Where is The Gaza War Going?
After the inevitable collapse of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas the war which has killed at least tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children is back on. According to Israel the war is a defensive operation to dislodge and eliminate Hamas, the Islamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007 and carried out the October 7th attacks on Israel that killed at least 1,200 people. This narrative is see through. Gaza has been a long-standing issue for Israel as a cite of continuous resistance to Israeli control of which Hamas is only a recent example.
Israel and the Zionist movement that created it were the products of an era of normalized imperialism and colonialism. Since the Zionist movement settled on historic Palestine to be the Jewish homeland its leaders have called for the forcible extirpation of the indigenous Palestinians. The creation, expansion, and maintenance of the Israeli nation-state was made possible by this process of "transfer" which continues to leave Palestinians dead, displaced, and under Israeli military rule. Israel now appears to be making a brutal attempt to solve the Gaza problem.
Can Israel succeed? There are reasons to think not. Palestinians are resilient. They remain in the land despite 76+ years of siege. Further, Hamas is an irregular fighting force with the ability to vanish into underground tunnels and into the civilian population. Further, Israel is trying to carry out an imperial slaughter in the light of the post-colonial era where decolonization and national liberation have made such policies morally repugnant.
Can Palestinians succeed? Well, they can, but their resistance and international solidarity with it are not yet strong enough to pressure Israel to maintain international humanitarian standards, never mind defeat Zionism. Anarchists around the world need to fight to create space for the building of resistance movements that can pressure Israel and ultimately end the Zionist project. Anarchism has an advantage as a solution for Palestine because it proposes a social administration made up of free association between all people.
Anarchist federation in which society is governed by voluntary self-governing regional assemblies which link up through democratic and voluntary delegation contrasts with the modern state. The modern state is a coercive structure that relies on permanent security in which certain civilian groups are demonized as security threats to be killed and displaced in service of modern ruling classes. Even a directly democratic state would require a monopoly on force that subordinates one class to another. An Anarchist federation is a classless free association of all producers.
Anarchism would also address the enduring problem of Palestinian leadership. Perhaps the greatest problem facing the Palestinian resistance besides Zionism is the myriad armed non-state actors which have dominated it. Putting aside the indiscriminate violence groups like Fatah and Hamas are known for they tend to either be coopted as a police force for Israel (Fatah) or use the limited power they gain to subordinate Palestinians to authoritarian rule (Hamas). This is because from an Anarchist view they substitute the struggle of the masses for freedom with their own military struggle for power and money.
Anarchism would allow the Palestinian resistance to replace these groups with what has always been more threatening to Israel, the self-activity of the Palestinian
masses. This was displayed in the first intifada in which Palestinians used strikes and protest to pressure Israel to the negotiating table. While Israel was perfectly happy to contain Hamas in Gaza for years, when Palestinians embarked on the mass great march of return protest Israeli snipers were used on the crowd. If generalized into a third intifada, the Palestinians could form their own brigades of armed resistance as was done by workers and peasants in the Spanish and Russian Revolutions.
Further, Anarchism frames the issue not as an ethnic conflict as academia and the media paint it, but rather a struggle for self-determination against imperialism. This justifies a complete rejection of the so-called "peace process" which has been deliberately engineered by the United States and Israel to stall the Palestinian struggle completely. Rather Anarchism embraces the struggle against Zionism which enjoins Palestinians and those Israelis willing to move against Zionism and reject the privilege it is designed to give them over Palestinians. It calls on Israelis to realize that permanent security is an anti-human doctrine that will prevent them from living in peace.
Further Reading
https://anarchistunionjournal.org/2024/03/07/what-solution-for-palestine-formulating-an-anarchist-approach-to-the-so-called-israeli-palestinian-conflict/
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-29901-9_287
https://redandblackanarchists.com.au/the-basics-of-anarcho-syndicalism/
