https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/71/palestine
The following motion was passed at our international conference.
In seeking to criticize the strategy of the Palestinian resistance during October 7, the leaflet “A Revolutionary Road for Palestinian Liberation” (10 October 2023) made a series of inflammatory declarations, best encapsulated in the kicker: “Only Death and Defeat with Hamas.” This made it appear to the movement that we were siding with the Zionist propaganda offensive, which was in full force at the time. Expressions characterizing Hamas as “fanatic Islamist butchers” and their strategy as “strapping a suicide vest on all of Gaza” were particularly provocative in this context.
Although the political arguments against Hamas’s strategy made in the article were themselves sound—and have been vindicated—even the best arguments amount to nothing if they are written in a way that alienates the oppressed they seek to speak to. The article was completely at odds with the sentiment of the Palestinian masses—who saw October 7 as a defiant act of resistance—the consequence being that our correct warnings against Hamas’s disastrous strategy fell on deaf ears.
In particular, in the context of the universal condemnation of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the article did not even make the elementary point that the targeting of the Israeli military was legitimate, in contradistinction to the targeting of unarmed civilians.
This article was defended for years following its publication despite both internal and external criticism and republished in our theoretical journal, Spartacist No. 69, in August 2024. Our defensiveness in the face of criticism, and the impulse behind the initial article, were in large part driven by the fact that much of the left was either uncritical of Hamas or refusing to put forward a political alternative to its nationalist strategy.
While our intervention in the Palestinian movement evolved in the course of the genocide as we developed our political understanding of the Palestinian liberation struggle, this first article, published during the opening shots of the genocide of the Palestinian people, was a stain on our otherwise principled intervention.
