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While the unbearable massacre in Gaza by the IDF and its thousands of deaths continues and is currently taking an even more abject turn with the offensive on Rafah, the current climate in the political environment has pushed us to write this article to repeat some observations which should be obvious to any anti-authoritarian revolutionary: as in any existing place on this planet, there are in Israel as in Palestine, a number of people fighting against the different powers that oppress them.

In Israel, demonstrations have been taking place every weekend for several months to demand a cease-fire, and to demand the departure of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, accused of continuing a useless and murderous war in Gaza to maintain control. power, while preventing the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas through their desire to blindly continue the fighting.

If the massacres which took place during the attack led by Hamas on October 7 had shocked the country and made people believe in a short period of national unity, protests quickly arose in mid-October 2023 to demand the State to prioritize the release of the hostages. While the Israeli government stubbornly continued the war, causing tens of thousands of deaths, these evening demonstrations intensified until tens of thousands of people took to the streets. On May 6, in the most massive demonstration in months, protesters blocked the Ayalon highway, lighting fires in their paths, and some demonstrators attacked the entrance to the Ministry of Defense before being pushed back by the police.

These demonstrations are a reminder of the protest movement which provoked massive strikes and brought out several hundred thousand demonstrators last year, until September 2023, against justice reform. It had expanded in part to the contestation of the policy carried out by the Israeli government towards the Palestinians, but also to the rise in the political influence of far-right Zionist or ultra-Orthodox religious movements. In some of these rallies, considered among the largest in the country’s history, participants repeatedly blocked major highways, sometimes in more than 150 locations across Israel, sea lanes, and one of the peak moments of the movement in terms of intensity, approaching Netanyahu’s residence.

Today, opponents of judicial reform, families of hostages and refuseniks, young Israelis who refuse compulsory military service and are liable to prison for doing so, mingle in the streets. The government, using the old and usual nationalist rhetoric of sacred union, denounced these demonstrations as a “gift” given by the Israelis to Hamas, while the police brutally repressed the gatherings and arrested several dozen people in recent weeks. , including family members of hostages, notably for “incitement to riot”.

Solidarity to those arrested during those nights and to all those fighting in Israel against the State, police repression and militarization.

Since taking power over the secular nationalist movement Fatah in 2007, Hamas has sought to impose its religious fundamentalist ideology on Gaza, through the application of Sharia law, and harshly represses any challenge to its authority over this territory. suffered by the Israeli blockade.

However, this does not prevent Gazans from rising up against Hamas, its control over economic resources or its “morals committees” which monitor the application of religious restrictions. For around ten years, demonstrations and riots have erupted in the Palestinian enclave. Large-scale demonstrations took place on several occasions in Gaza City in 2015 and 2017, in particular to protest against the incessant electricity cuts, the network and supply of which was partially controlled by Hamas and Fatah at the time. In 2019, Gazans took to the streets blocking roads and setting tires on fire to protest against the taxes imposed by Hamas on essential products and against inhumane living conditions, between poverty, unemployment, shortages and confinement, then that the leaders of Hamas do not live in Gaza and that its officers enjoy very privileged positions compared to the rest of the population. In July-August 2023, protests in the cities of Gaza, Rafah, Khan Younès and in the refugee camps of Jabalyah and Nusseirat, brought together thousands of Palestinians, notably after numerous appeals relayed by the anonymous Instagram account “Al Sakher Virus” or “Mockingbird Virus”. The Palestinians were demonstrating against the atrocious living conditions imposed by the Israeli army but also against the local power of Hamas, whose supporters were the target of stone throwing and saw their green flags burned by the rioters. The Gazans notably sang “The people want to overthrow the regime”.

Faced with these demonstrations, Hamas and its police have always responded with strong repression, by beating the rioters and putting them in prison, by shooting in the air or at the crowd. Hamas has constantly prevented the spread of images and appeals on social networks, even though many testimonies have reached us and are shared every day. Since taking power, he has also condemned to death and/or executed several Palestinians, and has widely used the motive of “collaboration with Israel”. Hamas has generally locked down the expression of disagreements within the Gaza Strip, with increased surveillance of Gazans materialized by: the General Security Services and its files on each individual where those who participated in the demonstrations of 2023 or those having judged “immoral”; an extensive network of informants and encouragement to denounce.

Solidarity with all those in Gaza who, in addition to suffering the repeated murderous assaults of the IDF and the Israeli blockade, take to the streets against the military and religious authoritarianism of Hamas.

The facts recalled here show that in Israel or Palestine, individuals have always fought and are still fighting against those who try to control their lives, whether they are soldiers and politicians of the Israeli state or supporters of proto-state of Hamas (or even before, Fatah). These rebels seem to the campist left not to exist, such is the desire to assimilate everyone into their respective governments to keep their ideology intact.

Since October 7, part of the left and French and international subversive areas have wallowed in a most debilitating campism. While the right and the far right obscenely support the Israeli government, the Tsahal, and their “right” to military response and massacres, the left under anti-imperialism, Bouteldjists from Paroles d’Honneur to Solidaires and going through the Trotskyists, responded with support, “critical” or not, to those who are supposed to be “the Palestinian camp”, in this case Hamas, presented as the “Palestinian resistance”. Finally, LFI, which is taking care of its electoral period, is doing well by presenting itself as the party defending the oppressed, after having repeatedly demonstrated ambiguous positions on Bashar al-Assad’s Syria or on the genocide of the Uighurs by China.

Outside of the TV sets, the student occupations follow one after the other and some of the demands made there question us: the end of the proceedings against the mobilized students poses absolutely no concern to us, but another demand that comes up concerns the end of the partnerships with Israeli universities, in particular because they have courses linked to the Israeli army. Quite funny on the part of Science Po students, a large part of whom constitute the future politicians, ambassadors, bureaucrats of ministerial cabinets, who will soon collaborate with their State and their armies and all those of the world, when they have finally finished boycotting triple cheeses. If this demand were obtained, it would amount to preventing any academic exchange for Israelis wishing to go to France, regardless of what these Israelis think of their government, which apparently does not matter if the latter are refuseniks or rioters who fought against the Israeli state since last spring or even longer. Recently, an appeal was launched in Paris to request the cancellation of the visit of Israeli exhibitors to an arms industry fair in Paris (“No Israeli weapons at Eurosatory”). Has antimilitarism become selective, depending on the country that uses-sells-buys the new military technologies that will be used to kill in all directions? Are there now good and bad missiles? Have we buried the most basic internationalism for good?

Worse still, some of those we have cited lamentably bathe in anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism in the purest Soviet (or Sorialian) tradition. We would almost come to confuse certain left-wing statements with Dieudonist outbursts, especially when some, thus continuing the long tradition of left-wing anti-Semitism, accuse of “Zionists” those who criticize confusionist or anti-Semitic rhetoric on the part of of their leftist idols who repeat the old cliché of the “new Nazi Jews” or the Zionist lobby which controls the world. Or that others come to unpack their new form of perverse negationism by affirming that Nazism was not “necessarily anti-Semitic” (seen on Twitter).

We remind these scums here that criticizing Israel, its massacres, its colonization in the West Bank and its general policy towards the Palestinians is possible without appealing to the sensationalist reference to the Nazis, who had a rather essential specificity: wanting to eradicate the Jews (which did not prevent them from exterminating other impure and undesirable people from the Third Reich).

In doing so, these scums do a disservice to both the Gazans and their support initiatives, and to the fight against anti-Semitism.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the RN, a party of racists created by former collaborators and Waffen-SS, now feels like it is trying to convince everyone that it is a protective party for the Jews, in at the same time pouring out its bile against North African and Arab immigrants.

What a detestable era but which ultimately resembles all the others: as always, both the left and the right make us want to puke.

Anti-Semitic acts have increased sharply everywhere and, faced with the trivialization, particularly on the left, of speeches and actions that are openly anti-Semitic or flirting with them, it seems more necessary than ever to mark a break.

With these few observations, we want to recall that the strategy which consists of amalgamating individuals with States or organizations which oppress them is a most complete factual and conceptual scam, reality having always contradicted these analyses, and which is equivalent to giving absolution to these same States, both the latter rub their hands when they see their speeches so cleanly broadcast.

While it must undoubtedly be difficult to think about anything other than survival when you are under bombs like the Gazans are currently, it is sure that it is more and more difficult in Israel, where the political power carries out intense propaganda of war and sacred union, to resist the nationalist sirens, we know that there is always a potential for revolt there, on both sides of the border. It is necessary for revolutionaries here and everywhere to affirm in solidarity that the defense of a national flag has never emancipated anyone in this world and that the battle is not fought between nations, between religions, between “peoples” but let it be against those who exploit and oppress us, whether they are soldiers, religious, democrats or capitalists!

English translation: https://anarchistnews.org/content/beyond-campism/