Where Are the Calls to Arms for the Palestinian Resistance?
This is not a gratuitous apologia for war. There is no room for feverish warmongering and its disdain for Palestinian lives, no desire to fetishize resistance and all the blood that has been spilled.
Yet confining ourselves to demanding a ceasefire is not enough – even if one believes that Palestinians cannot defeat Israel militarily. When the Vietnamese could not vanquish the US military, calls for ending the American massacres did not end there. As long as US aggression persisted, so too did the ethical and political obligation to support the Vietnamese liberation forces. The same was true when it came to supporting anticolonial resistance in Algeria, Angola, and Kenya against their colonizers, France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.
Today we have a duty to demand that genocide and ethnic cleansing cease, that systematic oppression and the Israeli colonial regime be disbanded. Yet we must also demand material and economic support for Palestinian resistance forces and their allies.
Only a few timid voices in the West are advocating for the right of the Palestinian people to struggle for their liberation by all available means, including through armed struggle. Yet far from constituting a transgressive or extremist position, recognizing the right to armed struggle is part of international law itself. It is indeed a sad state of affairs when the heights of boldness consist of brandishing United Nations resolutions. Worse still is when even those rare appeals to international legality omit critical components of international law, such as the provision in UN resolution 3070 which “Calls upon all States … to offer moral, material, and any other assistance to all people struggling for the full exercise of their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.”
The Eurocentric left, almost in its entirety, supported sending military aid to Ukraine, yet the logic is not extended to the Palestinian resistance. At a recent event by the Spanish left, a Palestinian woman defended the right of Palestinians to armed resistance. Self-consciously, leaders of a leftist party in attendance hesitated in their applause, seemingly afraid to have borne witness to her conviction. In other corners of the Spanish left, we find a radicalism that is at best passive and at worst opportunistic, cloying, and hypocritical. The political parties in government synchronize their cries of “Free Palestine!” with their endorsement of the colonial construct of a “two-state solution.” Spain’s government maintains diplomatic relations and an arms trade with Israel, and endorses only those Palestinians operating inside the bounds of human rights discourse or representing the Vichy regime known as the Palestinian Authority.
Forty years ago, Spanish unions and left-wing parties organized fundraising campaigns for the Sandinista guerrillas. Fifty years ago, Europe’s largest leftist parties collected and sent funds to Vietnamese guerrillas. Further back, during the Spanish resistance against Fascism and Nazism, Palestine sent fighters to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco’s troops.
Meanwhile, the actual political subjects of Palestinian resistance are silenced by Western leftists. Why did the Gaza ghetto rise up on October 7? Because “they are terrorists,” answer some European communist parties. It is only through the efforts of some pro-Palestinian groups that we get to hear the actual protagonists.
Contrast the current situation to previous eras. Forty years ago, Spanish unions and left-wing parties organized fundraising campaigns for the Sandinista guerrillas. Fifty years ago, Europe’s largest leftist parties collected and sent funds to Vietnamese guerrillas. Further back, during the Spanish resistance against Fascism and Nazism, Palestine sent fighters to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco’s troops. Now the same Spanish government that claims to be the heir of that Republic sends weapons and material support to Israel for its fascist aggression on Palestine.
By silencing the calls for material support to the Palestinian resistance, the European left is facilitating and reinforcing the criminalization by Western institutions of the Palestinians’ right to armed struggle for liberation. In its current guidelines, the European Union actually contravenes international law, criminalizing and persecuting those who materially support Palestinian forces. And of course, the United States is even worse.
Yet even more problematic is that the lack of material aid to Palestine extends beyond the West.
It is hard to comprehend why countries such as Cuba, South Africa, Venezuela that have little to lose and are already surviving US sanctions are also replicating the colonial “two-state” discourse and silencing calls to aid Palestinian forces and their regional allies.
On March 3, Havana hosted a multitudinous act in solidarity with Palestine and against genocide, attended by Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel and other prominent political figures. Despite the spirited and incisive descriptions of the genocide, the concluding demands were tepid: “a ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israel from the illegally occupied territories, and guaranteeing access to humanitarian aid.” Whereas the first and third requests were framed strictly within the limited bounds of humanitarianism, the second reveals Cuban subordination to the recognition of Israel and the fiction of “two states.” From Havana, Israel was asked to withdraw its troops, settlers, cities and infrastructure from the ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet this call was missing a decolonial approach to historic Palestine, any questioning of the existence of the Israeli entity, or any commitment to sending military or economic aid to the Palestinian resistance.
More incomprehensible is the following statement by Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune at the Arab League summit in Algiers in 2022: “We want a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.” Algeria was once almost divided into two states by France, which, anticipating the end of its colonization, sought to create a French state along one for native Algerians. Even accounting for the pernicious Western interference in Algeria, it is excessive for its president to advocate an explicitly colonial fate for Palestine.
Similarly, it is hard to comprehend why countries such as Cuba, South Africa, Venezuela that have little to lose and are already surviving US sanctions are also replicating the colonial “two-state” discourse and silencing calls to aid Palestinian forces and their regional allies. I don’t mean to imply that countries of the Global South that are already trapped in difficult economic situations should be expected to lead solidarity shipments, akin to the Cuban internationalism of the previous century. But shouldn’t we expect them to at least mount a discursive challenge to the colonial narrative and paradigm imposed by Israel and the West?
Today, as the Israeli colony agonizes, “two-states” is once again incessant noise.
Instead, across the Global South we hear traces of the Eurocentric left-wing discourse. Sometimes, we even hear echoes of the Western leaders who are fueling the genocide – Pedro Sánchez, Josep Borrell or Emmanuel Macron – in their desperate insistence on the “two-state solution”.
Officially institutionalized in 1947, the “two states” framework never consulted the inhabitants of the land, and as such was born colonial and illegitimate. After 60 years of Israeli colonial expansion, this construct is dead. Yet leftists of the world repeatedly return to this foundational basis of colonialism in Palestine, like automatons, even in the midst of a genocide.
Territorial partitions have historically served as an assurance to colonizers who, fearing everything could be lost, sought to retain part of their conquests. The plans for the partition of Palestine were devised by the British in the 1930s and 40s when they feared their colony could fail. During the Oslo Accords, the “two-state” framework intended to quash the Intifada that threatened the status quo. Today, as the Israeli colony agonizes, “two-states” is once again incessant noise.
The Western left is also stuck, exuding a combination of Zionist heritage and prejudice towards native national liberation movements that do not fit neatly into Eurocentric ideologies.
No settlers have ever voluntarily halted their invasion or made concessions. The United States, Canada, or Australia did not propose two states to the natives because they did not have to. In contrast, colonizers in Ireland, Palestine or South Africa, who did contemplate the possibility of defeat resorted to this framework. De Gaulle also considered it for Algeria and planned for the forced displacement of Algerians. For Palestine, the long-dead “two states” scheme serves to consolidate the existence of a colonized piece of Palestine against all conditions of possibility. It remains to be seen whether the natives would have the right to survive under a Vichy Regime, Bantustans, Indian reservations, or a gigantic Guantanamo as is being built today in Gaza.
Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, only one geopolitical entity has governed the lives of all inhabitants for decades: the Israeli colonial entity. Its whitewashing by the West cannot hide that it is a colonial entity, created through crime, looting, and the ethnic cleansing of the native population. Yet rare are the calls from the Global South for its replacement by a different political entity. No one demands support for the legitimate response to Israeli violence. Few demand the demolition of the colonial entity. The global left proposes appeasement. Israel must feel very calm in the face of this confluence.
Our reminder that Palestinian people have the right to armed struggle, without it constituting terrorism, has had to come from other international coordinates. It has come from China's representative at the International Court of Justice, Ma Xinmin, during the trial against Israel. It is an interesting move, and it remains to be seen whether China adopts a mandate to militarily and economically support the Palestinian forces and their allies as it did in the past, and to stop supporting the partition of Palestine, especially given China’s rejection of a similar possibility for Taiwan.
If the European left is incapable of overthrowing colonialism, it must at least be bold: defend international legality and send arms and aid to the Palestinian resistance and its allies.
At the moment, material support for the Palestinian resistance is provided by an alliance that is heterogeneous in both its ideologies and capabilities, from Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria. It is noteworthy how similar this alliance is to the one that Lenin proposed a hundred years ago in his Congress of the People of the East. Attended by conservative tribal leaders, religious sheikhs, intellectuals, and Marxist revolutionaries from Asia, the meeting encapsulated the Soviet leader’s belief that a heterogeneous anti-colonial struggle would be the Achilles’ heel of imperialism, and that no revolution could be expected within the European colonizing metropolis.
We seem to still be there, stuck in the struggle of impoverished people and oppressors who extract their resources and lands. The Western left is also stuck, exuding a combination of Zionist heritage and prejudice towards native national liberation movements that do not fit neatly into Eurocentric ideologies. Throw in some Arabophobia and Islamophobia and we can see why the heterogeneous alliance with Palestinian resistance is not worthy of the West’s selective solidarity. Given its deep imbrication in the structures of colonizing powers, perhaps the European Left only aspires to manage, in a more progressive way, the benefits that a colony in Palestine and subsidiary Arab regimes provide.
Everyone finds armed conflict repellant — although no one more so than the oppressed peoples who are forced to engage in it, who are forced to resist precisely so they can live in dignity and peace. It is why representation of oppressed peoples must come from those who resist. It is they who must be heard, rather than those who submit, the indigenous section of the colonial entity, the so-called Palestinian Authority. The colonial powers are already in charge of giving it a voice.
If the European left is incapable of overthrowing colonialism, it must at least be bold: defend international legality and send arms and aid to the Palestinian resistance and its allies.
This article was first published in Spanish in El Salto on March 19, 2024.