In a comment on ‘The Jewish Tragedy Finds in Israel a Dismal Sequel’ (I), the first part of the 1967 interview with Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher, Meryl Lynn Lombardi wrote:
“I’ve noticed that you keep referring to the Hamas Oct 7 attack as ‘gruesome.’ Why would this be needed in the face of the over 18,000 murdered Palestinians, nothing but genocide and ethnic cleansing. And the wholesale destruction of Gaza.”
We continue to use the term because we think it is as accurate today as it was when we first used it. We don’t believe the October 7 attack has somehow become less gruesome because Israel — with its exponentially greater military power — has outdone Hamas in barbarity.
DISCUSSION WITH OUR READERS
World-Outlook has documented in detail Israel’s increasingly genocidal war on Gaza, which has taken more than 20,000 Palestinian lives — the large majority civilians. More than 52,000 Palestinians have been injured. About half of the territory’s housing stock is now destroyed. And nearly 2 million of Gaza’s prewar population of 2.4 million people have been displaced.
We have unambiguously opposed Israel’s entire response. But that in no way changes the abhorrent character of the Hamas-led October 7 attack.
As World-Outlook wrote in our October 11 editorial, Oppose Israel’s War on Palestinians; Hamas Atrocities Set Back Palestinian National Liberation Struggle:
Hamas militiamen hunted unarmed civilians in their homes and cars and indiscriminately shot many in cold blood, including children. Some documented such repugnant actions in self-made videos they proudly posted online. In the most grotesque of these attacks, Hamas members massacred more than 250 youth [a death toll later revised to 364] participating in a music festival in the Negev Desert in southern Israel. This echoes the 2015 Baclan Theatre massacre ISIS carried out at a concert in Paris.
A subsequent news analysis, No to Israel’s New Nakba in Gaza! How Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. How Hamas Damaged the Palestinian National Liberation Struggle, detailed the origins, evolution, and political character of Hamas. It provided evidence showing that “the horrible carnage Israel is now inflicting on Palestinians is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation” by Hamas. “Quite the opposite.”
The Hamas leadership intentionally engineered what they expected Israel to turn into a massive national calamity for Palestinians in Gaza to advance their own goals.
We noted that Hamas leaders have explained in public statements “they waged their October 7 attack on Israel because they believed the Palestinian cause — or more accurately Hamas’s place in the Palestinian struggle — was slipping away, and that only violence could revive it.”
Right to resistance
The relevant political issue is not “violence.” Facing the violence of oppression and military occupation, the oppressed have the right to defend themselves. But the methods used to fight for freedom need to serve the strategic goals of the struggle. If not, they become a political liability and a self-inflicted obstacle on the road to liberation.
In Israel’s West Bank Inferno & the Responsibility of Socialists, Alan Wald wrote of the right to resistance: “Radicals know that the right of armed struggle, which the Palestinians surely have, does not translate into ‘anything goes.’ Palestinian resistance is necessary, and a willingness to fight back should be championed. Nevertheless, robotically approving what Hamas did after its stunning breakout from the imprisonment of Gaza is as insupportable as endorsing the Hamas suicide bombings of buses during the Second intifada of 2000-2005.”
As Rashid Khalidi explained in an interview republished by World-Outlook, ‘End Oppression of One People by Another’, “An argument that I see among some student activists is that all Israelis are settlers, and therefore there are no civilians. You can’t say that if you have any respect for international humanitarian law. Israel’s being the result of a settler colonial process does not mean that every Israeli grandmother and every Israeli baby is a settler and therefore not a civilian.”
World-Outlook has pointed out that Hamas rejects this view and has made clear its strategy: “Pogroms that target Israeli civilians coupled with mass martyrdom that sacrifices the lives of thousands of Palestinians — ultimately tens of thousands or more — who have not chosen this course or volunteered to give up their lives for it.”
That strategy is contrary to what is needed in the struggle to end oppression.
In the World-Outlook article Cuba and the Palestinian Liberation Struggle: An Exchange, Pete Seidman wrote:
“In view of the hell fire that is raining down over Gaza as a result, it is impossible for serious people not to see the October 7 action as one that, far from empowering the Palestinian people, left them as a disorganized force without effective leadership who had to flee in panic from IDF [Israel Defense Forces] terror. The murders carried out by Hamas, however much they were exaggerated in the bourgeois media, were not revolutionary acts, nor was taking of hostages.
“A revolutionary strategy seeks to base itself on the political empowerment and conscious participation of the masses in action. That is not in any way happening right now post-October 7.”
October 7 was a pogrom
We also believe the term “pogrom” is an accurate description of what Hamas led on October 7.
The Oxford Reference dictionary defines pogrom as “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jews in Russia or eastern Europe. The word comes (in the early 20th century) from Russian, meaning literally ‘devastation.’”
Those who attacked Israel on October 7 killed and brutalized the vast majority of about 1,200 victims — including raping a number of women and mutilating bodies — because they were Jews. Nowhere was this clearer than in the assault on the Nova music festival. It was an unambiguous act of Jew hatred that must be unequivocally opposed.
The murderous nature of Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza does not nullify the repulsive character of the October 7 attack, even though the scale and human toll inflicted by Israel are vastly disproportionate.
As our October 11 editorial explained, “The Hamas pogroms gave the right-wing Netanyahu regime a new opening to intensify Tel Aviv’s crackdown on Palestinians resisting the Zionist occupation of their land in Gaza, in the West Bank, and inside Israel proper. It will diminish the political space for action by supporters of the Palestinian struggle in Israel and the occupied territories. It has already emboldened Washington and Tel Aviv’s other imperialist allies to accelerate military and other aid to the Israeli colonial settler state.”
— World-Outlook editors
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Categories: Palestine/Israel
You speak as it there is an equal field of operations. As if the latest atrocities of Israel, born in terrorism and self conceit, were simply the flawed politics of an organization, itself born of desperation and unrelenting barbarity–unhidden generally celebrated by US and Western politicians, privileged citizens of empire, and this mouthpieces. Your defense of revolutionary principles, in this context, are vacuous justifications for giving revolutionary “advice”, telling people attracted to right-wing political programs because of their justifiable hatred of the conditions imposed in them for no other reason than to advance imperial aims. You speak of the dearth of more correct revolutionary leadership as a needed solution in a land of so much historical conflict as if all those people hadn’t thought of this problem, at least not well enough. And now, when those same people generate what is likely the only form of retaliation they feel available to them, you remove all the historical context, and apply what you think is revolutionary logic, recoiling at the “gruesome”ness of the result, relying on textbook definitions about what constitutes terms like “progrom” to justify, what, a “scientific” description to a reaction born of clearly less than scientific action? Are you saying that a group like Hamas is the same as the Cossacks and Black Hundreds of Russia or the Nazis of Germany? That they represent the same ilk and, therefore, what they did in a place now called Israel is the same as the historical persecution of the Jews? It seems a bit lazy at best.
Now, I do understand, we–well, the we of privileged America who now exist after all the genocides of early peoples have already been forgotten in the hope of “moving on”–I do understand that to chart a revolutionary course in the material context of the now, one has to think about what to do next. I understand that to win over masses of people in the present context, one has to portray a world that abhors “gruesome” acts associated with liberation because it isn’t the world we seek; you know, the world we currently actually have.
But I do remember what “we” revolutionaries learned about terrorism as being not immoral, but ineffective. Perhaps it is what you are trying to say, “we” cannot adopt the politics or tactics of the oppressor if we are to end oppression, in the final analysis.
However, your defense of mass revolutionary leadership over the politics of terror reads more like defensiveness, embarrassment, at the wrong turn taken by an organization born in strife and imposed ignorance from an unyielding oppressor who itself adopted a wrong turn to redress its oppression.
We have all learned that there is a material basis behind any form of politics. And Hamas is no different, they exist for basic material reasons, not simply the oppression of Palestine but because of a people who came to their country in a state of revenge, supported by the duplicity of Western powers seeking world control and the betrayal of Arab governments seeing their own imperial status. Is it any wonder that a resistance emerging from such circumstances would find recourse of a “gruesome” nature.
The demise of Indian resistance in this country, in the end, did not come from overwhelming military or even economic force, but because “Americans” grew weary of the “gruesome” nature of the resistance that “new Americans” found abhorrent as Indian people became more and more desperate and willing to fight every more with the tools of terror at their disposal. The true terror being the duplicity, betrayal, and unrelenting desire to displace Indian with White but the fiat of growing White population. Does anyone not see the parallel here? Does anyone not understand the material basis behind the wholly moral choice to fight against an unrelenting desire to displace Palestinian with European ethos?
Why are you willing to describe a people’s actions as “gruesome” or a “progrom” to show the “equality” of horror carried though genocide? Such equality only abets Israeli justification for their illegality.
Israel is an illegal country, but it is not the only illegal country that was ever born. I’m sure you know that, but it is being attempted to be born at a time in history where the victims may be identified more clearly, but whose murderers are expecting the same immunity from their acts as those countries who benefited from the more favorable colonial eras.
I’m sure you’ll want me to allude to my disagreement with the politics of terror used by Hamas, that it’s not a revolutionary answer. I’m sure you’ll be dismayed if I don’t try to provide my credentials in opposing antisemitism at the same time as I condemn Israel but give solidarity to the Palestinian people, how I see Zionism as not the same as Judaism. I have no need to defend my views on such issues as you know as well as I doing so is a fruitless endeavor. I find your response in this article as attempting to do just that, defend yourself in front of people who would never believe you regardless.
I find the willingness of so many young people, Arab, Black, Brown, Indian and White to stand against all such criticism, despite the chances of doing so less correctly or less clearly, and still oppose Israeli murder, still oppose US/European complicity even against being charged with being antisemitic, I find them courageous. I believe they will chart exactly that revolutionary leadership you speak of seemingly as a tired prescription. I believe they will do so because they will learn how to articulate their solidarity with an oppressed people today while at the same time recognizing it is the same solidarity they’d have had if it had been a distant yesterday. And I’m sure you’ll hope their such articulation will ring truer to you than mine.
I’ll look to that day
Comrades, I agree with the totality of the article. However, an exception here is the paragraph toward the end that states:
“Those who attacked Israel on October 7 killed and brutalized the vast majority of about 1,200 victims — including raping a number of women and mutilating bodies — because they were Jews. Nowhere was this clearer than in the assault on the Nova music festival. It was an unambiguous act of Jew hatred that must be unequivocally opposed.”
I think not. The fact they WERE Jews is secondary to the belief by Hamas that they were *Israelis*. For you paragraph to be true, you’d have to argue that if the original settler state were by French Catholics, and maintained the reactionary apartheid state, that the massacre would NOT have taken place or Hamas would of gone “lighter” on the French civilians and children of the original settlers. I think that would be nonsense. I think one sees *exactly* the same thing in the NLF massacres of French settler and *their children* in the 1950s Algerian Revolution.
Hamas in their 1987 “Covenant” issues antisemitic statements and anti-Jewish bigotry woven throughout. In 2017 they dropped the antisemitism from the “new Covenant” . i think its bullshit as apparently they never changed the anti-Jewish aspects of the text books they given their children to learn the history of the Zionist created disaster. Having said that, the murderous idiocy of Hamas that *sparked* the genocidal attack on Palestinians would of happened regardless of the religion of who they percieve, all, as “settlers”. I think your article is correct but not in this one respect.