Dan Lazare sums up his analysis in the following words: “The international proletariat must defend Palestinians against the ravages of Israel, but at the same time defend Israeli workers against the ravages of the so-called Islamic resistance.” Of course, anyone invested in the Palestinian cause will recoil at this framing, this reference to the “ravages” of war on both sides as though there were any comparison between the violence of the Israeli state and that of the armed resistance. But let us set that aside for the moment and deal with Lazare’s argument on his own terms. What are the theoretical underpinnings of this view?
The crux of Lazare’s position is that nothing can be achieved without uniting the Jewish and Palestinian proletariats against both the Israeli state and nationalist organizations like Hamas. The history of the anti-colonial movement in the post-war period has amply demonstrated that nationalist groups are hostile to the working class and will betray them in favor of a domestic capitalism the moment they come to power. Hence, socialists must oppose all forms of nationalism, even those of the oppressed. From this, Lazare concludes that, however distant or hopeless it may seem, the only path to Palestinian liberation is through a struggle to unite the working class internationally, and this also requires exposing Hamas as an obstacle to liberation in that its nationalism undercuts the need for proletarian internationalism. I believe Lazare will agree that this is an accurate summary of his position, though he himself has not made it this explicit in his letters.
These fine ideals, I believe, are Lazare’s starting point, but there is considerable ambiguity in the political conclusions he derives from them. Is he only against nationalism, or is he against armed resistance in general, as the phrase “there is no military solution” would imply? If it is the latter, his position is nakedly reactionary, and would have put him on the other side of the barricades in essentially every anti-colonial struggle of the last century. If, on the other hand, he is only against violence led by nationalist groups, then we only need to look at the actions of communists on the ground to see how detached his position is. The PFLP and other Palestinian communist groups—to the extent they exist—have fought alongside Hamas in Gaza. This does not in any way mean that they have endorsed the domination of Hamas over the national liberation movement. But in a life-or-death situation, the principal concern of communists cannot be agitating for leadership or raising slogans; it is armed struggle against the Israeli assault, which obviously requires joint action with groups like Hamas. And this also was true in the dire situation these forces confronted before October 7.
Then again, the PFLP is a faction within the PLO, which is an explicitly Palestinian nationalist grouping. So, does Lazare think we should pitch the PFLP overboard as well, or might this suggest the need for a more nuanced approach to anti-colonial nationalism? If Lazare wants us to “distance” ourselves from all forms of nationalism, we will have to take an oppositional stance against essentially every organized form of Palestinian resistance over the last half century. More precisely, it is an ultimatistic stance: in so many words, Lazare says to the liberation movement: “conduct your fight by our principles, or we will have nothing to do with you.” But then again, Lazare doesn’t so much as mention the PLO, the PFLP, or anything else concrete about events in Gaza, so it’s hard to say just what he thinks. That is no problem for him though, because in reality, what he is preaching is abstentionism, and that requires nothing concrete.
Further confusing the debate is that Lazare seems to base himself on a rejection of bourgeois nationalism generally but conflates these with Islamism and Hamas specifically. In fact, this is no accident. He assiduously avoids mention of any aspect of the resistance other than Hamas because he doesn’t want to draw his arguments to their logical conclusion: a rejection of the Palestinians’ right to resist. This accounts for the ambiguity of his arguments, and his need to set up a false equivalence between Hamas and the whole national liberation movement, and between armed resistance and religious jihad.
Zionism justifies its assault on Gaza by presenting Hamas as a criminal syndicate from which the Gazans need to be liberated. Hamas and Islamism are equated with any form of armed resistance in order to discredit the national liberation struggle and obscure its anti-colonial character with the label “religious extremism.” This is a formalistic and ahistorical rendering, in which, on the one hand, Hamas and the masses are sectioned off into separate categories, and on the other hand, Hamas is equated with the entire anti-colonial struggle. Lazare is anxious to defend the purity of the Palestinian masses by stressing that Hamas doesn’t speak for them, but in doing so he ends up echoing the characterization of Hamas as an ahistorical bogeyman.
In fact, as Hisham H. Ahmed lays out in a 2008 article, armed resistance to the occupation was initially led by secular Palestinian nationalism, while Islamism preferred other methods:
…when Palestinian nationalism as concretized through resistance to the Israeli occupation in the 1970s and 1980s was at its zenith, the Islamic movement in Palestine, i.e. the Palestinian wing of the [Muslim] Brotherhood and the precursor to Hamas, advocated non-involvement in direct political activities and preached confinement to religious educational duties. The national movement emphasized armed struggle to bring about liberation while the Islamists stressed subtle social transformation… Prior to the Intifada, the Islamists opted to stay outside the realm of combating the occupation under the rubric of being preoccupied with ‘educating’ their constituency. However, when the Intifada broke out, the Islamists, particularly the young, realized that non-involvement amounted to political extinction. Hence, Hamas was formed as a way to underscore the change of attitude from the earlier one adopted by the Brotherhood.
In other words, the methods of Hamas are not due, in the first instance, to religious ideas. Rather, it was compelled by the development of the mass movement itself to take up methods of armed struggle. Its ideas are shaped by its social environment, by the material realities of the occupation. This should have been obvious to a Marxist. To speak of Hamas primarily in religious terms, as Lazare does, as a group bent on “a medieval religious crusade,” is to detach Hamas from its historical origins and flip causes on their heads in a manner worthy of a liberal commentator.
Ahmed continues:
The Oslo Accords created shock waves in Palestinian society… The consensus established earlier by the PLO was challenged and actually questioned by Hamas, especially as the PLO recognized Israel even while the latter remained an occupying power. To make matters worse, the unifying PLO was practically replaced by the complacent Palestinian National Authority (PNA, or PA)…
At the same time, it was natural as a function of Oslo that the nationalist fervor which used to help Fatah acquire its domestic strength and popularity had to be held in check… Rampant economic and moral corruption in the PNA, a non-promising political process and continued Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people during the peace era, all were factors which provided opportunities for Hamas…
The most important development at that time was that all Palestinian factions espoused direct resistance to the occupation. This in effect legitimated Hamas’s advocacies during the Oslo era: In other words, due to the intensity of repression by the Israeli army, Palestinian factions found themselves driven to follow in the footsteps of Hamas, in many respects.
With the Palestinian working class excluded from the Histadrut, the racist federation of Israeli “trade unions,” and held down as a permanent underclass of hyper-exploited workers, there was no possibility of a joint struggle against Israeli capital. In these circumstances, it was inevitable that the Palestinian masses turned to militant nationalism. With the discrediting of the Palestinian political establishment in the PA and PLO (and the Israeli efforts to destroy the secular opposition), it was Hamas that took up this mantle. Even this short historical outline is enough to see that Hamas cannot be understood as a primarily religious phenomenon (as liberal commentators like to bloviate) or a mere agent of the Iranians. That it has been borne along by the shifts in the Palestinian masses as much or more than it has directed or mis-directed them, is underscored by the 2017 Charter, which Nicolas V has already referenced. This document has a strikingly different orientation than the 1988 Covenant, with Hamas, among other things, affirming “that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”
Marxist Politics Are Rooted in Practice
In his first letter, Lazare quotes from Lenin’s “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions,” but in fact, Lenin says exactly the opposite of what Lazare wants him to say: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.” The whole point of contention is that Lazare does not want a “temporary alliance” but a pure revolutionary process that conforms to a set of already-laid-down ideals.
Lenin, in his polemics against Rosa Luxemburg on “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” critiques Luxemburg for over-generalizing in her treatment of nationalisms. Against Luxemburg’s fear that “recognition of the right to self-determination is tantamount to supporting the bourgeois nationalism of the oppressed nation,” Lenin writes: “in her fear of the nationalism of the bourgeoisie of oppressed nations, Rosa Luxemburg is actually playing into the hands of the Black-Hundred nationalism of the Great Russians!” Lenin again and again stresses the need for concrete analysis and the need to “study the attitude of the various classes of society towards this question,” in other words, exactly the opposite approach of those Marxists in the imperialist countries that preach general (i.e. abstract) “Marxist” principles about nationalism. Lenin goes on to note that what, for Luxemburg, was a mistaken generalization from the experiences of the Polish social democracy on the national question, became in the hands of opportunists, a justification for the “objective opportunist support for Great-Russian imperialism.”
When Lazare argues, as though announcing a timeless edict, that the primary task for Marxists, at all times, is to struggle to unite the international working class against both capitalist states and nationalist organizations, we can say plainly that he is using abstract principles to cover for his own national chauvinism.
Just what, for Lazare, would this struggle consist of? As I noted in my first letter, he “makes not a single recommendation as to what workers and socialists in the West should actually do.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to feel the need to rectify this in his most recent piece. Detached from this question, any talk of internationalism is purely scholastic.
Lazare’s letters neglect to mention that there have, in fact, been significant shifts in the working class. The genocide in Gaza has radicalized millions of people around the world. Workers are connecting the brutality of imperialism abroad with the depredations of capitalists at home and are taking action in defense of the Palestinians. Union activists are rallying around demands for BDS, a set of essentially nationalist demands, which nevertheless have brought workers internationally into motion (see, for instance, the efforts underway in the UAW, Teamsters Mobilize’s statement, and this recent overview). It should be obvious that the main task for socialists in the West is to participate in this fight in the labor movement. That means, above all, a fight against the union bureaucracies. In the US, the Democratic Party-aligned AFL-CIO aims to defuse and co-opt popular opposition to the genocide with mealy-mouthed “ceasefire” statements, even as it attempts to block the movement of the rank-and-file to challenge its material support for Zionism.
The main ideological battle faced by workers in this struggle is to oppose the efforts of the Democrats and the union bureaucracies to muddy the waters by setting up false moral equivalences and deploring violence on both sides. Our reply is simple enough: We solidarize ourselves with and unequivocally support the national liberation movement. There is no equivalence between the violence of an oppressed people and that of a fascist, genocidal state armed to the teeth by imperialism.
This is the primary way that the question of Hamas is posed to the workers’ movement in practice, by the nature of the struggle itself. Does this rule out criticism of Hamas? No. It is possible to criticize nationalism and Islamism and still support the national liberation movement, of which it is a component part, because the question of political support isn’t a moralistic calculation. But the role of Hamas in the national liberation movement is, in practice, something that the Palestinian masses must answer for themselves. For workers internationally, the main question that is posed is our orientation to the liberation struggle as a whole.
Lazare’s method, in contrast, is thoroughly idealist. He subordinates the needs of the struggle to a theoretical system. He dissolves the complexities of the class struggle in abstractions and general principles that he insists on applying uniformly to all times and places. To him, international solidarity is an idea that the masses need to be led to, hence he is concerned primarily with an intellectual struggle to defend it. That is where academic Marxism will get you.
Reply to Dan Lazare’s Second Letter
Yet Lazare demands an answer. Amid the fog of war, in spite of unanswered questions about friendly fire and the falsifications of the Zionists, in a military operation with various actors, Lazare demands that we tear our attention away from Gaza and answer the all important question: do we or do we not support October 7?
This is why I brought up Marx’s comments on the Indian Revolution of 1857. Marx, in this passage, responds to the British charges against the Sepoys in the Indian Rebellion in exactly the manner I think we have to respond. However “infamous” the violence of the revolting parties, ultimate responsibility lies with the violence of colonialism. Lazare says I am “playing games in order to get Hamas off the hook.” Is “appalling, hideous, ineffable” not clear enough? What is at issue here is not prettifying Hamas or “getting it off the hook,” but explaining the historical roots of the violence, for only in this way can we orient ourselves to the class struggle.
But Lazare is set on his moralisms: “Just as Israel should be accountable for its own actions, Hamas should be as well. Hamad and Netanyahu should both be in the dock, and perhaps someday they will be, with Israeli and Palestinian workers serving as judge, jury, and executioner.” History is not a court of law, and our main concern is not what “should be” in Lazare’s imaginary Nuremberg. This is such an unserious approach to history that it is not necessary to comment on it further.
Finally, I just want to note that contrary to Lazare’s accusation, I am not in any way affiliated with the Socialist Equality Party. Yes, I spent a few years around them early in my political development, but I broke with them several years ago, as a simple Google search would have shown.
Reply to Christopher Carp on “The Masses”
Lazare asserts that October 7 was planned over the heads of the Palestinian masses: “The Gazan masses did not make any such decision – Hamas made it for them.” In my first letter, I reply that the masses are always “refracted through organizations” (except, perhaps, in moments of revolution, when the old institutions break apart under mass pressure). Thus, it’s necessary to be concrete, to examine the relationship of Hamas to the historical mass movement.
Christopher Carp reads into this that I want to distinguish between “the unmediated, revolutionary agency of ‘the masses’ and the mediated, non-revolutionary agency of ‘organizations’” and he transforms my letter from a defense of Cosmonaut’s “unconditional support of the movement for Palestinian liberation” into an attempt to “ignore Hamas” and craft a “detached political position.”
Carp has badly misread my letter. But he does raise a real political difference, in that he seems to think it is silly to talk about “the masses” at all. I find this a strange position for a Marxist to take. Read the founding documents of the PFLP and you will find a constant reference to the Palestinian masses and an orientation to their needs and struggles.
Carp writes that there is “no such thing as collective human agency that is not refracted through some form of pre-existing social infrastructure or, in other words, organization.” This is only half true. Organizations spring from the interests of various social strata and then in turn operate according to their own social dynamics. But just as they arise from class forces, so too the class struggle can sweep them away. To fetishize organizations and to avoid any mention of the masses is to forget the class struggle.
Under the heavy blows of imperialism, Hamas has come to play a leading role as a means of opposing the corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. Yet Hamas, and bourgeois nationalism generally, has a contradictory character in that it mobilizes the masses against imperialism but subordinates them to a domestic bourgeoisie.
In other words, the situation requires a dialectical conception. Both Lazare and Carp make a formal equation between the whole movement and its leading organization, though they draw opposite conclusions from this. One could, with the same method of reasoning, conclude that because the AFL-CIO leadership is Zionist, one should abstain from the labor movement in favor of “internationalism,” or conversely, that communists should give “critical support” to the union bureaucracies.
Carp’s line of thought leads to completely dissolving the Marxist left into bourgeois nationalism. The point of remembering the existence of “the masses”, and the point of remembering that the dominance of nationalism is only conjunctural, is to orient to a struggle from below.
Reply to Chez Ter
Chez Ter absurdly reduces the word “fascist” to an epithet, devoid of any political or historical content. Fascism is on the rise all around the world, and there are real consequences to trivializing it in this way. Historically, the conception of “social fascism” blurred the differences between fascism and social democracy, which led to the disarming of the German working class in the face of the growing threat of Nazism. Ter applies the same formalistic method to geopolitics: Russia is fighting against American imperialism in Ukraine, and so is Palestine. Thus, the two conflicts are the same. QED.
What I really want to discuss here, though, is Ter’s claim (without providing any evidence, of course) that “the Marxist role” was to support early Zionism. The reality is far more complicated. From its foundation in the late 19th century into the first decades of the 20th century, the main opponent of political Zionism, and its main barrier to gaining influence among Jewish workers, was the socialist movement. Zionism was primarily an ideology of the middle classes. Zionist intellectuals openly sought out an alliance with Western imperialism, which in turn used Zionism as a weapon against the socialist movement.
After the collapse of the Second International, Labor Zionism — that is, bourgeois nationalism that had appropriated some socialist-sounding language — came to dominate the Zionist movement. Just as fascism was obligated to co-opt and divert socialist sentiment behind so-called “national socialism,” early Zionism paid lip service to socialist ideals, because of the great influence that the socialist movement had among European Jews. At this point, the national chauvinist Socialist International increasingly came to associate with Labor Zionism, but Zionism was intransigently opposed by communist parties around the world. It was only after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, only when the socialist movement had been smashed, that Labor Zionism was able to dominate the politics of millions of desperately persecuted European Jews. The reactionary bourgeois nationalist character of Zionism was put on full display only a few years later, in the Nakba of 1948. Jason Schulman shows powerfully in “The Life and Death of Socialist Zionism,” how “‘Socialist’ Zionism was nationalist statism, or more concretely, a nationalism that used the working class for statist ends under a socialist guise.”
Ter wants to paint over this history with a broad brush. Marxism, he says, has had “a regrettable and repulsive past” in the anti-colonial struggles in the Middle East and Africa. But history shows us the opposite: tens of millions have fought under the banner of socialism in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. It was bourgeois nationalism that betrayed these anti-colonial struggles and subordinated them to the present form of world imperialism.
Ter says that “proletarian internationalism is futile in a region being bombed.” Yet Palestinian trade unions and communists have appealed to the international working class for support, and unions and workers around the world have responded, with a global mass protest movement that has drawn in tens of millions of people, and an emerging struggle against the union bureaucracies. That is proletarian internationalism in practice.
-Peter Ross
