by Marcone de Oliveira
The following is an unofficial English translation of an article from the Brazilian New Democratic newspaper A Nova Democracia, originally published on June 5, 2024, found here.
There is a long road that runs from the main street of the historic Shejaiya district to the northern end of the occupied Palestinian lands in Safad, as writer Ghassan Kanafani said. This road runs from one end of the Gaza Strip to the other, but it also cuts through history. It is the road of Saladin, champion of the Battle of Hatim, observed from above by the living memory of Shuja al-Din Uthman al-Kurdi, emir from continued resistance to the Crusader invasion. It is the road that echoes the cry for revolt against the British Mandate and against the submissive leaderships, coming from the hills of Ya’d, in 1935. Coming out of the mouth of Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, before his heroic death, this cry also signaled the transformation of the struggle for an independent nation, for the restoration of the honor and freedom of an entire subjugated people, within the conditions of the new epoch. From the most impoverished masses who attended al-Qassam’s funeral, the stones that imposed the challenge to the greatest power then present in the world, broke, they were turned into projectiles and rockets and bombs in the 1980s and 2000s, in the First and Second Intifada. Just as they did not bow to the colonial power of the British, these masses would not bow to the Zionists.
This long road is also covered with lost members of fighters, men and women, elderly, children, blood, from the ugly “debris of defeat”. The heroes, like al-Qassam, and the masses have not yet seen their end, hindered successively by the violence of British imperialism, for the betrayal of reactionary leaders from within and from the Arab countries and for Zionism, supported by the greatest enemy of the peoples, by the hegemonic superpower only USA. However, like Shejaiya, so often destroyed and rebuilt, defiant and unbreakable, like the Palestinian people, who turned stones into rockets and bombs, the rubble of defeat into imperatives of victory, the road itself cannot be erased, forgotten, and every severed member, every corner occupied, only increases the challenge, only advances the march.
Relative impediments, such as tears, cannot restrain or cool the struggle, which transcends them. Fear, an individual feeling, can only perish in the face of the need for multitudinous courage, which becomes a giant within each one, a giant greater than any of the already buried or dying forces that project themselves as eternal. The road connecting Shejaiya to Safad, which connects Gaza to Vietnam, to the slums and camps of Brazil, is the only truly eternal force, the force of popular rebellion. Today we are witnesses, but also agents of this force.
The “day after”
President Joe Biden said: “As someone whose had a lifelong commitment to Israel, as the only American president who has ever gone to Israel in a time of war, as someone who just sent the U.S. forces to directly defend Israel when it was attacked by Iran, I ask you to take a step back and think what will happen if this moment is lost. We can’t lose this moment.” He continued: “It’s time for this war to end and for the day after to begin.” With eight months of war, of resistance and firmness of the fighters and the Palestinian people, of cowardly and genocidal attacks by the Zionist state, his words are that of a desperate and helpless man, a recognition of weakness.
The Zionist military defeat against the Palestinian National Resistance is renewed day by day. From the surprise and devastating attack imposed on the Occupation Forces on October 7 last year to their inability to reach, in eight months, any of the goals set forth in the war declared the next day, there is no denying it. Palestinian military organizations in this period have proven themselves capable of not only maintaining, but qualitatively developing their combat capabilities, as well as recently, when they took new hostages in a complex ambush. The political defeat of “Israel”, in turn, transcends borders like never before in the history of the already almost secular confrontation.
This is a defeat expressed in internal disorder, in the fragmentation at all levels of political and military forces: fragmentation in the reactionary coalition of Benjamin Netanyahu with the far-right of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, in constant threat of being dissolved; fragmentation between the colonialist government forces in general, and especially within the “mixed” war cabinet, who quarrel over how best to keep the occupation standing by or staunchly open and declared genocide; fragmentation between local political forces and the central government, exhausted by destruction in the north; fragmentation between military forces, and, with numerous layoffs of important names since the beginning of the war and a clear lack of cohesion in the troops, which is also reflected, side by side with the military defeat, the, in its low morale.
In Zionist society, the fiasco has been creating waves of protests against Netanyahu’s stay in government and Zionist military strategy, unable to recover prisoners of war, highlighting the crisis, the fragility and precariousness, in fact, which is also ideological, of this reactionary power. The protests and the stampede of the colonialists also increase even more in the face of the destruction of settlements in the occupied Palestinian lands in the north, imposed by the Lebanese anti-imperialist organization Hezbollah in support of the Palestinian National Resistance and the people.
On the level of relations between the Zionist state and its master, the USA, Biden’s own statement says a lot. Netanyahu is against the ropes, precisely because Biden himself is against the ropes, insofar as his complicity with the genocide of the Palestinian people can no longer be hidden or diminished. The first of them must decide between going against the rumblings and barking of the far right and joining Biden’s “plan”, losing their coalition, or challenging the Yankee and thus seal their already inglorious destiny. In any case, the quake has been carried out, and those like Ben-Gvir make a point of increasing its impact.
In front of the world, the images of genocide, of children dying of starvation, of babies burned in the most recent and cowardly attack against Rafah, cannot be erased from the collective consciousness. The popular demonstrations, the occupations of universities, the challenge imposed in various parts of the world on governments and monopolies that maintain relations with the Zionist state, as well as the recognition of the complicity of the USA, of its coordination of genocide by economic and military means, of the complicity of all imperialist countries, they are getting closer and closer to a radicality and scope that has not been seen since the Vietnam war. What was already certain, at least on the part of the masses, in the Arab countries, was the hatred of the occupation, the protest against the attacks against the Palestinian people, it spreads to every corner of the globe, pressing Biden and his peers, forcing them to restrain their contumacious bloodshed and to, either in words or in partial attitudes, stand against the execution of the “final solution” of Netanyahu and his war cabinet. The pressures for a ceasefire, the economic pressures, with the decrease of Zionist exports and imports, either due to the Yemeni blockade or the impossibility of reactionary governments, such as Turkey, to negotiate with the Zionist state, the legal pressures for the recognition of the Palestinian state, which is already spreading even by the European imperialist countries, and by condemning Netanyahu for his participation in genocide crimes, they are also part of a global movement for the rights of the Palestinian people led by the masses and stand against the execution of the “final solution” of Netanyahu and his war cabinet.
It is in this scenario that Biden’s proposal for a ceasefire arises, without his “redemptive” claim being able to deceive anyone. It is more than clear that, given the suffering in Gaza, a comprehensive ceasefire, the withdrawal of the Occupation Forces and the exchange of the colonists and soldiers prisoners of war taken by the Resistance by the Palestinian political prisoners of the Zionist state are desirable objectives, in fact securing an unassailable victory of al-Aqsa Flood, the Palestinian fighters and the people and cementing in history the worst defeat of the Zionists, who would return humiliated to a “strength” whose structures proved rotten.
The Yankee proposal, however, contains a clause that at the same time cannot be concretized nor accepted: its idea of the “day after”. On this next day, the imperialists fantasize, reactionary guardians of an anti-scientific ideology, what will happen would be what the Romans called status quo ante bellum, the return of everything to its “due place”—in this case, the common oppression of the people under the occupying power and the slow and gradual genocide in Gaza by imposing blockades. However, they want the wheel of history to turn even before October 7, to 2005, before the election of Hamas to the government of the Gaza Strip, with the imposition of a “non-belligerent” power in its place. They want silent victims.
But the Palestinian people, with the proof of history and the proof of al-Aqsa Flood, do not accept victimization. After the Oslo peace accords and the capitulation of Fatah, the Second Intifada stormed the Zionist state and claimed the lives of more than a thousand settlers and soldiers of the Occupation Forces. Such numbers, with the successful operation last year, were hit with just one day. Popular resistance accepts no compromise with the peace of cemeteries and does not back down.
Biden’s proposal also bumps into Netanyahu’s need to keep his failed government on its feet. While the Palestinian National Resistance, in a historic coup, has cornered not only the Occupation Forces, but also the hegemonic superpower USA, which maintains them, the precariously sewn interests of the two parties are now separated by a thread. The blurring of the “day after” in the face of tensions between the two governments, both possibly with the days counted (that of Biden on account of the elections), is representative of the general destabilization of the correlation of forces in the region and in the world, repeated in the Far East and Europe.
Zionist and Yankee decadence, hastened by Palestinian bravery, is a double whammy in the myth of “invincibility”, which also renews faith in the armed struggle of the masses against oppression, it removes from the eyes of the people the sands deposited after the fall of the USSR and affronts the Hitlerite dream of the USA of complete world domination, of worldwide imposition and blackmail through the equipping of international organizations, economic subordination and military superiority. The “day after” of Biden and Yankee imperialism will be for them nothing but another step towards their end.
Antebellum
The emperor, decadent, bent, purulent, walks naked. It is always the voice of the child, in the midst of the crowds, that denounces him. It is always the new that challenges the old.
Yankees also use the Latin expression ante bellum, the two words, to refer to the historical period immediately preceding the Civil War that resulted in the end of slavery, the period of unrest before the storm. This meaning is closer to the current reality than the one that Biden’s “day after” seeks to make seem possible. The Palestinian National Resistance has unleashed against the parched prairie of imperialism a potent spark, animating not only the struggle for the liberation of the national people themselves, but of the peoples of the whole world, encouraging the protest, even the demand, of the resumption of a common struggle against the enemies of the world peoples, the imperialists and their lackeys. There’s no going back. The new slaveholders, those who benefit from the exploitation and violation of the peoples, are doomed to failure, which is already announced in an amplified way in the imminent fall of Zionism. The present war and the manifestation of the masses demonstrate a truth that has been so much sought to hide: it is not violence in the abstract that is rejected by the peoples, but unjust war. The struggle for freedom, on the other hand, has broad support from the popular masses and can never be stopped.
The victory of the peoples against imperialism today is like “a child ready to be born moving tirelessly within its mother”. A child who comes from Gaza, along the road that connects Shejaiya to Safad and the deepest corners of the oppressed countries of the world. And history also proves: the old must always give way to the new.
