Posted by Ken Waldron on October 20, 2024, 3:19 pm
Long article from July but informative:
Gaza is Free and Does Not Bargain
New Socialist.
July 12, 2024 Tom Gann
The statements of the Resistance groups are a valuable source of knowledge about what's happening in Palestine. So why aren’t British journalists paying attention?
The Israeli idea is that the real problem does not lie with the official Palestinian leadership; it is the Palestinian community which rejects the Israeli maximalist solution and expresses its readiness to oppose it, supplying an endless flow of fighters to the resistance organisations and rendering every possibility of agreement with the Palestinian negotiators impossible to implement.
Walid Daqqah
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. Calagacus, quoted in Tacitus.
On December 30th, an ‘Israeli’ soldier being held by the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades (the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) was killed following a failed rescue attempt. In an official statement, the group described the “many human losses” they inflicted, and how “dragging behind the tails of disappointment and defeat…the zionist enemy in its stupidity and arrogance, targeted that location with its air force to cover the retreat of its defeated soldiers which led to the killing of the prisoner”. The Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades have also reported that they are in possession of IOF laptops and a set of flash drives, which were seized “during the heroic Al-Aqsa Flood battle” and through which they have “obtained… valuable and precious information, military plans, and private data… [from which] our fighters are now benefitting.”
On January 4th, US and “coalition” forces, quite possibly including Britain, assassinated Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces commander Taleb Al-Saedi in Karbala. The Popular Mobilisation Forces are part of the Iraqi Armed Forces and were cohered predominantly to fight ISIS. The PMF’s role as part of the Iraqi state, albeit with considerable autonomy, gives their position a contradictory character with regard to the US and Britain. They are among the most effective forces fighting ISIS, but, at the same time, elements of the PMF are designated by the US as terrorist groups. On the most basic level, the irony of assassinating a commander in a serious anti-ISIS military force, when fighting ISIS is the justification for the ongoing US and British presence, should be obvious. On top of this, the assassination of a figure who is, essentially, a senior commander in the Iraqi Army is a grotesque violation of sovereignty. In response to the assassination, the Iraqi government have opened talks aiming to set a timetable for the total withdrawal of US and coalition forces. The US has not accepted this demand, though it seems possible that their military presence will be reduced. The wider context for the assassination of Al-Saedi is the extent of Iraqi solidarity with Palestine.
‘Israel’ cannot be abstracted from world imperialism under the hegemony of the US, and the other side of this, of course, is that regional conflicts cannot be abstracted from the question of Palestine. tweet this Both these stories matter a great deal, but I have seen no mention of them in the official press. Moreover, they have barely been mentioned in more critical outlets, or even on British pro-Palestinian social media. Only after the Iraqi Resistance killed three US soldiers on January 28th, “with the explicit purpose of stopping the zionist genocide on Gaza”, and the US immediately ordered reprisal strikes, did Western media begin to pay attention to the extent of Resistance attacks in Iraq and Syria—mostly by reporting on US Defence Department press conferences. One such report, in the Guardian, tells us that “[US Defence Secretary Lloyd] Austin acknowledged that there had been 160 strikes on US bases in Syria and Iraq since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October,” but offers little more explanation of the situation, and no broader contextualisation. In April, following Iran’s response to the ‘Israeli’ attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the Guardian published a just-about-adequate piece aiming to contextualise ‘Israel’-Iran relations, which stated that, “after years in which both sides operated within the framework of a largely undeclared set of ‘rules’, Israel… bulldozed through every red line”. However, the analysis entirely ignored the existing role of the US in Iraq and Syria. The US appears only as a benign and fully external agent—but nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is, ‘Israel’ cannot be abstracted from world imperialism under the hegemony of the US, and the other side of this, of course, is that regional conflicts cannot be abstracted from the question of Palestine. The US is aiming to suppress—on behalf of ‘Israel’, but ultimately to secure its own hegemony—solidarity action with Palestine across the Arab nation.
David Miller @Tracking_Power 1h This essay by Comrade Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) from July in @NewSocialistNS is possibly the most comprehensive assessment of the war for Palestine that I have seen from a British socialist in the past year: newsocialist.org.uk/gaza-is-…
I urge you to set aside the time to read it in full.
It is a sign of how far and how quickly one's understanding of anti-imperialism can develop when exposed to Resistance sources directly, without distortion by Zionists.
As Comrade Gann rightly says:
'This scrupulous ignorance largely extends even to pro-Palestinian journalists and outlets. Has Owen Jones ever drawn on Resistance News Network? Has Novara? Even Declassified, who have otherwise exposed important elements of the situation, such as the involvement of British planes in the genocide (via Cyprus), have ignored it. The dominant tendency on the British left has thus far been to focus on the figure of the Palestinian as perpetual victim, following a line of argument most powerfully articulated in Judith Butler’s Frames of War, which tends to stress the equal “grievability” of Palestinian life.'
Comrade Gann and the New Socialist took the disastrously wrong position on the fabricated 'Labour antisemitism' smears, perhaps previously having been under-exposed to the Islamic realist worldview of the Resistance (present even among socialist Resistance organisations, such as the PFLP, and DFLP) which offers such a solid materialist framework for understanding how Zionist hasbara works and teaches to resist such banal 'antisemitism' smears.
During the Corbyn years, New Socialist threw the most enlightened anti-imperialist Labour MP of the past decade, Chris Williamson (@DerbyChrisW), under the bus by entertaining and reproducing Zionist talking points about him. At the time, New Socialist as an organ was part of the cacophony of political illiterates among the British Left with no understanding of Zionist history and tactics or the scale of Zionist entryism and subversion in the UK. They served as unwitting footsoldiers for a Zionist strategy that stretched across Europe, which had the intention of destroying the bonds of solidarity among anti-imperialists as a prelude to conducting a Jewish supremacist genocide across the Levant. We told you then and we're telling you now.
This naivety has also extended to other issues at the New Socialist, such as indulging Kurdish separatist killers who work on behalf of NATO as 'freedom fighters'. Such naivety arises from poor fundamental analysis and underlying systemic Islamophobia, and results in the lionising of any old band of secularist extremist thugs who post pictures of bare-headed women toting rifles.
And this brings me to the only major deficiency in Comrade Gann's sensitive and much-needed essay. He comes close to addressing the question of the centrality of Islam to the transformation and effectiveness of the Palestinian Resistance when he admonishes Matan Kaminer:
'One supports *this* Resistance or one does not support Palestinian liberation.'
Comrade Gann is correct. Secularist socialists (often simultaneously Islamophobes and Judeophiles, phenomena which are strongly correlated among influential thinkers and policymakers on both right and left who created and facilitated the ongoing War on Terror) cannot dictate to the noble people of the Resistance what they ought to believe and are in no position to condition their support during this 140-year long genocide in which they have done nothing but assist the Zionists.
But it is clear that some very important and fundamental naivety remains in Comrade Gann's approach. In the quote above, he is chiding Matan Kaminer. Let's be clear: 'Matan Kaminer' is a Zionist propagandist, which is why his slander against the Resistance was published by Jewish Voice for Labour. Kaminer's purpose is to peel leftist support away from the Resistance and keep naive, Judeophilic white liberals second-guessing themselves by making spurious arguments about how some counter-hegemonic movements engage in 'capitalist exploitation of women, nature and colonies'. This is what the kids might call "shit-tier hasbara".
If Comrade Gann wants to join the ranks of us anti-Zionists and anti-imperialists, he should bear in mind the first rule: we don't take lectures from our enemies. Jewish supremacists, and Jews who harbour even residual Zionism, or who refuse to categorically reject the hegemonic Jewishness in the world today which conditions Jewishness upon Zionism, are to be mocked and defeated, not consulted. Furthermore, who cares what some Ashkenazi colonist toad has to say about the Resistance? Has the Resistance not produced thousands of leaders in 140 years? Are their works and writings and speeches not sufficient for you? What does it say about white leftists that they constantly rely on Jewish affirmation for their worldview, especially concerning Islam, the Levant and West Asia? It says they can be separated into the category of naïfs and cowards, or outright collaborators. The first category need to shape up if they're going to be useful in the days and nights ahead. The second category must be outed and face the consequences.
But I welcome the evolution of Comrade Gann's thinking, which is testament to his desire for knowledge. Unlike others on the British Left, Comrade Gann has striven to understand the genocide and the war by going to the source: the statements, daily battlefield updates and speeches and writings of figures and movements in the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance.
As I have always said, there is no way to understand West Asia (or the world as it is, really) without these invaluable sources. In the coming days, I will again be pointing to more useful sources of information concerning the Zionist war for global hegemony, in which the Levant in its totality is sought by Zionist militants as their territorial operating base.
"...the first rule: we don't take lectures from our enemies. Jewish supremacists, and Jews who harbour even residual Zionism, or who refuse to categorically reject the hegemonic Jewishness in the world today which conditions Jewishness upon Zionism, are to be mocked and defeated, not consulted. Furthermore, who cares what some Ashkenazi colonist toad has to say about the Resistance? Has the Resistance not produced thousands of leaders in 140 years? Are their works and writings and speeches not sufficient for you?"
on October 20, 2024, 3:19 pm