ashlar encapsulates everything I find detestable about the American left’s perspective on modern geopolitics. First and foremost, labeling Lazare a ‘white supremacist and “no better than Joseph Goebbels,”’ is an accurate assumption, especially considering his characterization of Hamas’s goals as a ‘medieval religious crusade’ aimed at eliminating Jewish people and his invocation of the ‘socialist right to self-defense’ in response to the death of a black homeless man in New York City. Goebbels would be proud if such anti-black and islamophobic narratives represented the anti-imperialist left and thankfully they do not. If refusing the right to resist occupation after thousands of bombs have been dropped on the Gaza Strip isn’t fascism, then I question your ability to identify fascism if the victims are brown people. Does it take yellow stars and concentration camps for someone to recognize it as such? Your policing of Ashlar for using ‘Stalinist’ language, irrespective of its hyperbolic nature, is ultimately unhelpful and lacks genuine engagement, instead appearing as liberal concern trolling.
In my view, the conflicts in both Palestine and Ukraine are anti-imperialist struggles. The NATO-controlled world order, designed to undermine third-world development and socialism, faces resistance in Ukraine. Despite Ukraine’s claims of victimhood, the country openly expresses a love for Israel, participated in the illegal invasion of Iraq, and suppresses political dissent by banning all parties, harasses the left with nationalist militias, and imprisons those speaking against the war. They have been bombing their own people since 2014, contradicting any notion of victimhood. Ukraine gleefully sought to benefit from the European world order, and due to their rejection of treaties and continued attacks on the Donbass, they have created a security dilemma where their sovereignty is contested. It’s not left wing or anti-imperialism to defend state sponsored anti-communism and Banderism.
Remarkably, the special military operation in Ukraine has endured for nearly two years, yet more civilians have been killed in Palestine in a two-month period than in Ukraine. October 7th should bring great joy to anyone sympathetic to the Palestinians, and demonstrates the resilience of the Palestinian liberation movement against the occupation of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the violent response to the Great March of Return. The Palestinian resistance lives on regardless of the setbacks.(Note: While the death of Israeli civilians is a tragedy, efforts should have been made to repatriate more Israeli settlers safely into the hands of Hamas as hostages.)
Addressing nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa, the Marxist role has a regrettable and repulsive past. Marxists initially supported movements like Zionism in the Levant, later adjusting their stances for political expediency and abandoning the secular movements you yearn for, instead for Gorbachev’s agenda of withdrawal from the third world. While imperialism plays a role, the left shares responsibility for not being an effective political opposition.
Hamas can be argued as the most democratic movement in historic Palestine since the British mandate, collaborating openly with Marxist groups in the Gaza Strip. It is the Fatah secularists who promote Palestinian bourgeois-nationalism, not Hamas which is a movement of the lumpenized.
The most significant opposition to Zionism is evident in the movements of Hezbollah and the Houthi movement. One should also be open to viewing the Houthi movement as a nationalist successor state to the South Yemen state. If embracing the idea that proletarian internationalism is futile in a region being bombed, where most Gazans have lost their homes and are lumpenized, and advocating for critical engagement with nationalist forces makes me a left nationalist, then I am a left nationalist!
-Chez Ter
