Regarding Nicolás V, Rob Ashlar, and Christopher Carp, I think their responses to my letter of Dec. 15 are a good example of how the Gaza war is sending all sectors of bourgeois political opinion careening to the right. On one side we have the Likud government, including a far-right Kahanist wing led by Bazalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. On the other, we have the Muslim Brotherhood in the form of Hamas. One is Jewish supremacist and increasingly apocalyptic in its religious thinking, while the other is Islamist and anti-Semitic, with a highly developed Masada complex of its own. Confronted with such a dismal choice, V, Ashlar, and Carp have opted for Hamas. But the more they embrace such an ultra-right outfit, the more they push others in a rightwing direction as well. The result is a collective march over a cliff. Socialists fight tooth-and-nail against such lemming-like behavior. But I think it’s obvious that the writers not socialists, but, rather, nationalists of an increasingly unhinged sort.
To get down to specifics:
V – it’s unclear if that’s an initial, a number, or what – accuses me of suffering from an “infantile disorder” because I fail to recognize that “Israel took a decisive blow on October 7th” that rendered its subsequent ground invasion “a total failure.” He continues: “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” (Israel Defense Forces/Israel Occupation Forces).
This is an example of the extreme lack of realism in certain quarters. I have no idea what planet V is living on, but he should understand that a military force capable of dropping 40,000 tons of high explosives in a two-month period – more than the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – can be called many things, but “paper tiger” is not one of them. V is beside himself over the “exciting” news that “PUMA, a long-standing target of the BDS movement, has officially dropped the sponsorship of the Israeli soccer team” in response to the war. He may be all aglow, but I doubt that Gazans living in terror of Israeli bombs feel the same. Does V honestly believe that a single cancelled corporate sponsorship is worth 20,000-plus civilian deaths?
V is upset that I dare suggest that Hamas should have consulted the people of Gaza before exposing them to massive Israeli retaliation. “Where did he [Lazare] buy his crystal ball?” his letter asks. “Was he born with this extra sensory perception? Did he talk to the masses himself?” The answer is, no, I did not. I merely noted that Hamas has not held an election since 2006, thereby shutting the Palestinian masses out of the decision-making process for close to two decades.
This is what made an interview that Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad gave in October so appalling. “The Al-Aqsa Flood is just a first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth,” he said in Beirut. “…Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
But what gives Hamad the right to impose martyrdom on a population that doesn’t even have the right to vote? Mass martyrdom is not something socialists celebrate. Quite the opposite, we celebrate mass democracy, mass equality, mass development – and the ability of the masses to enjoy the fruits of their struggles while they’re still able. Hamad may be on a death trip, but Marxists are not.
Ashlar’s letter is even worse. He calls me a “Third Reich propaganda minister,” “white supremacist scum,” and a “social fascist” (an old Stalinist term of abuse), but all he succeeds in doing in tossing such terms about is to demonstrate the depths of his own hysteria. His celebration of Hamas violence is chilling. “For a short time,” he says of the Oct. 7 terror operation, “the descendants of the Nakba retook the land from which their grandparents had been expelled. In a delightful twist of fate, many of them reenacted scenes visited upon their ancestors, but now turned against their tormentors.” Delightful? It reminds me of the old Weather Underground’s celebration of the Tate-LaBianca murders. “Wild!” is how the future law prof Bernardine Dohrn described it. Decent people can only turn away in disgust.
Ashlar defends jihad on the grounds that, “[f]or over twenty years, the protagonists of anti-imperialist struggles in the Muslim world – most notably, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine – have been self-professed mujahidin.” The facts are otherwise. The mujahideen who tore through Iraq in 2013-14 were members of ISIS, a group armed to the teeth with US and Saudi-supplied weaponry according to one international study. The mujahideen who toppled a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan in the 1980s were likewise armed and financed by the US and Saudis as well as Pakistani intelligence. The same goes for the “muj” who ravaged Syria beginning in late 2011. They, too, enjoyed ample backing by the US, Saudis, and others. US cultivation of the Muslim Brotherhood goes back to the days of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, is no more anti-imperialist than the Saudi monarchy with which the brotherhood was once closely associated.
Carp’s Dec. 18 letter accuses me of misusing Lenin’s 1920 “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions. As he puts it, my “reliance on such isolated, decontextualized quotes reveals a deep intellectual weakness.” I disagree, needless to say, since I think the document’s emphasis on the importance of maintaining ideological independence from Third World nationalists remains as timely and relevant as ever. But if Carp thinks I’m wrong, he should explain why, simply and clearly. Since he doesn’t, and since he fills his letter with a lot of high-sounding nonsense about Marxism as “a politically committed, socio-historical method of intellectual investigation engaged in the production of revolutionary strategic knowledge,” I can only conclude that he can’t.
Finally, there’s Peter Ross, whose more thoughtful letter of Dec. 19 accuses me of “social chauvinism” and being “more interested in defending the ideal of internationalism than in defending the Palestinians in a life or death struggle.” After being called Nazi scum and the like, this is almost a relief. But it’s still wrong since the whole point of my letter was to protest the violence being rained down on the Palestinian population.
Ross is a writer for the World Socialist Web Site and presumably a member of the Socialist Equality Party, a movement that saw something of a collective nervous breakdown in the mid-1980s, but which has pulled itself together under the leadership of David North. The rescue mission has not been entirely successful, however, since the SEP now embraces a number of rightwing positions, i.e. hostility to any and all labor unions, opposition to UAW organizing drives in the Deep South, and growing social patriotism.
Its position on Hamas is meanwhile contradictory. On Oct. 7, WSWS hailed the Hamas assault as “an uprising of the Palestinian people.” But now Ross says that “Hamas is not the masses,” which suggests it is no longer expressive of Palestinian popular sentiment. He then quotes an article that Marx wrote in 1857 about the hypocrisy of the British press in railing against Sepoy mutineers in India. Marx described Sepoy atrocities as “appalling, hideous, ineffable,” but countered that they were a reaction to British policies that were even more brutal. “Today,” Ross says, “we can say clearly that the conduct of Hamas on October 7, however infamous, is only the reflex of Israel’s own conduct in Palestine….”
Sepoys in 1857, Hamas in 2023 – the two are evidently the same. Yet in fact they’re apples and oranges. The Sepoys were a sector of Indian society, upper-caste Hindus for the most part who served as troops for the British East India Company and were being driven to distraction by British colonial policies. But Hamas is a party, which is to say a self-conscious political grouping whose roots go back to Egypt in the 1920s, two decades prior to the founding of the Jewish state. Arguing that it is merely a reflection of Israeli policies not only turns history on its head, but deprives Hamas of all “agency.” It suggests that it is not responsible for actions that are the product of decades of internal political development. I imagine that even Hamas would regard such attitudes as insulting and demeaning.
Ross is thus playing games in order to get Hamas off the hook. But it won’t fly. 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.
How would Marx have responded to the Oct. 7 atrocities? It’s impossible to say, of course. But his reaction to an Irish Brotherhood attempt to spring a member from a London prison in 1867 provides us with a clue. When a brotherhood bomb killed 12 innocent bystanders, Marx was incensed despite his strong support for the Irish cause. “This latest Fenian exploit,” he said in a letter to Engels, “…is a great folly. The London masses, who have shown much sympathy for Ireland, will be enraged by it and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletarians to let themselves be blown up for the benefit of Fenian emissaries. Secret, melodramatic conspiracies of this kind are, in general, more or less doomed to failure.” Engels agreed, replying a few days later that the Fenians were “fanatics,” “asses,” and “cannibals.”
Presumably, the two men would have had even harsher things to say about a terror operation that killed a hundred times more.
Let me make my position crystal clear. Zionism is an aggressive, expansionist, and racist ideology that is advancing rapidly toward fascism. The more it does, the deeper it will plunge the region into fratricide and war. But Hamas is rightwing, obscurantist, and profoundly anti-Semitic, and its presence condemns the region to fratricide and war as well. 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. To quote the Dec. 15 letter that started this ruckus:
“Marxists believe that the only solution to the bloody conflict in Gaza is a workers’ democracy in the context of a socialist Middle East, and we stress that anything that impedes that aim – as bloody communal slaughters obviously do – must be opposed. There is no military solution in Israel-Palestine. Cosmonaut
-Daniel Lazare
