Separation and unity

There are three competing and contradictory dialectics of fragmentation (or shattering) and unity (or unification). The first of these emerges from the current practices of ‘Israel’, which involve the physical destruction of the Palestinian people through genocide and, potentially, the liquidation of Palestine. This liquidation is a perennial fantasy of the ‘Israeli’ right (and, at this point, the ‘Israeli’ right describes the vast majority of ‘Israelis’), and was recently expressed by Avigdor Liberman in the Jerusalem Post. It relies on the claim that Palestine (even post-1967 Palestine) has no reality, and that the situation can therefore be resolved by Gaza being transferred to Egypt, some part of the West Bank that ‘Israel’ doesn’t want being transferred to Jordan, and Al-Quds being fully integrated into ‘Israel’, becoming its capital. This is proposed destruction on the diplomatic-legal level. The other side of this destruction is the moment of unification, where fragmentation becomes its opposite. To physically destroy the Palestinian people requires, from ‘Israel’s point of view, a grim unification of Gaza and the West Bank, as the entity increasingly applies to the latter the genocidal techniques it has already been using in the former. But/and, this destruction and genocidal unification has also strengthened the unity of the Palestinian Resistance.

The second dialectic is, for the most part, the position of world imperialism—not only the US, but regional bearers of imperialism (with the exception of contemporary ‘Israel’) too. There is a risk that of position being viewed, on the left, as a “nice” alternative to the physical destruction of the Palestinian people, but this must be rejected. Moreover, this position need necessarily not be anti-genocide. It competes with the ‘Israeli’ position, but it is not necessarily in antagonistic contradiction with it. It is the position of genocide as a means to an end (politicide) rather than genocide as an end in itself. The general preference of world imperialism is for an administrative unity, under some configuration of the PA to be imposed on the West Bank and Gaza from above. This would be the imposition onto Palestine of, in Daqqah’s words, “a level below full organisation, but not devolving into total chaos”.

Such a moment of unification would be predicated upon the fragmentation of the Palestinian people and their nullification as a political factor. Fragmentation, then, is the condition of possibility of administrative unity.

The intention of world imperialism is to render the Palestinian people, like Marx’s “sack of potatoes”, as a “simple addition of homologous magnitudes” with “merely a local interconnection… the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organisation among them.” As Marx argues, it was this fragmentation and absence of “national bond” and political organisation that both enabled and required, in 19th century France, the Bonapartist form of unification: a unification imposed from above. Where the Palestinian people differ from the French peasantry of the 19th century is that, despite everything, they still exist as a people. For Marx, the socio-economic position of the French peasantry guaranteed for the state their political reliability and malleability. With the Palestinians, things are very different. For administrative unity to work, separation and fragmentation—politicide as the destruction of national bonds and political organisation—must be imposed. At the moment, the attempt is being made to impose it through genocide.

The final dialectic of fragmentation and unification is that of the Palestinian Resistance. This dialectic is radically incompatible with the two previous imperialist positions. The unity of the Resistance is a political unity, not an administrative one, and it is the political unity that makes administrative unity impossible. The Resistance is both the expression and reinforcement of the national bond, rooted in the truth that the Palestinian people exist as a people, with collective and national values, despite all the efforts at their destruction. This unity is ideological, political, and military, but due to fragmentation, it is prevented from having a government form. The potential attraction of administrative unity is that it would resolve (albeit badly) the fragmentation between the West Bank and Gaza. The Resistance groups have their own solution to this fragmentation: a governmental form of political unity called the “three pillars”, recently defined by Ismail Haniyeh:

a unified national leadership within the framework of the Palestine Liberation Organisation for all forces, forming a national unity government in the West Bank and Gaza with an agreed national reference, and conducting general presidential, legislative, and Palestinian National Council elections.

The fact that Hamas are explicitly committed not only to elections, but to the establishment of a unity government that would necessarily require them to give up a lot of power would seem to undermine various hack arguments that present the group as brutally and undemocratically intransigent. Where the imperialist positions outlined above rely on the fragmentation and destruction (whether physical or political, or both) of the Palestinian people in order to impose new, unwanted unities, the unity of the Resistance emerges from and, crucially, helps secure against all efforts at fragmentation, the continuing unity of the Palestinian people.

This unity, as we have seen, is hard-won against genocide and attempted politicide. It is crucial to understand quite how intense ‘Israel’s’ efforts at politicide have been. As Daqqah writes:

The South African delegation that visited Palestine [in 2008] was astonished by the extent and nature of the measures imposed by Israel on the Palestinians and described them as having far surpassed the measures taken by the governments of South Africa during the Apartheid period. In the worst times of racial segregation in South Africa, there were never segregated roads for blacks and whites like the existing segregation in the OPT between roads for Jews and for Arabs… The one thing which astonished the South African delegation and rendered the term ‘racial segregation’ insufficient for describing and defining the Palestinians under the occupation, was the system of roadblocks separating not only Palestinians and Israelis, but also Palestinians from each other. Israel, as we know, divided the OPT and cut them into small enclaves, which has made life unbearable for the inhabitants.

This separation of Palestinians from Palestinians operates on a number of levels, from the separation of the West Bank and Gaza, to separations internal to the West Bank (the enclaves), to the various practices that Daqqah analyses within the smaller prison but reflected in the bigger one. To these we can now add—in a reversal of the transfer of genocidal techniques from Gaza to the West Bank—the imposition, both through genocide and the enforcement of disparate and disconnected so-called “safe zones”, of an new set of separations internal to Gaza, mirroring those internal to the West Bank.

Within the smaller prison, Daqqah also analyses the (partially successful) efforts to degrade national and collective values and identities into sub-national ones, rendering things easier for the prison administration and blunting, for a time, the moral leadership of the prisoners. The intention was to turn the prisoners “from a unified force with national concerns and shared values into individuals immersed in their private demands and concerns” and Daqqah also writes of “the measures taken in order to crush the prisoners [which] targeted their feelings of solidarity and the values of collective national action. Solidarity had the ability of turning the prisoners from a group of individuals and diverse factions, with various beliefs and ideologies, into one force.”

Such immersion in private demands and concerns is the pre-condition for bargaining.

What ‘Israel’ aims at (in the bigger and the smaller prisons) is a set of what Nicos Poulantzas calls “isolation effects”,
which are comparable to—indeed, in part derived from—and also intensifications of the isolation effects of capital in general. As a Marxist, Daqqah theorised the links between the “shapeless modern oppression” of ‘Israeli’ prisons—both big and small—and capitalist exploitation, in terms of how the oppressor or exploiter reaches “into every detail of your life”.
And so the sub-national identities into which ‘Israel’ tried to degrade the prisoners included “geographical affiliations”, party or factional identities, and, strikingly, the family. Family identities, for Daqqah, are both as anti-collective or anti-social as they are for Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh
—but they are also prisoners’ “most important and supportive social circle”.

Knowing this, ‘Israel’ has developed techniques of isolating prisoners from their families, in order to break their resistance.

Against all this, the fact that the Palestinian people exist at all as a people—that consciousness moulding has decisively failed—is a considerable achievement.
The Human Rights Discourse

There is another position, critical of ‘Israel’ and putatively pro-Palestinian, which replaces solidarity with the Resistance and its logic of unification in struggle with a broad acceptance of the fragmentation and isolation effects aimed for by the seemingly more benign imperialism described above. This is a long-standing tendency, and it was critically conceptualised by Daqqah as “the human rights discourse”.

In this discourse, Palestinians are (or ought to be) as much a sack of potatoes as they are for those seeking to force an administrative unity.

Marx’s “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented” here becomes, “they cannot save themselves, they must be saved.” And, as Daqqah clarifies, the saviour in most cases is supposed to be ‘Israel’—or, at least ‘Israel’’s better self. The human rights discourse, he argues:

concentrates its special efforts in order to prove specific violations considered by the Israeli judiciary and media as the exception to the rule, which is respect for human and prisoners’ rights. The result is that contrary to the pretence of exposing and being transparent, in reality this discourse hides facts and obscures the truth.

Three elements are significant here. Firstly, the stabilising effect of the discourse: horrors are not the rule, but the exception; the normal functioning of ‘Israel’ is essentially benign, and problems can be resolved within its framework. Secondly, connecting to Daqqah’s theory of the smaller and bigger prison, elements of the human rights discourse and its effects traverse all of Palestine—they are not just applicable to the jails. Thirdly, the human rights discourse has its own isolation effects. Indeed, the discourse itself is a part of the shift in the repertoires of torture towards consciousness moulding and separation. To return to Poulantzas: juridical subjectivation—and human rights discourse represents perhaps its leftward limit—is the model for the isolation effect. As demonstrated by the functioning of courts, the subject under the law is always an individual, and always alone. Moreover, in the Palestinian case, these isolated subjects are subjected to the jurisdiction of a hostile occupying power. The human rights discourse affirms, on the one hand, the agency of ‘Israel’ to correct so-called exceptions, and on the other, the Palestinian as isolated suffering subject, unable to save themselves. The subject of human rights is barely distinct from ‘Israel’’s moulded subject. Human rights discourse, therefore, doubly reproduces politicide.

The human rights discourse has its own isolation effects. Indeed, the discourse itself is a part of the shift in the repertoires of torture towards consciousness moulding and separation.
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The human rights discourse has very much been evident in the last month, following the announcement from Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, of his intention to pursue arrest warrants against not only Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, but also against the Hamas and Al-Qassam leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh. The contradiction between the celebratory positions taken up by the vast majority of the British left (within which the human rights discourse is hegemonic
) and the critical ones taken up by the Palestinian Resistance has been particularly striking. Samidoun released a statement reminding the world that “there is no equation to be made between the legitimate resistance of the Palestinian people and its leadership, including Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, and the illegitimate Zionist coloniser”. PIJ said that Khan was “equating the victim with the executioner”. The human rights discourse abstracts the crucial distinction between resistance and colonialism, and assumes an Olympian position, entitled to judge both sides. International law and human rights discourse assumes its (and the state’s whose agency is held to be its legitimate policemen) role in punishing, in place of the action of people to free themselves. The human rights discourse aims to transform each Palestinian from an “active subject…into a passive, receptive object.”

In the human rights discourse, when states fail, when the aberration reaches a certain point, international law must step in and assume the role in judging and punishes. This internationalisation of the law further marginalises the action of people to free themselves. In the human rights discourse and its practice, there is a double move away from this active subject. Firstly, the move to the isolated subject of the law. This subject is equally alone when accused and when attempting to assert their rights, this is very different from the resistant subject, indeed, the resistant subject stands potentially accused. Secondly, even this isolated subject does not appear in court, such a subject cannot represent themselves, indeed, it is barely even represented. It is substituted by the, or ultimately, a state, or by “the international community” acting in a state-like way to prosecute a violation of the law. Within the human rights discourse, ‘Israel’ is held to be the state able to correct crimes committed by individuals in ‘Israeli’ institutions. If ‘Israel’ fails to do this, either another state, notably South Africa with the ICJ, or the bearers of international law in a state-like function, such as Karim Khan, must step in.

The individualisation in the indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant serves as an alibi. It not only ignores, in the words of PIJ, “the hundreds of war criminals among the enemy’s leaders, both politicians and military, whose crimes have been broadcasted in sound and image since October 7 until today,” but also the entire structure of the state and the Zionist project as a whole. Indeed, Khan’s references to ‘Israel’’s “right to take action to defend its population” further insulates the core of ‘Israel’ from attention. Even to punish every individual war criminal as an individual would, as Daqqah says, “hide facts and obscure the truth”.
This obfuscation, particularly when only two individuals are indicted, speaks to the aberration model of the human rights discourse and of international law. It posits, implicitly, a return to “normal”, once wrongdoers are punished and removed from power, with international law the agent. International law, in its “majestic equality”,

has become a fetish for most of the left in the imperial core.

In contrast to this fetishisation, Kanafani begins his 1971 interview with the NLR by saying to Fred Halliday: “I appreciate the fact that you reject bourgeois moralism and obedience to international law. These have been the cause of our tragedy.” Also against fetishisation, the Samidoun statement argues that “every legal achievement has been brought about not by the objective power or application of law, but by the shifting of reality brought about by the Palestinian armed struggle.” This brings us back to a final, central, aspect of Daqqah’s critique of human rights discourse. Human rights discourse is presented by Daqqah as a result of struggle in the prisons: the struggle in the prisons forces concessions and modifies techniques and repertoires. In the human rights discourse, conversely, the core of power—the ‘Israeli’ state—is left untouched.

“The tradition of the oppressed,” as Walter Benjamin wrote, “teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Echoing this from within the tradition of the oppressed, the PIJ statement on the indictments situates the present emergency within “76 years of crimes against humanity and war crimes against our people.”

The ICC announcement, then, is a victory in some ways—it is the effect of struggle within the law—but it is a victory where the basic and essential structures that help reproduce the current state of things remain untouched. We see one effect of these structures in the warrants for the three Resistance leaders. International law and the human rights discourse may not be the cause of this particular tragedy, but they absolutely offer no way out of it.

Walid Daqqah. 2011. ‘Consciousness Moulded or the Re-Identification of Torture’. In Abeer Baker and Anat Matar (eds.): Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel. London: Pluto Press, p.236. ↩

Tacitus. [98] 2009. Agricola. Translated by A. R. Birley. Oxford. Oxford World’s Classics, Chapter XXX. ↩

More recently, the US position on refusing seems to have hardened. The first round of talks halted almost as soon as they had started, following the attack on US troops in Jordan, and there now seems to be an increased reluctance to withdraw. Little has changed in the fight against ISIS, beyond US and British anti-Iranian and anti-Iraqi Resistance actions helping ISIS a little. However, it seems likely that its concerns about Iran as a challenger to regional hegemony will motivate the US to continue to station troops in Iraq.. ↩

Judith Butler. [2010] 2016. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. ↩

On June 11th, the homepage of Electronic Intifada featured 20 stories, of which only one substantially dealt with armed resistance — in this case the impact of Hezbollah on ‘Israel’ internally — and one with Palestinian protests within ‘Israel’. The rest predominantly covered ‘Israeli’ massacres, especially in Nuseirat, and also the suppression of solidarity with Palestine in Europe. To point this out is not to criticise the coverage of ‘Israeli’ massacres of Palestinians. These matter a great deal, and are covered far, far less by the mainstream media than they ought to be. The lack of coverage of the Resistance, however, does end up presenting a limited and potentially obfuscatory sense of the situation. I will return to this in the third piece in this series. ↩

I will return to these processes of ideological structuring — and how a fact can be acknowledged and instrumentalised in one context, while any wider effect of that acknowledgement is completely contained — in the second piece in this series. The most striking example of instrumentalisation is Heidi Bachram’s claim, in order to demand the proscription of the PFLP and the banning of Leila Khaled from entering Britain, that “The PFLP participated in 7/10 atrocities and were and are likely still holding hostages”. In any other context, for ‘Israel’s’ most enthusiastic backers, October 7th was entirely the affair of Hamas. ↩

RNN links “Arab Tails” to the following image. ↩

Obviously Cameron’s statement ignored the Damascus attack, hence the challenge. Sunak also ignored it, accusing Iran “of sowing chaos in its own backyard”, and promising to “stand up” for the security of our “regional partners including Jordan and Iraq”. Hopefully, what Britain has done to “stand up” for the security of Iraq is clear. Starmer also made no mention of the attack, but bewailed “the fear and instability being generated by Iran”. ↩

Until fairly recently, the fact ‘Israel’ was losing was barely remarked upon in Britain. There was one strong piece by Paul Rogers in the Guardian in December, in which Rogers also suggested that the extent of ‘Israeli’ casualties was being underplayed — but that was more or less that, and the piece never entered into the general discourse as something “respectable”. However, on the back of an article in Haaretz, which argued that “Israel has been defeated – A Total Defeat”, Owen Jones has since published a video on this theme. The Jones video is interesting and symptomatic, as is the fact that it required the legitimacy of an article in Haaretz to prompt it. I will explore it further in the third part of this piece. ↩

Daqqah’s work in English is restricted to the chapter ‘Consciousness Moulded or the Reidentification of Torture’, in the Pluto Press anthology Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel, and two remarkable essays of a far more literary character: “A Place Without a Door”, and “Uncle, Give me a Cigarette”. A fine analysis and account of Daqqah’s “abolitionist decolonisation”, can be found in Shai Gortler’s ‘The Samud Within’, which draws on as-yet-untranslated Daqqah texts written in Arabic and Hebrew, as well as ‘Consciousness Moulded…’. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.236-7. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.237. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.248. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.237. ↩

The linked statement here is the latest from a Resistance group on field executions. To get some sense of the scale of field executions — though the on-the-ground knowledge of even the Resistance groups will be limited — search “field executions” on RNN. ↩

It is worth also searching RNN and RNN Prisoners for Sde Teman. Such a search will show that it was being discussed far prior to the CNN story. Following the discussions of the Palestinian prisoner groups, Sde Teman was also mentioned by Haaretz (far prior to CNN deigning to notice), as the prisoner groups acknowledge. ↩

Antony Loewenstein. 2023. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. London: Verso, p.5. ↩

The duration of the protests, and their intensity, should be clear from a search for “Jordan” in RNN. ↩

Of Amman in 1984, Genet writes: “everyone felt relieved at his own rottenness, soothed at escaping from moral and aesthetic effort.” Jean Genet. [1986] 2003. Prisoner of Love. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: NYRB, p.71. This rottenness, and the relief at contemplating it, is what Gaza refuses, and what is particularly admired by the Jordanian protestors in “Gaza does not bargain”. ↩

Did the Atlantic expect Al-Ejri to turn up like this? ↩

There was a further escalation after the Nuseirat massacre. Again, what other response should there be? ↩

One can see this by searching RNN for “American-British warplanes”. ↩

A distinction can be made between a “classical” Leninist understanding of hegemony — what I have, elsewhere called an “internal” account — in which the question is the hegemonic element that helps cohere a particular political alliance or bloc, and an “external”, more Gramscian account, where the question of the hegemony of a particular social group over the whole of a society is emphasised. ↩

On the question of primary contradictions and the PFLP, see Samar Al-Saleh and L.K.‘s ‘The Palestinian Left will not be Hijacked: A Critique of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction’. The authors are particularly (and rightly) critical of the “mechanistic” way in which the category of Stalinism is applied to the apparently “‘false’ political tendency that places anticolonial liberation before socialism.” ↩

Leon Trotsky. 1947. Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence. Edited and translated by Charles Malamuth. London: Hollis & Carter, p.165. ↩

In Kaminer’s criticism of the Palestinian Resistance, it is difficult not to discern in his allegations of potential (!) extractivism and ecological mismanagement a further support in a racist, “tsk, tsk, these Arabs and their uncontrollable lust for hydrocarbons and ecological destruction.” ↩

Max Ajl. 2021. A People’s Green New Deal. London: Pluto Press, p.158. This combination of “non-political ecology”-type attacks as part of muddying questions around coups has been most apparent in the cases of Venezuela, and particularly Bolivia, but Kaminer’s attempted argument shows that this sort of greenwashing of imperialism is widely available as a strategy. It’s worth reading Ajl’s argument around this in A People’s Green New Deal with his excellent article ‘Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet’, especially the scepticism around the concept of “extractivism” and the “ignoring [of] the contradictions of Southern development and national liberation as they unfold against imperialism and monopoly capital.” Notably, in this text, Ajl is critical of Malm’s concept of “fossil capital” as another type of “carbon reductionism”. In the Malm/Kaminer debate, it is perhaps relevant to note that, although Malm takes up the correct line politically, his master concept of fossil capitalism is extremely mobilisable — as is “extractivism” — for the kind of gotchas Kaminer attempts. What insulates Malm from reaction on Palestine is not his key concept, or indeed his wider theory, but his contingent political perspective. ↩

Ajl, A People’s Green New Deal, p.12. ↩

Malm describes himself as an “ecological-Leninist”, but Malm’s ecological Leninism is essentially additive, a bringing together of two separate terms: a green term, and a red (Leninist) term, with the red term referring both to class politics and organisation. I have critiqued this previously, drawing on Ajl and Moore to suggest that this approach in fact leads to a tempering of radicalism. The ecological-Leninism I am calling for here not only involves the concrete analysis of concrete situations, as well as a particular account of hegemony, but is also essentially monist rather than dualist: a Leninism in the web of life, as it were. Following the classical account of hegemony, the notion that “Leninism” can represent an unambiguous working class politics seems questionable at best. Leninism is always a politics of alliance, and it is alliance that poses the question of hegemony. ↩

Louis Althusser has an interesting, if peculiar, reading of this phrase (or rather “the British one-liner, if my aunt had two wheels…”) within Marx’s work. Althusser suggests this lies behind Marx’s insistence that “if the essence (or knowledge) came down to the phenomenon (to what is immediately given), there would be no need for science”, which Althusser claims it “no doubt inspired”. The inspiration seems implausible, not least because, rather than positing a situation where attending to the immediate appearance of the aunt-bicycle could guarantee knowledge, the line surely refers to something like Kaminer’s raising of trivial, even fantastical, objections to avoid acknowledging what the conditions themselves call out for. Ironically, perhaps, the famous Gino D’Acampo outburst is, in fact suggestive of Althusser’s reading: a macaroni cheese with ham does not, thereby, become a carbonara. The change of appearance does not impact the essence. See Louis Althusser. [1972-3] 2020. ‘Draft of a Reply to Pilar Vilar’. In History and Imperialism: Writings 1963-86. Edited and Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Cambridge: Polity, p.46. Versions of the formulation appear fairly often in Marx, probably most importantly in Chapter 48 of Capital: Volume III, in the form, “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided”. Other formulations tend to define the essence of things relationally: the contrast between appearance and “inner connection” as the basis for the need for science, for example, in the 1867 letter to Engels in MECW, Volume 42, p.380. We are a long way here from aunts and grandmothers who may or may not also be bicycles. ↩

This is easiest to show by doing a search of “Qatar” on RNN, though there are useful examples from during the May ceasefire negotiations: 1, 2, 3, 4. ↩

As well as defensive resistance to ‘Israeli’ incursions, there are continual operations against the ‘Israeli’ state in the West Bank and Al-Quds, particularly against police and checkpoints. These were happening before the beginning of Al-Aqsa Flood, and are ongoing. One can search RNN for “stabbing operation” — usually conducted by unaffiliated individuals — and “shooting operation” — usually conducted by the Resistance groups in the West Bank — for a sense of this. The most recent shooting operation was conducted by the Al-Wadie group in Nablus on July 2nd; the most recent stabbing operation took place on June 18th. Shooting and stabbing operations are often undertaken against police and checkpoints. ↩

Grimly, major parts of the British left see prison guards, who are unionised in the POA, as comrades who are part of a shared struggle. We should reject this, not only for their role in Britain, but also their role in Palestine. ↩

Daqqah, ’Consciousness Moulded’, p.237. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.236. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.248,243. ↩

Nicos Poulantzas. [1968] 1978. Political Power and Social Classes. Translated by Timothy O’Hagan. London: Verso, p.130. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.235. ↩

Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. [1982] 2017. The Anti-Social Family. London: Verso. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.241. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.234. ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.234. ↩

Celebrations of the ICC judgement were notable, and almost universal among the British left on twitter. A symptomatic and worked-out position on the ICC, within the human rights discourse, can be found in Owen Jones’s column of May 22nd. Jones writes: “The arrest warrant requests detail, firstly, how three Hamas leaders should be held criminally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity including extermination, murder and hostage-taking. Their guilt is incontrovertible, and no cause justifies such depraved crimes against civilians. But there is a distinction to be made. For while Hamas’s crimes were obscene and indefensible, the prosecutor’s proposed charges against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, describe atrocities that were directly facilitated by cheerleader politicians, most notably in the US, UK and Germany, and legitimised by multiple media outlets.” For Jones, then, there is no moral distinction to be made between Palestinian victim and ‘Israeli’ executioner. The issue resides in the particular culpability of politicians and journalists in the imperial core for one set of “obscene” “indefensible” crimes, while they are held to bear no responsibility for the other set (which remain obscene and indefensible). In, fact even the claim politicians and journalists in the imperial core are culpable for ‘Israel’’s crimes but not the ‘crimes’ of Hamas, does not hold. It is the occupation and its horrors, as backed and enabled by world imperialism, that led to Al-Aqsa Flood as a response. There is culpability there too. We should also note Jones’s individualisation here; the point is surely not politicians and journalists as individuals, but the structures and relationships of which they are bearers, and that entails the complicity with those structures of everyone in the imperial core with (including, quite strongly, critical writers for the Guardian). ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.246. ↩

Daqqa,. ‘Consciouness Moulded’, p.234. ↩

See Anatole France’s Le Lys Rouge: “Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.” Peculiarly, the standard English translation renders la majestueuse égalité as “the majestic quality” which “prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from sleeping under the bridges, from begging in the streets, and from stealing bread.” ↩

Daqqah, ‘Consciousness Moulded’, p.237,244-6. ↩