Opinion | Farrukh Abadi
The heroic Operation al-Aqsa Flood has put into focus on an international level the debate on Palestine, and with it, the question of violence. As we have stated elsewhere on The Worker, there are two basic positions: to oppose armed resistance and support Israel, or to support armed resistance and oppose Israel. Vacillating between these two poles is the centrist position, which opposes both Israel’s genocide and the armed resistance, in essence promoting the existence of Israel while denying the right of the Palestinian people to liberate themselves, gun in hand.
The openly Zionist position and the pro-Palestine position both view the contradiction as antagonistic and the only path forward for its resolution through one side overcoming the other militarily. Politics and war are interlinked, and war is the highest form of political struggle. The centrist position, rooted in a collaborationist, liberal bourgeois perspective, seeks to reconcile the two sides and combine them into one; in other words, they want Zionist occupation, and they also want the Palestinian victim, disarmed.
The openly Zionist position is materially rooted in those who profit the most in the short-term from the intensified genocide, such as those tied to the armaments industry. They can see only the tips of their own noses, their short-sighted bloodlust for profits has tormented them with delusions of “destroying Hamas” or “defeating Hezbollah” amid increasing losses. They are willing to gamble the whole of Israel to realize more profits in the immediacy as they feel the weight of their economic crisis; wars of aggression help alleviate this, and they dream of restructuring—through bloodshed—the balance of power in the Middle East to their benefit.
The liberal bourgeoisie are relatively more far-sighted than this—they want to preserve Israel as a long-term military outpost for US imperialism. They promote the notion of a two-state solution and want to preserve Israel’s genocide but in a more discreet form. Like other Zionists, their hatred is directed at the resistance and its supporters; however, they will save a few frivolous words of condemnation for the most barbaric acts of Israel’s genocide. They are willing to sacrifice a part to preserve the whole. The pacifism propagated by this position is then an ideological weapon of imperialism aimed at disarming the oppressed and stripping them of the gun—necessary for the seizure of power.
The centrist position finds its home most readily among the petty-bourgeoisie, who, blunted between the big bourgeoisie and the proletariat, find themselves stuck between two world outlooks. There are those who claim that they support armed struggle but denounce its concrete manifestations for not conforming to their idyllic view of it. The Communist Manifesto has described such a viewpoint as “want[ing] all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom”; they want liberation but reject its violence. Mirroring this view on the other end of the spectrum of centrism are those who support Israel but reject its genocide; just as the first position believes there can be liberation without arms, this position believes there can be an Israel without genocide. Centrism is marked by seeing social phenomenon in a vacuum rather than interrelated, hence why it purports the resolution of contradiction by combining two into one while rejecting that one must overcome the other.
Politically, this view is manifested in the right-wing of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, which advocates for electoralism, revisionism, and class collaboration. It focuses on death counts and downplays, ignores, or even opposes the resistance; it emphasizes respectability and appeals to monopoly media in the hopes of “good press”; it suppresses the more militant wing of the movement through peace policing, at times openly collaborating with the state. They want to win the masses to the defense of the very system which engenders genocide, hoping to turn the vacillating character of the center into a definite right-wing and isolate the Left. It is bourgeois ideology within the mass movement.
The armed resistance is rooted in those who have the least to lose and the most to gain, the most oppressed of the world who clamor for liberation. For those who have been forced in a concentration camp for decades and subjected to genocide for nearly a century, the only moral, political, military, and economic option is liberation by force of arms. The history of resistance in Palestine proves there is no other way out: “peaceful” conciliation with Israel, like the Oslo Accords, further cemented Israel’s domination and legitimization, while al-Aqsa Flood shattered Israel’s image and abilities. The guns of al-Aqsa Flood have trumpeted the point of no return for Israel—neither Zionism nor imperialism will ever recover, and the notion of returning to a pre-October 7 status quo has evaporated along with the delusions of defeating the resistance.
The lessons and gains for the world’s people are still to come; in the current era of the strategic offensive of the world proletarian revolution, when revolution is the order of the day internationally and particularly in the Third World, al-Aqsa Flood has brought about a leap in the people’s consciousness and collective experience and will certainly inspire the next wave of uprisings to come.
The oppressed rise up against their oppressors in violent explosions relative to the degree of their oppression. This is a law of the class struggle—where there is repression, there will be resistance; the greater the repression, the greater the resistance. Those who have the least to lose and who have suffered the most will take the most severe actions to ensure their victory. We see this time and time again: whether it be the violent slave rebellions and the US Civil War that ended slavery as a mode of production in the US South, the armed struggle carried out by Algerians against the French, or the violence of any other anti-colonial struggle, revolutionary violence is necessarily an integral part of the overthrow of imperialism, its lackeys, and the conquest of power.
Every one of these processes was accompanied by its own set of reactionary, revolutionary, and centrist positions. For example, Nat Turner, who led the deadliest slave rebellion in US history, was portrayed as a terrorist by slaveholders. The abolitionist-sympathizing centrists stated that his actions only made the cause of emancipation more difficult, while the pro-slavery centrists promoted paternalistic slavery. The thorough-going abolitionists, both enslaved and free, saw it as a source of inspiration to continue the struggle. History has shown that what was the most violent slave revolt in US history was a catalyst in the struggle for emancipation that brought the debate to center-stage.
Armed struggle is the sole path for liberation. Imperialism and its lackeys are propped up by force of arms, and their domination can only be overcome through the liquidation of such forces. There are two processes at play: there are those actions that strengthen the rule of the oppressor and those that facilitate its downfall. The danger of centrism is that it provides cover for the openly reactionary position by joining in its chorus of condemning the one path for liberation. Karl Marx established the correct position on the conquest and defense of power over a century ago: “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”
For those who act on the deeply held desire to end all violence, the first and only act of condemnation must be in repudiation of the oppressive reactionary violence, which makes revolutionary violence necessary, just, and correct.
image: Abu Obeida, spokesman for the Qassam Brigades of Hamas, speaks at a press conference in 2019 flanked by fighters of the Qassam Brigades. Abed Rahim Khatib
