Imagine if someone wrote a piece denouncing right-wing factions of the Maquis partisans after hearing about the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre or a screed denouncing the Yazidi militia YBŞ after seeing videos of ISIS butchers burning Yazidi people alive in cages.
Lazare’s letter is the latest chapter in a long legacy of lazy, racially-tinged pseudo-analysis best left behind in the trash bin of history. I’m simply not interested in hearing some social democrat wax hysterical about the rise of crazy Muslims who want to “inspire Jihad.” The German “left” has this well-covered these days!
The same German “left,” of course, that engages in the same pearl-clutching and saber-rattling about ‘terrorism’ that Lazare is trying to pass off as ‘ruthless criticism,’ a farce made even more ironic by how close his ramblings goose-step in line with the ‘official’ narrative of his national bourgeoisie. Marxists (or, more accurately, “Marxists”) should be cautious when their “analysis” begins to sound an awful lot like the vitriolic propaganda that’s shat out by whatever bourgeois rag they can get for a nickel at the corner store. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that his words borrow from the bourgeois ideological cesspool, coming from a social-democratic hack like Lazare — but we should ruthlessly criticize him regardless; his letter reveals the rotten core of social-democratic politics and its lack of class analysis.
Lazare replaces an analysis of the social conditions and social forces (and relations of production) in Israel/Palestine with a social-chauvinist moralizing framework. He is not concerned with the struggle of Palestinian workers so much as he is intent on chastising people from his armchair for not cooperating with the ‘rules’ of the international bourgeois order — rules they never follow themselves, of course, and only swing as sentimental hammers against their opposition. Lazare doesn’t bother talking about the conditions of Palestinian society that keep Palestinian workers and politicians shut out of the normal state-building and national bargaining system. Nor is he interested in why the Palestinians are effectively a permanent reserve population continuously kept at the margins of the production process. To meaningfully address any of this, Lazare would have to identify the structures and contradictions of the global capitalist system as a totality, consequentially rattling his reformist politics from the inside out. The social-democratic project cannot pose capitalism and bourgeois democracy as a totality. There is an inherent interiority-exteriority to it. All threats must come from the ‘outside.’
I’ve never felt a stronger spiritual kinship with Marx than I do now, recalling his declaration against Lafargue and company. If Lazare is a Marxist, then “if anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”1
For the Zionist Squadristi, a keffiyeh is a bullseye. Hamas did not start the bloodshed, and the al-Aqsa Flood only laid bare what was already a reality for anybody willing to peek outside and smell the dying roses. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked planes, fought knee-deep in the mud against Lebanese Christo-fascists, and targeted non-combatants long before Hamas began delivering food aid to workers in Gaza in 1987. For decades, the stateless and desperate Palestinian militants improvised, adapted, and clawed against the Israeli death machine. Israel responded by unleashing the hordes of Hell against everyone: man and woman, child and elderly, combatant and civilian. Israel has set the table and punishes anyone for approaching.
But is this the sort of death cult that Cosmonaut supports? Hamas’s goal is obvious: to inspire jihad throughout the Muslim world. But even if successful (which it won’t be), the result will be a medieval religious crusade that can only add to the hatred and violence. It’s very easy to call for endless warfare from the comfort of the United States. But it will do nothing to benefit the Palestinians. To the contrary, it will make their plight a hundred times worse.
Of course, Lazare cannot describe the Zionist occupation of historic Palestine as a “medieval religious crusade,” despite Jewish supremacists calling for the construction of a temple on the current site of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. It is telling that Lazare talks about Israel in more-or-less neutral terms (calling the slaughter a ‘conflict’) but talks about the Palestinian militants as if they are a barbaric brown horde. Refusing to see Hamas as a conservative, bourgeois-democratic party and instead painting them as an irrational, illiberal, and deranged group of zealots is not class analysis — it’s chauvinism, plain and simple. Hamas (if we are to believe their most recent charter) seeks to establish a liberal-conservative, pluralistic society with (at least nominally) equal representation. They are not ISIS or al-Qaeda, but rather a state-in-miniature.
As a state-in-miniature, Hamas doesn’t engage in wanton, asymmetrical violence for no reason. No amount of NYT hand-wringing makes that correct. Hamas has political goals and aims, and the rank-and-file have more than a few reasons to join their ranks. The violence of October 7th was not simply a ransacking blood quest. They are not out to ‘inspire Jihad.’ What we saw that day was, on the one hand, a coordinated attack by a rational actor against a state power dedicated to their dismantling, and on the other, a reaction of people with almost nothing at all to lose, flinging themselves toward their hated enemy in a desperate attempt to stop everyone and everything they love from being annihilated.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! — Mario Savio
There’s no point in seriously denying that Hamas committed atrocities during their incursion. I disagree with some of the other responses to Lazare’s letter here. Something clearly went south. We may never know what exactly happened or how many people were gunned down by the IDF and not Hamas. The al-Aqsa flood is not the first time that Palestinian militants have attacked non-combatants. There’s no excuse for this. But moralizing over this achieves nothing, and the political forces that demand we apologize for it every time we speak want to continue the conditions that caused it for eternity. On this, there is no wiggle room; never give in and participate in the ritual denunciation of Hamas, no matter how much the genocide apologists try to rattle you. Sorry, Mr. Lazare, but it is not the Islamists who guarantee more violence and refuse peace. Israel rejects peace at every turn. The peaceful “Great March of Return” was met with horrific violence,2 and Israel murdered a Palestinian politician in 2012 during serious peace negotiations.3
Our analysis must start from this reality. All the key questions (How do we relate to the struggle against national oppression in Palestine? What is the balance of class forces in Palestine and Israel? What role does political Islam play in the fight? How can communists and workers outside of Palestine support Palestinian workers?) can’t be answered without understanding the fundamental asymmetry of Palestine and Israel; this is not a matter of simple nationalism.
On the other hand, many responses to Lazare’s garbage heap of a letter also reek. I don’t think there’s any point in performing hagiography for Hamas. The October 7th incursion accomplished some objectives, yes. But the militants are fundamentally incapable of militarily defeating Israel. There’s no reason at all to rotely list off the accomplishments of the Flood as if it were equivalent to the Tet Offensive. There is a reason the coalition of forces took hostages. The colonization of Palestine requires a political solution. I’m not arguing that Palestinian workers should lay down their arms and let Israel destroy them; quite the opposite — I support the Palestinian workers in their fight against genocide, and I think communists in the United States should find ways to help them. Internationalist solidarity is the order of the day; however, right now, there is no tangible way to affect the situation outside of disruptions and appeals to politicians for a ceasefire, and this is our fundamental issue.
While we work on the ground to find a method of political intervention, we should also be incredibly vigilant for snakes in the grass. The reply I found most profoundly ridiculous was Rob Ashlar’s Stalinist nonsense. Comparing Lazare to Joseph Goebbels is hilarious. Apologies, but I don’t think sending in a chauvinist letter to Cosmonaut Magazine is on the same level as directly aiding the industrial extermination of six million people. Lazare: racist idiot? Yes. Reich propaganda minister? No. And I don’t think someone who ‘hands it to’ the Taliban and the Russian armed forces has any right to denounce barbarism. It takes an extraordinary flattening of reality to place the murderous war in Ukraine on the same level as the national liberation of Palestine. The parallels between the invasion of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza and Russia’s targeting of hospitals in Ukraine are obvious.
Rob’s views are nothing but vulgar anti-Americanism. Neither Lazare nor Ashlar are really opposed to barbarism or imperialism. Communists don’t pick sides in inter-imperialist conflicts. I agree with Rob that Lazare’s positions might be ‘religious’ (they definitely aren’t based on class analysis), but his proclamations are equally religious. I despise American imperialism just as much as anyone else, and to take it seriously means analyzing it realistically. Acting like it’s on the verge of collapse is laughable. Millenarianism is well and great as a personal belief system (death to the American empire, of course), but let’s not pretend that it constitutes a good analysis.
To recognize American imperialism as an enemy of the global proletariat necessitates a class analysis of USian and global imperialism. Realpolitik and geopolitical musings don’t provide a single drop of insight or actionable praxis. I certainly hope that we Marxists, and even the pseudo-Marxists, can find a better course of action than clapping for the Taliban from our sofas.
Whether he realizes it or not, Ashlar’s framing makes it seem as if the partial defeat of American imperialism in Afghanistan is an end in itself. I’m sure millions of Afghan workers are glad that deranged American teenagers aren’t machine-gunning their homes anymore — but my political and personal sympathies extend a bit further, out towards the Afghan women and girls suffering under the iron fist of a deeply anti-women autocratic regime. If this makes me an ‘infantile ultra-leftist,’ I’ll be pleased with the mantle.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to genuinely oppose world imperialism without recognizing the social and class divisions endemic to it and the constructed nature of bourgeois nation-states that make it up. Bourgeois-national construction creates antagonism between previously non-existent social groups, naturalizes the social relations of capitalist society, and ultimately siphons workers away from class struggle toward purely nationalist machinations. We should never dissolve our opposition to bourgeois nationalism in the struggle against national oppression; this opposition is born out of and is an extension of the class struggle, not separate from nor in addition to it. On this point, Lazare is not wrong, though I don’t believe that he means it sincerely for a second.
* * *
This proximal milieu could close the door to the
Closeness that keeps us inside the spaces that we hide
My heart burns cold as life, leaves my daughter’s eyes
I am the mother of the dying, the dust, the denouement. — Silent Planet, “Tiny Hands (Au Revoir)”
On June 10, 1944, the SS destroyed Oradour-sur-Glane in retaliation for a partisan assassination of a regional SS leader. The Nazi ghouls surrounded the small French village, rounded up and killed all of the men, then herded the women and children into a church and lit it on fire. Some villagers tried to escape, but the soldiers fired at them with machine guns. Marguerite Rouffanche survived by climbing through a rear window, followed by a young woman holding a baby. Both were gunned down. She was the only survivor.
On December 19, 2023, the Israeli Defense Forces invaded the Al Awda building in Gaza City, separating the men from the women and children and gunning down eleven of the men in front of their families. They then forced the women and children into a room and threw grenades inside.4
We might not know the full horror of the genocide in Gaza until years from now. The scale of the death camps in Poland, or the Armenian mass graves, was not widely known until a few years afterward. I hope we can look back, this time, and say that we did something for once, or at least that we spoke on the matter with the gravity it required. It won’t bring back the already-murdered, but it’s vital. At the very least, we should try to approach the Gazan genocide with more tact and less hate than Daniel Lazare. He and his ilk are condemned by the courts of history more and more every day.
-Kristian Lamprecht
- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Marx and Engels: 1880-1883, vol. 46 (International Publishers, 1993), 356.
- “Two Years on: People Injured and Traumatized during the ‘Great March of Return’ Are Still Struggling.” United Nations, June 4, 2020. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/two-years-on-people-injured-and-traumatized-during-the-great-march-of-return-are-still-struggling/.
- Sahar Khan, “Israel Rejected Peace with Hamas on Five Occasions,” Inkstick, October 26, 2023, https://inkstickmedia.com/israel-rejected-peace-with-hamas-on-five-occasions/.
- “Unlawful Killings in Gaza City,” ReliefWeb, December 20, 2023, https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/un-human-rights-office-opt-unlawful-killings-gaza-city.