Lazare, the man who gave us such hits as “racist vigilante subway lynching is fine, actually,” asks in his December 15th letter to Cosmonaut, what did the events on October 7th accomplish? The armchair crank, the ultraleftist, the fence sitting liberal, all love this question. I’ll answer it in a few ways.
Israel took a decisive blow on October 7th. Officers captured, bases and posts ransacked, heavily armed Israeli reinforcements pushed back by martyrs throwing rocks. The subsequent bombing campaign of civilian targets was seen for what it was — asymmetrical war crimes — by the international community. The naked genocidal tendency of Israel has been put on full display. Their later ground invasion has been a total failure. Millions across social media are sharing the cheers of Palestinians as invading IDF tanks are blown away by improvised explosives. If anyone deserves the title of “paper tiger” it’s the IDF/IOF. We are living in the aftermath of the moment in the Wizard of Oz when the curtain is pulled back only to reveal an impotent genocidal maniac pulling levers and pressing buttons that read “bomb children,” “crush internal Israeli dissent,” “biden money machine,” “google search: how to stop being cooked by the militants who are not armed to the teeth with nukes like we are.”
This recent uprising brought together a united front of militant organizations (even communist ones!) in Gaza. It has united the suppressed voices of Gazans around a singular and primary mission: the liberation of our people from the yoke of settler colonial occupation. That being the case, support for colonial revolt is not giving our political support for Hamas nor is it us “merging with bourgeois democratic forces.” Neither the PFLP, the DFLP, and other communist forces have any desire for such a merger. Support for the revolt does not require erasing the political and class divisions that exist in the Palestinian resistance movement. None of this contradicts the nature of a “temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries” per Lenin’s 1920 Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions. Our unwavering support for the revolt puts the reality of a socialist Palestine nearer not farther.
An exciting aside: PUMA, a long standing target of the BDS movement, has officially dropped the sponsorship of the Israeli soccer team — this is no coincidence to the world-historic event of October 7th and the ongoing global Palestinian solidarity movement. Israel is facing a crisis of legitimacy.
Waves of popular uprisings across the world coincide with the declining support for governments and parties who support Israel economically and militarily. These popular uprisings have become a wedge within so-called liberal democracies who’ve chosen full on authoritative restriction to freedom of speech, movement and assembly — Germany being the most illustrative example of a capitalist and imperialist state showing its true face. Recently, militant Labor Unions across the country are mobilizing support for a ceasefire. I see it in my Tenant Union. There we often talk about how “working class protagonists” need to “know your enemy.” Around the world millions are becoming conscious of the truly barbaric evils of settler colonialism. They are getting to know their enemy. My political home, DSA, has seen a surge in membership growth because of all our support for Palestine. Campaigns in chapters across the country have been ramping up to move our electeds to a ceasefire and, in the case of my chapter, work to get support for Not On Our Dime which will take away the charity status of organizations funding the genocide. Long held beef, stemming from the Bowman Affair, has been squashed between DSA and militant pro-Palestinian groups like Within Our Lifetime and the Palestinian Youth Movement. Our logo has been seen on posters next to other socialist groups, labor unions, tenant unions, and Palestinian and Muslim organizations — it looks like a united front to me!
The “opprobrium of the world” against militant fighters of Palestine that was aroused lasted maybe a few days. The real anger, vitriol, indignant criticism has, for the most part, been aimed at Israel, the occupation, its selective “democracy,” and apartheid regimes in general. Hamas, and the coalition of militants, aren’t likely to win a purely tactical war but the political war is almost certainly being won by the Palestinians. The Palestinian resistance was given new light as a consequence of October 7th. The reality that the Palestinians know and many on the left know: Palestinians are freedom fighters escaping the brutal conditions of a concentration camp. And pieces like this from Lazare try to strip away their mass protagonism of the liberation movement by insinuating that Hamas is not the people, that Hamas is controlling them and sending them to slaughter. It is much easier to rationalize and then dismiss the brutal, but necessary, choices of an occupied people by saying they are being manipulated by a poorly defined orientalist caricature of Hamas. Overt chauvinism like this is poison to a socialist movement that centers the oppressed right to fight for liberation: “The Gazan masses did not make any such decision – Hamas made it for them.” The oppressed aren’t puppets to Hamas. The people who fought on Oct 7th, captured strategic military locations, took military officers hostage, and the ones continuing to fight as I write are fighting for their own liberation. They are fighting to free the 8,000 prisoners in Israeli jails, some of which have been freed because of October 7th (another accomplishment, I hope you’re writing all this down). But still, Lazare suggests the masses weren’t consulted before any of these decisions. Where did he buy his crystal ball? Was he born with this extra sensory perception? Did he talk to the masses himself?
Lazare childishly yet patronizingly asks, “what did Hamas hope to achieve other than bringing down the wrath of the Israeli military on the Palestinian people?” The wrath of the Israeli military was there before October 7th and if the events of October 7th didn’t happen it would still be there. Since October 7th we’ve seen a non-stop bombing campaign in Gaza, a restriction of food, medicine, electricity, movement. The strongly held liberal myth that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East has fallen apart for most people. This is an accomplishment. In my Tenant Union we have seen a rise in consciousness as it relates to imperialism, settler colonialism, dispossession. We have leaders of Caribbean and West Indian descent making an organic connection between the plight of neocolonialism back home and the plight of settler colonialism in Palestine. We are building out an analysis that connects the displacement happening in our communities in Brooklyn via gentrification, hyper-policing, lack of access to food, and so on, to the occupation in Palestine. Raising class consciousness to a global anti-imperialist one is an accomplishment. Building a fighting mass protagonism throughout our independent working class institutions that can name and take on their enemy is an accomplishment.
Lastly, Lazare may gain something from reading Hamas’ 2017 charter which is radically different from the 1988 charter he cites. The claims Lazare makes could not be made by someone who has read the newest charter in good faith. If he did read it then he is trying to pass off a tremendous lie about Hamas — “Hamas’s goal is obvious: to inspire jihad throughout the Muslim world” — by omitting the most relevant expression of politics or a program we have on offer from Hamas. That being said, I have hope that Lazare isn’t a liar. Rather, he is simply a poor scholar.
-Nicolás V
