After a year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, now expanding to Lebanon, the strategy of the Axis of Resistance can be roughly mapped. As Sharmine Narwani of the Cradle puts it, the strategy is one of “boiling the frog”. This lecture was just before the pager attack and the war on Lebanon began, but after a shaky period, Hezbollah returned to effectiveness without changing the strategy. Israel intensifies its genocide, with a focus on North Gaza, but the Axis has stuck to the plan:
Take Israeli prisoners to try to exchange for Palestinian prisoners
Naval economic blockade from Yemen to generate economic pressure
Steady missile and rocket fire on Israeli military targets (and at various targets of the US occupation of Syria) from Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza to generate psychological pressure
Resistance in the West Bank (mostly the northern West Bank – Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem, and Tubas) to tie up Israeli forces
Inflict steady casualties on Israeli ground forces wherever they deploy in Gaza and now Lebanon
Maintain the threat of major destructive standoff missile attacks from Iran
The stated objective of the Axis, articulated by the late Hezbollah Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, is to win a ceasefire on Hamas’s terms. The Axis hope is that Israel would agree to a ceasefire rather than face a worse alternative: a collapse from within. This would mean a critical mass of soldiers refusing to fight in the face of an unwinnable war, and a critical mass of Israeli settlers leaving for greener pastures in the face of an untenable future.
As Scott Ritter told Danny Haiphong on Nov 13/24, if Israel fails by internal collapse, then there won’t be a specific trigger moment for Israel to use its nuclear weapons to destroy the region in the so-called “Samson Option”. Samson could be invoked by Netanyahu in his bunker if his enemies are closing in – and the Axis is trying to win in a way that doesn’t lead to world destruction, which is why the Axis would settle at any moment for a ceasefire with full withdrawal from Gaza and Lebanon, an end to the siege, and an exchange of prisoners.
The evolving genocide plan
Now let’s also review the more complicated US-Israeli strategy.
Total war – genocide: aerial bombardment and ground-based demolition, targeting, above all hospitals, civilian infrastructure, and gatherings of civilians.
Avoid occupation of populated areas and responsibility for the occupied population: use genocidal tactics to try to depopulate targeted areas (Gaza, south Lebanon).
Depopulation is the long-term goal and a difficult one: short-term, the strategy is just to keep up a continuous and unending series of raids. The ideal air raid is of an encampment of refugees in Gaza, which has no air defense. The ideal ground raid is one where a village in Lebanon is wired with explosives by an engineering unit that withdraws before they can be attacked by Hezbollah infantry.
Terrorist attacks including the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the pager attack, and the dropping of 80-tons of bombs to assassinate Nasrallah.
Mobilize Israeli society to support genocide, mass rape, and other atrocities using atrocity propaganda and related methods.
Media strategy centered on dehumanization of all of Israel’s enemies as “terrorists”, and have Western media and politicians insist that total war on an entire society is justified if there are “terrorists” among them.
Censorship and state repression to depress solidarity movements in the West, Jordan, Egypt, and other strategic countries run by US allies.
Discard all relevant UN resolutions, international laws, and international court rulings. Establish the precedents that the law does not apply to Israel, diplomacy does not apply to Israel, Israel does not negotiate.
Refuse prisoner exchange – kill prisoners or kill Israelis before they can become prisoners (“Hannibal Doctrine”).
Condition Israeli society to absorb higher casualties and missile attacks while inflicting vastly disparate casualties in Gaza especially (and increasingly, Lebanon) to try to defeat the “deterrence equation” of the Axis of Resistance and thereby avoid the Axis’s ceasefire terms.
Obtain higher subsidies from the US to outlast economic attrition.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on X: “In Lebanon, there will be no ceasefire and no respite. We will continue to hit Hezbollah with full force until the goals of the war are achieved. Israel will not agree to any arrangement that does not guarantee Israel’s right to enforce and prevent terrorism on its own, and meeting the goals of the war in Lebanon, disarming Hezbollah and withdrawing them beyond the Litani River and returning the residents of the north safely to their homes.”
The stated objectives of the war: to return Israeli settlers to northern Israel, return Israeli prisoners from Gaza, and to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah – would all follow from the overall objective which is to restore Israel’s dominance. To establish that it is Israel, not its enemies, who determine what happens in the lands that are of interest to it. If dominance is restored, Israel will be able to place its settlers where it wishes, administer the Palestinian prison population as it wishes and where it wishes (in ever-smaller enclaves and perhaps in a re-occupied Sinai), and move the Lebanese population where it wishes.
Dominance means a society whose primary activity is the administration of prison camps and a military whose primary activity is conducting raids against starving civilians.
Dominance is the current situation, in other words, extended forever into the future. The Western elite will support such a project, financially and politically, unto death. But: can Israel contain the resistance to the point that life can feel somewhat normal for enough Israelis to keep the project going (relying on the fact that resistance rockets have relatively small payloads and high-payload missiles are rather infrequent and could perhaps be spent if enough time passes)? Can Israeli society be conditioned to accept that this is life now, that there will never be a “normal” life again? Are there enough Israelis who are willing to live like this and fight for this? Does America have the resources to support this life?
Unlimited objectives -> unwinnable war
The Axis of Resistance strategy seems to be based on the hope that the US and Israel can be forced to see reason. Is the US capable of making the strategic decision to call Israel off before dominance has been restored (since it might never be)? Israel and the West have jumped together off the cliff of racial supremacy. The restoration of dominance could be too open-ended of a goal for victory to be possible.
The US-Israeli victory could look like this: Israel kills everyone in Gaza through famine and bombing, 2 million people, over another year or two. America bombs Yemen so much that Ansarallah is effectively destroyed. Israel depopulates Lebanon to the Litani river, destroys Hezbollah and kills most of Lebanon’s Shia population, another million or more people. Then Israel moves on to the West Bank. Then Syria. Then Iran. Against Iran, there’s not an easily imagined path to victory, but let’s stretch and imagine a miraculous short war that leads to a regime change in Iran and a bloodless coup to bring back the Shah. Egypt and Jordan wait, docile, for Israel to finish with these enemies before offering themselves for occupation. And the march continues like that… or the war with Iran leads to nuclear escalation and perhaps the destruction of human civilization.
Israeli leaders have expressed as war aims things like “the destruction of all resistance” and “the continuation of the war”. So if the war ends on Israel’s terms, the war doesn’t end. With diplomacy and international law discarded, Israel has to continue warring and genociding until it is stopped.
To rephrase Frederic Jameson, it’s becoming easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the US-Israel stopping their genocide.
Scott Ritter in the aforementioned video with Danny Haiphong ventured a prediction that the project of Israel and the ideology of Zionism would eventually come to an end and be absorbed into a unitary Palestinian state, the way Apartheid South Africa ended and became the South Africa of today. The other options seem to be forever war or world destruction.
On empathy and historical investigation as research methods
American writer Ta Nehisi Coates has a new book called The Message and has been saying some things that make sense about Palestine, apparently in the book and during his promotion of it. I am not sure what to make of Coates. He’s a writer, he teaches writing, as he’s been reminded on television recently, he’s been given great awards and accolades and publishes in the highest literary circles of America (all of which, he was reminded on CBS, can be taken away). From what I’ve seen (I will read the book but I have not yet) the book is intended for writers. I’ve always had some discomfort with the idea of identifying as a writer. Writing is a tool; you should identify with the reason you’re using the tool. Hassan Nasrallah’s principal activity was preparing and delivering speeches, but I wouldn’t have called him a public speaker. I have made a lot of youtube videos this past year, but I wouldn’t call myself a youtuber. As for the accoladed writers, there seems to be an agreed-upon illusion that their words have some kind of unique power beyond that of normal writers. You might find the same facts (with or without the citations) or the same insights elsewhere, but there is something special about it when it’s given to you by a Writer. I’m not even above that feeling – I like reading the work of an exalted Writer as much as anyone. I just think it’s a shared illusion that we’re all partaking in. And it isn’t a great time to have illusions. Not about this.
Here I’m not writing about the viral CBS interview clip where some pro-Israel TV host threw all the regular talking points at Coates, who answered them with great ease. I want to look instead about his debriefing of that and discussion of the Palestine part of his book with Trevor Noah and co-host Christiana Mbakwe Medina, on Noah’s podcast. I think some of you may have guessed the part of it that I want to talk about.
Both Noah and Coates say a lot of good things worth listening to in here, for example:
Noah points out that no pro-Israel friend of his can argue that Israel *isn’t* an apartheid state
Coates points out that there can be no justification for apartheid, and that in trying to justify it, Israel’s defenders admit that they believe there can be justifications for racism, apartheid – and now genocide as well.
But among these good things, Coates gets to a moment, around minute 14, where he talks about October 7th, and the discussion here pretty well cancels out the good he does elsewhere in the interview.
He says, “I try to maintain my great horror at October 7th… because human life really matters to me.” A minute later, he continues, asking the rhetorical question: “Is there room in the world… to have genuine genuine horror about what happened on October 7th? And I’m not Palestinian, I’m Ta Nehisi Coates. There’s no reason that I can apprehend to justify anything like that.”
In his recent interview with Middle East Eye, Coates talks about how he writes much better when he can actually go and see for himself. Indeed Trevor Noah commended Coates for going and seeing for himself and bringing back the words after doing so. But Coates didn’t see October 7th. I have seen everything available to the public that happened on October 7th; I have heard descriptions from journalists who attended the Israeli screening of the footage they assembled for the express purpose of trying to create support for genocide.
What happened on October 7th was an early morning raid by trained, disciplined guerrilla forces on the Israeli bases that maintain the siege on Gaza, a raid whose goal was primarily to take military prisoners that could be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian prisoners that Israel keeps and tortures. Prisoners who, if Israel has its way, will never be free. One group of fighters from the Qassam brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, were surprised to encounter a rave party, the Nova Music Festival, whose location beside an Israeli air force base had only been announced to attendees just before. Israelis trying to flee this music festival were slaughtered from the air by Israeli helicopter gunships. When Qassam fighters infiltrated into the fortified villages that enclose Gaza, Israelis were also slaughtered in these villages by tank fire from the Israeli army who happily killed Israelis for the chance to kill Palestinians – the new rules that Israel lives by, as I’ve discussed in a previous post.
The “great horrors” that circulated as stories after October 7th, about 40 beheaded babies, about rape being used as a weapon of war – turned out to be fabrications, sourced back to a small number of Israelis whose stories fell apart, as Max Blumenthal details in the film Atrocity Inc.
Here’s the point: Coates didn’t “go and see” for himself. He doesn’t appear to have done any investigation at all. Instead, he has simply accepted the lies told by the colonizer. Given the importance of analogies in Coates’s writing, he should know that colonizers lie about the people they oppress. He should know the kinds of lies they tell, the nature of atrocity propaganda, and the purpose of it in preparing the public for genocidal violence against the oppressed. How many times has this specific pattern of lies recurred in American history? Where has it led, each time? Coates needs to make this connection.
When he does make an analogy to American history, Coates tells the story of Nat Turner’s rebellion – and does so also in a way that doesn’t seem to recognize that slavers could lie about what rebellious slaves did. About Nat Turner, Coates says, “this man slaughtered babies in their cribs.” In fact, as I mentioned in our last tankie therapy session, my first thought when I heard Normal Finkelstein first make this analogy last year (the analogy of October 7th 2023 with Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion) was that perhaps Nat Turner didn’t commit atrocities either. Having watched the construction of atrocity propaganda in real time this year, it is hard to imagine the slaver society told the truth about Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 (by the way I covered this rebellion in my historical podcast about four years ago now). It is incorrect to rely on a history written by the enslavers about atrocities committed during a slave revolt 100 years ago as analogical evidence that atrocities were committed during a guerrilla operation last year.
No babies were slaughtered in their cribs on October 7th. No babies were beheaded. There was, according to the Ha’aretz list, one child who was killed by accident in one of the Israeli villages of the Gaza Envelope. The Palestinian Resistance fighters who attacked fortified Israeli bases on that day were not acting out the degradation of their lives (probably neither was Nat Turner). They were enacting a military strategy and doing so according to their (Islamic) military ethics, which do not allow harm to civilians nor sexual violence. If Coates can listen to Israelis, can give them a hearing, he should also be able to give a hearing to the voices of the Resistance: spokespeople, political leaders, intellectuals. I’ll return to that point below, but let me address how Coates made it even worse:
At 15:48, he says: “I’ve done this thought experiment for myself over and over. Does the degradation and dehumanization of slavery make it so that you can look past something like that? And I think I can accurately imagine that there were enslaved people that said this is too far, I can’t do that. Now here’s the flip side of it. And I haven’t said it out loud. Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open air jail – if my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out to the sea he might get shot, if my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the walls she might be shot, if my sister has cancer and she needs treatment and if I can’t get the right permit for it she might die? And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty. And the wall comes down. Am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say, this is too far. I don’t know that I am.”
This thought experiment has nothing to do with reality. Coates has tried to use empathy and imagination but he doesn’t have the factual foundation to get where he is trying to go. It’s true, the conditions in Gaza are like he describes – worse, in fact – but that has not installed in Palestinians a drive to go and commit “great horror”. Palestinians have a drive to be left alone in their land. Palestinians have a drive to study and pursue education. Many Palestinians have a drive to take care of the land in their Mediterranean ecosystem of olive and orange trees. The Gaza-grown, vengeful Ta-Nehisi that Coates is trying to imagine doesn’t exist. The real people weren’t waiting for a chance to get even, or inflict the degradation they’ve suffered on their oppressors. They were waiting for a chance to get their freedom and to get their land back, and they did so in an organized armed struggle, not chaotic violence. There’s no need for this kind of imaginative exercise when the facts are available.
Immediately after this interview, some cartoonish Israeli writers took this thought experiment and ran with it to defame Coates. By using his imaginative exercise to defame the Palestinian Resistance and by avoiding investigating for himself what actually happened on October 7th, Coates rendered himself defenseless against the pro-Israel lobby’s smears. Coates first decided to believe the lies about “horrors” on October 7th, then said he didn’t know if he had the strength to not commit such horrors. This was all unnecessary: the facts of what happened don’t match his implication and the logic of the Resistance exists entirely outside of the idea of inflicting reciprocal degradation.
Coates is a writer who uses autobiography and his background is an open book. His father was a Black Panther and the publisher of Black Classic Press, which published many important Black intellectuals. Some of what Coates says on Noah’s podcast suggests that he missed many of the important points that these intellectuals were making. He says that in Israel, he saw “some of the nationalist impulse that I grew up under”, but “taken to the Nth degree.” But Zionism is nothing like Black Nationalism taken to the Nth degree. Zionism is a form of colonialism, and Black Nationalism is an anti-colonial ideology. At 24:45, he says about Zionism:
“I can feel the parallels, the fraternity for it and the sympathy, I understand it. But you see where it goes. And a people who have been repeatedly degraded over the centuries, massacred, killed, chased, ethnically cleansed themselves out of Spain, can go somewhere and create a system of dire inhumanity against other people. That was a challenge for me as a Black person, because I started thinking, what would we be if we had power? What would we do? “
[One day I might return to this historical question of medieval Spain, which I happen to know a lot about – but it’s a huge mess and Coates bringing it in here adds more muddle to the thinking, not less.]
The belief that Coates holds that Black people, in power, would become Zionists, is incorrect. Not because it isn’t humanly possible – of course it is – but because it shows a lack of understanding of what Zionism is. Coates relies too much on the analogy he has made between two things that are much unlike one another – the Black nationalism published by W.P. Coates’s press (John Henrik Clarke, Bobby Seale, Amiri Baraka) – and the Zionism of Herzl and Jabotinsky, of Bill Clinton and of Netanyahu. Zionism, as I’ve documented here in an eight-part series, is an anti-Jewish ideology. And as I’ve documented in my historical podcast, it was an ideology of its time – and that time was the Scramble for Africa – and that ideology was of European colonization. You can like it or hate it, but Black Nationalism has nothing to do with this. Coates knows this, but it seems to slip through his fingers in his over-empathizing and his over-connecting of these ideologies.
The tree from which Zionism springs is the Anglo-American colonialism whose settler colonial branches live in Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, and whose devastated post-colonies in Asia and Africa continue to pay trillions in tribute (tribute given various names: repatriated profits, brain drain, suppressed wages, interest on debts…) to their former colonial masters.
The tree from which Black Nationalism springs is the tree of resistance to all of this, and it shares much with other ideologies of national liberation from colonialism around the world. European colonization of the world is a few centuries old and in terms of technological and ideological sophistication (including specifically the deployment of lies) it is unique. When Coates says that it isn’t unique to Zionism but it is a “human problem”, it’s another case of over-empathizing, this time with European colonialism:
“This doesn’t work if you can’t see yourself within Israel and within Zionism. If you think this is just evil people doing some evil thing, you’ve missed it. This started somewhere. Once I started reading the documents about Zionism, on one level, I recognized the colonialist discourse, but the other part was I recognize the yearning.”
But Zionist yearning, for a colony, could not have been more different from Black Nationalist yearning, for liberation. To achieve hegemony over the Jewish community, Zionists had to defeat both religious and secular Jewish traditions and identities. There were Jews who yearned for liberation from European racism, who Coates should empathize with. But they were not Zionists.
In an article about The Message, one of Coates’s friends said that Coates goes through a very public learning process. He’s approached his study from the wrong direction, starting with Zionist intellectualism and discovering the evils that occur as it’s applied on the ground. For the next phase of the learning process, the Resistance’s intellectuals should be the avenue of approach. As a writer’s writer, how about the late Refaat Alareer? Ghassan Kanafani would be a good one to have on the shelf. Salman Abu Sitta is way underrated. Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches. Abu Obeida’s speeches. Yahya Sinwar’s novel too. Since Coates has already said that he doesn’t care about the awards and accolades, that he wants to be a writer to go into those kinds of places, that’s the direction to head in. More historical investigation. More reading the words of those who never had illusions about Zionism in the first place.
Reading about Meta’s Israel Policy chief the other day reminded me that there are real human racist decisions without which “algorithmic suppression” cannot happen. We are deceived by the idea that our screens are controlled by “algorithms”. Actually, they’re controlled by racists.
Tech executives working with genocidal governments decide which news items we can see on our screens: news editors decide what those items contain. CBC policy, BBC policy, and a revolving door between the Israeli military and American journalism, as Jeremy Scahill mentioned.
That’s why I never saw the point of the supposedly groundbreaking stories about Lavender AI or the Where’s Daddy algorithm for killing people in Gaza. Really? Is an algorithm driving the bulldozer over hundreds of people? Is an algorithm dressing up in dead women’s underwear, playing with dead children’s toys, and taking photos for dating sites?
On today’s EI Livestream, Jon showed some aerial imagery from Rafah of before and after.
It’s not serious to think that any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, was applied in doing “targeting” that led to this destruction. We are talking about how many multiples of the Hiroshima nuclear holocaust’s worth of ordinance have been dropped on Gaza at this point (I think it’s around 4x now and counting). There’s no intelligent algorithm needed, only the sheer depravity to take the decision, the American bombs to drop, and the American planes to deliver them.
Well, that’s not all that’s needed. Because in north Gaza right now it’s a very intimate, hands on holocaust. In the Sde Teiman torture / death camp, it’s a hands on holocaust.
And according to a CNN story and an Israeli media story this past week (the latter written up in the Cradle), doing the genocide is driving the perpetrators crazy – so crazy that they can’t even talk about what they did in direct language, even in the expose. Instead of talking about the trauma of what they did, they talk about what they saw. Instead of talking about what they’ve become, they talk about being depressed and unmotivated. Their army psychologist tries to help them “normalize” the atrocities, but the subject of the CNN story killed himself. Can human compartmentalization be so total that you can commit mass murder and then retain the sense of the preciousness of life that you need to have relationships? Can racial supremacy really get you that far? It might not.
It’s a word I heard my whole life but I only bothered looking it up a few years ago: shibboleth, meaning a word that distinguishes one group from another. Speak for a few seconds and I’ll know from just a few words whether you’re pro- or anti-genocide.
Anti-genocide shibboleths include using the word “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing; using the word “resistance” to describe the people fighting Israel; using the word “martyr” to describe someone Israel has killed.
Pro-genocide shibboleths include calling the victims “terrorists”, phrases like “Hamas embeds in civilian areas”, “Hamas uses human shields”, and repeating the lies about October 7th.
I wrote last year that as far as the pro-genocide and anti-genocide sides go, that as they reject our (facts) and we reject their (lies), that soon “there will be no reason to talk to one another and no desire on either side to do so.” We’re pretty nearly there – not sure about you but I get less and less from watching anti-genocide people go on debate platforms to have it out with the genocidals (usually with a genocidal or fake friend of the anti-genocide movement hosting).
It’s good to keep track of these shibboleths. Knowing them can help: on the anti-genocide side we need to learn to find each other quickly and recognize who’s a waste of time. There isn’t any time to waste. Every day that our efforts fail carries an intolerable cost.
On the messages sent between occupier and Resistance
Over the past year I have tried to focus on the military question in the expanding war / genocide the US / Israel has been waging on the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Yemenis, and Iranians. As figures from the Resistance have said and reiterated, the issue will be decided on the battlefield. And although struggle in all these areas has a role to play, the issue also won’t be decided in the feelings of the oppressor communities nor even in Western genocidal media, campuses or streets. Military affairs require extensive study, encompassing the particulars of weapons systems to topography and maps, to supply chains and logistics, to propaganda and morale. History is always the principal tool, but used with caution: the future is different from the past and the present is maximally dynamic.
The quintessential Western military theorist, von Clausewitz, the subject of a previous post of mine, described war as an extension of politics. Politics involves communication between enemies, and so does war.
Israel, and following it the whole West, has transformed itself over the course of the year. It presents itself as a new and different kind of opponent. All year I have wondered about the long-term consequences of such a voluntary self-transformation. Let us now focus on the image Israel is trying to project, how it communicates that new image, and how this will ultimately compel the Resistance to transform as well.
If you’ve followed the utterances of genocidal Western elites or of Israelis, you’ll hear a lot of pedagogical language. “The Yemenis are about to learn why we don’t have free healthcare”, said one memorable tweet. “We will teach them a harsh lesson,” a repeated theme. But what exactly is the lesson? If you were to ask an Israel advocate, they would say probably that the lesson is “don’t mess with Israel”, as Israeli bots like to add under anti-genocide posts on social media. But the strategic lesson Israel seeks to teach its victims is a bit longer. If it could be spelled out, it would be more like: We can do whatever we like to you, and if you resist we will make it even worse for you. That there are unimaginable punishments in store for those who resist is the most important lesson the oppressor, the abuser, wants to teach.
In his speech on the anniversary of al-Aqsa flood, the spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam brigades, Abu Obeida, intimated that the operation of Oct 7/23 was a pre-emption against an Israeli plan against the al-Aqsa mosque, a pre-emption of an Israeli plan to advance the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The arrival to power in Israel of the Kahanist settler movement would give credence to this line of thinking.
Abu Obeida’s speech declared an understanding of Israel to “only understand the language of power”.
If the Oct 7/23 raid was indeed a pre-emption, it explains why the Israelis were so ready for October 7/23 in every way but defense. While they didn’t repel the raid, they managed to deploy their helicopters and ground forces to kill hundreds of Israelis to prevent them from becoming captives that might then be tradeable for thousands of Palestinian prisoners, in a “mass Hannibal” event. Israel was prepared to destroy houses full of Israelis in the kibbutzes. This is one of the messages: Israelis would die so that Palestinians could remain imprisoned, Israelis would die so that Palestinians could be killed. Israelis are willing to die for the sake of imprisoning and killing Palestinians.
Israel and its advocates were ready with a package of lies about atrocity crimes, lies that people who knew the dynamics of the conflict and its antagonists instantly recognized as such and fairly quickly proved their case – not that it mattered for Western media and politicians who repeat the same lies a year later. The specific lies about atrocities against children and lies about sexual violence are more than just standard colonial tropes. The point of the lies is a deep one. Morale is the key to the anti-colonial struggle. The preparation and propagation of lies about atrocity crimes were designed to make supporters of the struggle ashamed. To make the operation of October 7th a shameful operation. To sap the elation of courageous fighters entering their homelands for the first time and successfully taking the fight to their invader, and instead force supporters to defend against accusations of the worst crimes. Israel has conducted several successful genocidal operations over the year, but the atrocity propaganda operation is one of its most successful. And here is another message Israel sends its victims: We can turn your victories into shame, because we control how the world sees you. The goal is both demoralization and isolation of the Resistance’s cause from friends and allies who are silenced by the viciousness of the lies.
After massacring Israelis and preparing the full package of atrocity propaganda, Israel quickly moved into genocide mode, announcing intent in advance and then proceeding to impose food, water, and power blockades, methodically destroy Gaza’s health care system, hospital by hospital, while targeting children and boasting about it to the world. The lies they told to justify these massacres – of human shields, of command centers under hospitals and schools, etc. – were never meant to be believed. Their target was the oppressed: We can lie about you and we will be believed, not you.
Israel was so ready with the whole genocide package that some came to believe that the Israelis knew about the Oct 7/23 attack and allowed it to happen. I’m not among them: I think Israel was ready with an accelerated genocide plan because Israel has always been ready with an accelerated genocide plan. Israel came into existence in 1948 through an accelerated genocide plan, and everything it has done since has been to add more and more American technology to the unfolding of that original plan.
Israeli strategy is open-ended and opportunistic: grab what is possible. If limits are hit, wait for the next opportunity – or force one. Israel made a plan to force the people of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai (and then occupy it, of course) and discarded it when Egypt demurred. Israel has enumerated many plans for the post-war occupation of Gaza that assume they’ve won the war and defeated Hamas. More can be grabbed when the oppressed are demoralized than when they are hopeful. This explains the message sent by the revelling in atrocity – dressing up in dead women’s underwear and playing with dead children’s toys, demolishing universities and mosques, etc. You have suffered so much because you resisted. This destruction is your fault.
This last message, the abuser’s look what you made me do, is Israel’s most important one for the subjugation of the Palestinians (and now Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, Iranians…). The total destruction is spun as the victim’s fault for the logic of subjugation, analogous to the way Resistance successes are spun as atrocity crimes to try to achieve the isolation of the Resistance. Destruction and lies, subjugation and isolation. These are the messages sent by the colonial power to those who would resist.
Adapting to the colonizer’s classroom
Long term, subjugation is a pipe dream. One of the most spectacular projects of colonization (which the early Zionists tried to participate in) was the Scramble for Africa, when all the Great Powers of the 19th century – far more powerful in relative terms than they are now – got together to colonize the immense continent of Africa. They had a formal meeting, the Berlin Conference, in 1884 and had rolled up most of the continent within a couple of decades, killing millions of Africans in the process and during the colonialism that followed. Africans threw most of them out by the early 1960s. Africa expelled the invaders even though their leaders were murdered; even though their people were displaced and genocided, imprisoned and tortured; even though they lost most of the battles they fought with their technologically overpowered colonizers. Faced with the look what you made me do carnage, decolonizers put their heads down and kept fighting. Faced with the 19th century version of atrocity lies, the claims that they were savages, not ready for self-government, two-legged beasts, racial inferiors etc., decolonizers once again put their heads down and kept fighting.
In the current war, the anticolonial resistance has actually challenged Western media and narrative control of the colonial power – something the 20th century decolonizers hardly even tried to do. The armed resistance has also gone beyond trying to survive (win or lose) until the colonizer has to leave. Instead it has tried to impose a different “equation” on Israel. The Resistance always talks about “the equation.” Besides the escalation ladder, the equation is the most pervasive metaphor used to describe the battle with Israel.
Trying to take Israeli prisoners to exchange for Palestinian prisoners was an attempt at creating an equation, one that had freed many Palestinian prisoners in the past, and one that could equal freeing all Palestinian prisoners if the calculation was correct. This is the equation Israel was trying to cancel through the formalization of the Hannibal doctrine: the willingness to kill Israelis before, during, and after capture, to make sure Palestinian prisoners remained captive and hopeless.
Creating armies and Indigenous arms industries that could challenge and defeat Israeli ground forces was an attempt at creating an equation, one that the Resistance hoped could deter Israel. Once the message was firmly sent that Resistance ground forces could not be defeated by the Israeli army, there could be talk of a long-term ceasefire that was not on the basis of subjugation. Israel is trying to cancel this equation in two ways: by showing willingness to send the Israeli army in again and again and use media strategy to claim victory even if there wasn’t any on the ground; and use their superior air force to commit genocide from the air, returning to the message of look what you made me do.
Open equations
Several equations remain open.
In 2012, Nasrallah promised a yet new equation: if Israel again destroyed Beirut from the air the way they had done in 2006, Hezbollah had missile capabilities to do the same to Israeli cities. In 2024 Israel has set out to test whether this is the case, by assassinating Nasrallah and bombing Beirut exactly as Nasrallah promised would bring the destruction of Haifa. Haifa still stands, but the war is just starting.
In 2023, Ansarallah in Yemen announced that they would be blockading Israel and attacking any ships that tried to go to Israel for any reason, until Israel ends the genocide and the blockade on Gaza. The US sent their Navy to try to get Yemen to back down, which they did not. The US, UK, and Israel have bombed Yemen many times over the year. Each time Yemen emerged to resume their blockade and their attacks on Israeli shipping and the US navy. Israel has announced that it wants to assassinate Yemen’s leaders; Yemen announced that they have implemented new security measures… and resumed launching missiles and drones, including on Tel Aviv.
In April 2023, Iran attacked Israel with a series of drones and missiles after Israel attacked the Iranian consulate in Syria. In October 2024, Iran attacked Israel again, after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Israel has promised that it will attack Iran, and Iran has promised it will attack Israel again if that happens. If there’s an equation here, no one knows the variables yet.
In addition to the above three open equations, to repeat the other communications so far:
Israel tries to tell the Palestinians that resistance is futile. The Palestinians do October 7/23. Israelis claims the story of October 7th and paints the event as an atrocity crime to isolate Palestinians from allies and demoralize them through a demonstration of media domination and Western message discipline.
Israel commits aerial genocide to show Palestinians and now Lebanese that they should submit to Israel’s will. Resistance ground forces fight to show that they can keep fighting as long as it takes.
Israel takes thousands of Palestinians prisoner and tortures them to try to demoralize and subjugate the nation. Palestinians take Israeli prisoners to try to get an exchange. Israel responds by showing a willingness to kill Israeli prisoners rather than let an exchange happen.
Another Resistance message that would confound Westerners if they knew (which they don’t) is their adherence to the rules of war as they understand them. Hizbollah and Iran both conducted missile strikes which they said were revenge for assassinations and massacres, revenge that inflicted almost no casualties. While Qassam in Gaza has fired on attack helicopters with shoulder-launched missiles, they have not fired on medical evacuation helicopters, content to watch and film them. Despite the most daring campaign of lies about October 7th, returned Israeli hostages have reported that the Resistance did not abuse them and repeatedly told them “we are Muslims, no harm will come to you” – the same phrase that Ansarallah told the crew of the Israeli ship (Galaxy Leader) when they took it over and sailed it to Yemen last year.
Westerners assume Resistance captives are abused like Israeli prisoners are.
This message seems to be: No matter how low you sink, we will not abandon our (Islamic) principles of fighting honorably. Perhaps Israel will succeed in eliminating the honorable warriors and Westernizing the next generation, one day to face an opponent more like themselves. From the Resistance perspective, there are probably two reasons they stick to their beliefs: first, because they draw their strength from the same place that these beliefs come from; and second, perhaps, because they view themselves as the future government of all of Palestine, and are fighting the war on the same principles with which they wish to rule.
An Israeli medevac helicopter, coolly observed from the camera of a Resistance fighter.
What happens in Year 2?
As the Resistance has tried to drill the lesson that aerial destruction will not defeat us on the ground, Israel has tried to drill the same lesson from a different perspective: repeatedly defeating Israel on the ground will not protect Palestinian and Lebanese civilians from aerial genocide. Nasrallah’s 2012 deterrence formula, that the destruction of Lebanon’s cities will lead to the destruction of Israel’s cities, has been taken as a challenge by Israel, which is forcing Nasrallah’s successors to either follow through on the threat or accept that nothing can stop Israel from committing genocide safely from afar.
As Israel drills the lesson that we will not be deterred regardless of military casualties, it is arguing that it will not make concessions, not negotiate, and will continue war while it has the ability to do so. The Resistance took prisoners and established military forces towards a long-term ceasefire with a prisoner exchange. Israel’s reply: while Israel exists and while the US is based there, there will be genocide against the peoples of the region. The Resistance did not believe in Year 1 that conditions were right for bringing matters to a decision like this – the most statements by the Ayatollah and by Abu Obeida suggest that the Resistance has come to realize that the US/Israelis believe they can genocide to victory.
The Ayatollah said “when they finish with one country, they move on to the next.”
As Israel has drilled the lesson that we would rather kill our own people than let them be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners, the only way of freeing the Palestinian prisoners without an exchange is the Khiam model (when Hizbollah drove the Israeli occupation out of southern Lebanon in 2000 and liberated the prisoners by liberating the prison).
As Israel has drilled the message that we have the narrative mastery to tell your story including whatever lies we wish, the Resistance has made strong efforts on the war propaganda front through videos that depict their continuing capability and ability to inflict losses on the ground, as the unarmed resistance challenges the lies using whatever media are available through censors and monopoly control. This, too, is an open equation. The truth doesn’t always prevail, and we don’t know whether it will prevail here. All we can do is tell it.
Israel is still planning to attack Iran and dramatic events are certain to occur in the coming days. Can the Resistance win? Nasrallah said that war is like this – one day for the enemy, one day for you. The US and Israel could assassinate even more people, Israel’s army could collapse and be backfilled by the Americans directly. Maybe they’ll blow up the world.
Let’s suppose they don’t, since there’s not much point in continuing this post if they do.
Suppose they don’t and that they win the war, somehow destroying Hizbollah in the mountains of Lebanon, completing the genocide and starving the fighters of Hamas to death, cleansing the Palestinians of the West Bank to Jordan, destroying Iran’s missile abilities, crushing Iraq, perhaps miring Yemen and Syria in fratricidal wars? Then Israel will have bought itself a decade or two of tranquility to dance again in the ashes. And in a generation, a new war, in a totally different geopolitical and technological world than today’s, with foes that make it long for the enemies of today, who were foolish enough to think they could force a Western enemy committed to genocide and racism to fight with reason and honor.
A review of Yahya Sinwar’s novel, The Thorn and the Carnation
At the end of the 2021 war, a Hamas leader gave a speech among the carnage of Gaza. He told the press and public that he would walk home, that the Israelis knew where he was, and if they wanted to make him a martyr that would be their chance. Instead, he ended up going home and sitting on an intact piece of upholstery amid the rubble of his house.
Yahya Sinwar in his destroyed home in 2021
Today that leader – until 2011 a prisoner of Israel’s, now the head of Hamas’s political bureau – is in the tunnels of Gaza, directing the war effort against Israel’s genocidal army.
Two decades ago, Yahya Sinwar wrote a novel. It should be required reading for friends and enemies of Palestinians alike, but it was banned from Amazon and circulates instead on the back channels of the web. The Thorn and the Carnation was written inside Israeli prison, copied by hand and smuggled out: Sinwar’s words escaped Israel’s dungeons years before the author got out in a prisoner exchange. The novel is a document of Palestinian life under occupation from the 1960s to the early 2000s and reveals the perspectives and priorities of one of the main Resistance leaders of our time.
Colonizers are always obsessed with the leaders among the oppressed, and Sinwar obsesses the Israelis like no one else at the moment.
Israel’s UN ambassador holding up a photo of SinwarIsrael’s Finance Minister holds up a photo of SinwarIsraeli made terrorist playing card of Sinwar
In the preface of the book, Sinwar says that all the events in the book are real but have only been transformed into fiction to “to fulfill the form and requirements of a novelistic work.” As a graduate of the Arabic Literature program of the (now destroyed, along with every other university building in Gaza) Islamic University of Gaza, Sinwar would know. Imprisoned not long after his student years (he was born in 1962 and imprisoned in 1988, sentenced to life), Sinwar wrote a book where most action takes place in the three sites central to an occupied people obsessed with education: the camps, the campuses, and the prisons. There are no corporate boardrooms, glitzy hotels, yachts, or even weapons laboratories. Readers of the Thorn and the Carnation witness the construction of the Resistance in seemingly impossible conditions, humble locations, under the ever-watchful eye of the occupier.
Morally and practically prescriptive, the novel is not written from an ironic distance, but from the point of view of a youth growing up and learning of the world. Corrupted characters and villains – the occupation and collaborators – play their roles across from upright Resistance characters and heroes. The protagonists’ family hold fully-drawn out debates between communist (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Islamist (Hamas), and nationalist (Fatah) members. All positions are reasonably portrayed, but the Hamsawis get the last word.
A review of the book by Haneen Odetallah in Mondoweiss draws the philosophy of Sinwar out of the text, showing how the protagonist’s cousin (more like a brother), Ibrahim, represents the values of a Resistance fighter: Self-sacrifice, asceticism, and security awareness.
Certain military concepts can also be drawn out by reading Thorn and Carnation. In it, a frank and undramatic narration of Israeli atrocities coexist alongside an ever-evolving assessment of Resistance possibilities.
Long before the current genocide, Israel’s actions could have formed the basis of a horror novel, but the Thorn and the Carnation is a novel of action. While occupation persists, resistance never stops, and never will. Its forms change, but through all the harms inflicted upon the people, it grows. Even if Sinwar himself were killed in the current war, the Resistance would go on.
The book describes a Gaza Strip in the 1960s constantly under patrol by the Israeli army, in which guerrilla fighters would move in silence and come out of hiding for an ambush. “The resistance men would dominate the camp at night, making it impossible for the occupation patrols to enter its alleys. They stayed on the main streets, and with the break of dawn, the resistance men would disappear.”
The actions and the deaths of martyrs are reported in a straightforward style:
“A significant event that year was the martyrdom of our neighbor Abu Yousuf. He, along with two other young men, had set out to execute a mission against the occupation patrols. Their strategy involved one of the fighters throwing a grenade at the patrol that regularly passed through the main street at a specific time, then retreating in a way that made him visible to the soldiers. Abu Yousuf and another fighter, armed with Carl Gustav rifles and grenades, lay in wait for the reinforcements that would pursue the first attacker. Unfortunately, they were ambushed unexpectedly from behind, and both Abu Yousuf and his comrade Ibrahim were martyred on the spot.”
As a child, the protagonist, Ahmed, witnesses the public execution of a collaborator, followed by an Israeli mass arrest operation; imprisonment and torture of random men from the community. Characters are introduced to show how Resistance is organized: recruiting, building networks, acquiring weapons. Resistance members, like everyone else, get swept up in the Israeli dragnet, and the novel reveals how they conduct the struggle even while being interrogated:
“As is usual in resistance work, one of the cells encountered an operational failure, leading to the arrest of its members. Under severe interrogation, some began confessing, leading to more arrests, eventually reaching Abu Ali. He was captured and subjected to intense interrogation in the dungeons of Hebron prison. Abu Ali showed great resilience and refused to confess even the simplest things that some of the young men, deceived during the interrogation, had admitted.” His partner had confessed, but the uncle didn’t: “Abdul Fattah was taken to Hebron prison and subjected to severe interrogation and torture, as they questioned him about his relationship with Abu Ali and tried to convince him that Abu Ali had confessed everything. However, Abdul Fattah continued to deny the allegations. Consequently, he was sentenced to six months of administrative detention without any charges, while Abu Ali received a five-year sentence based on the confessions obtained from some of the young men who weren’t resilient enough to withstand the interrogation ordeal.”
The ones who don’t confess to anything end up free sooner, while confessions lead to worse sentences for everyone. The message is clear.
Sinwar as a young man
The chapters covering the 1970s dive deeply into prison life – the counts, loudspeakers, food, bathroom shifts, beatings, being made to sit on a blanket non stop, one five minute shower per week, one bar of soap for dozens of people… then the military court / kangaroo court. A young reader of the novel would know what to expect when the Israelis nabbed him and sent him to prison. This part of the novel conveys the centrality of the prisoners’ struggle to Palestine, and the importance of liberating the prisoners to the Resistance. After the prisoners adopt the hunger strike, the Israelis make conditions a bit better and the prison becomes a Resistance school in its own right:
“In the following period, cultural, religious, and educational gatherings in prison became very common. In one room, there was a session discussing Palestinian history; in another, a political session about the latest developments; in a third, a session about the principles, slogans, and objectives of the Fatah movement; and in a fourth, a session on socialist thought and Marxist philosophy. The prison transformed into an advanced school where learners taught others, and those inexperienced in debate and political thought were trained.”
As the chronology moves into the 1980s, the protagonist’s older cousin, Ibrahim, the model Resistance fighter, comes into his own. He studies and prepares, builds a family life and a business while getting an education and working underground in the Resistance.
Before the First Intifada (1987-1989) the Resistance is at a low point and Israeli intelligence looks unbeatable:
“The occupation’s intelligence had begun to infiltrate the camp gradually, systematically, and deliberately. Anyone opposing or objecting would find the intelligence officer responsible for the area sending dozens of summonses to young men and men to his office. They would sit in the waiting room for hours, then be called in one by one, to be beaten, threatened, warned, bargained with, consoled, and efforts made to recruit them.”
How did the Israelis recruit? Through blackmail, bribery, corruption, and, from the Islamic perspective, through immorality as well:
“It became clear that through its agents, the occupation’s intelligence started promoting the trade and use of hashish, drugs, and alcohol. They considered this a means to destroy the nation and kill any spirit of resistance, while the agents saw it as a quick way to make money with their appearance protected. The agents began to promote corruption and immorality by spreading obscene pictures, magazines, and sexual videotapes among boys and girls.”
A reader of the book would be forewarned against these Israeli methods:
“It was clear that the occupation’s intelligence, using its agents, systematically practiced spreading organized corruption to destroy the people and end any hope of a future for liberation or resistance. Every day, their methods in this field evolved, to the extent that one of the well-known agents’ offices would announce registration for a tourist trip to areas inside the Green Line. During these trips, with dozens of naive young men, several prostitutes known for their collaboration with the occupation’s intelligence were taken along.”
But despite all the infiltration and Israeli intelligence success, resistance persists. The Intifada indeed begins. In the Thorn and the Carnation, there is no separation between the armed struggle, the intelligence war, and the popular struggles on campuses or in the streets. The Israelis do not differentiate between these and neither does the Resistance. In the latter half of the novel, there is a switch to third-person narration as details of how organization proceeds and what methods are employed by both occupation and Resistance, e.g.:
“…the territories were completely devoid of weapons; the occupation had methodically worked over nearly two and a half decades of its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank to empty the regions of weapons and ammunition and to seal all avenues through which they might be brought, imposing severe penalties on anyone involved in this trade. People didn’t even know how to use weapons if they found them. Therefore, activists resorted to using bladed weapons like knives, daggers, machetes, and swords, in addition to batons, and it was very rare to see an old Carlo Gustav rifle or a pistol.“
On organizing the Intifada:
“They are planning and organizing the escalation of the Intifada and confrontations in the city and surrounding towns and villages. They agree to work on two fronts: first, to activate the events and incidents wing of the Intifada, and second, to start establishing armed groups and cells and to gather weapons for them.
“One of the attendees departs to meet three young men to announce the formation of the core of the armed effort. They are instructed to start searching for weapons, prepare hideouts and shelters, and nominate candidates ready to engage in this field. Meanwhile, dozens of activists move in various directions to mobilize individuals and supporters to distribute pamphlets, write slogans on walls, and set up barricades on roads to hinder the movement of occupation forces and settlers, drawing them into suitable locations for stone-throwing, thus facilitating the youths’ camouflage, withdrawal, and maneuvering.”
When the Intifada winds down and Fatah signs the Oslo Accords with Israel, the debate between Hamas and Fatah on the peace process takes place in the protagonists’ family home, between Ahmed’s brother, Mahmoud, who is with Fatah, and his cousin Ibrahim, with Hamas. When Mahmoud says that the Palestinians needed an agreement to establish the beginnings of a state in the West Bank and Gaza, Ibrahim replies:
“It’s clear that continuing resistance and military activities, which cause human losses to the occupation, along with a popular uprising that inflicts political and media damage, will force them to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Then we can establish a state on any piece of land from which the enemy withdraws… If they leave by an agreement, it means that we Palestinians must adhere to certain obligations, the least of which is recognizing their right to our remaining land. However, if they leave without an agreement under the pressure of resistance, it means that we have committed to nothing and the door remains open for us to continue immediately or later… when we find it appropriate.”
As the Intifada dissolves into the Oslo Accords, Ibrahim he gives a speech in prison, to his fellow prisoners, about how the Resistance would start over and over again, as many times as necessary:
“…All sacrifices of the first Intifada have been wasted, and now, with the politicians and negotiators, we’ve reached a deadlock. What’s stopping us from starting anew?”
“Hundreds, if not thousands, of martyrs will fall, and tens of thousands will be wounded. You’ll find someone to propose going to a new Oslo, or whatever you want to call it. After every round of our people’s struggle and sacrifice, the politicians come to reap the fruits; because they rush to harvest the fruit before its time, they are punished by being deprived of it. Neither does the fruit stay on the tree to ripen, nor is it useful when harvested because it’s not yet ripe. This was the solution with our people’s first Intifada, and now we must start again until someone imagines that the fruit has ripened and its time has come, only to destroy everything our people have sacrificed for.”
In Ibrahim’s view, the pressure of Resistance alone is what led to the partial withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories, and the easing of that pressure that led to the reoccupation.
The novel goes through the 1990s in a whirlwind of Israeli repression and Resistance operations. In the end, Israel is at a crossroads, unable to decide how to proceed, as Resistance continues to grow.
In Mahmoud’s (Fatah) view, continuing Resistance after the agreement was endangering the Palestinians, who had no way of defeating Israel. Ibrahim addresses this defeatism directly, as Mahmoud says the Israelis could easily crush the Palestinians.
“Then why haven’t they crushed us? The components of the equation are not merely about pure military strength, Mahmoud. Israel knows it faces an Arab and Islamic nation behind us, fragmented yes, but if it used excessive force against us, the balances of the universe would turn. Israel is unable to crush us because it is governed by many equations, and breaking any one of them means it could be crushed as well.”
Ibrahim’s journey ends in martyrdom, from a helicopter-launched missile striking his car. That, too, is symbolic of the way, in the world view of the Thorn and Carnation, a model Resistance fighter’s life should end while occupation persists.
In the end, the great characters in the Thorn and the Carnation exhibit persistence – through pain, grief, prison, and torture. They don’t reveal themselves to the enemy. They are not fooled by the enemy’s deception and are not intimidated by the enemy’s violence. They study and learn and prepare, even as they fight. They will fight on regardless of setbacks and even through genocide.
At a public event Sinwar is presented with a sidearm captured from an Israeli soldier.
The narrative of the novel ends in 2004. Two decades later, Israel is one year into a genocide against the Palestinians, with the full support of all Western countries, led by the US. The leader of the genocidal campaign is Benjamin Netanyahu. The leader of the principal Palestinian Resistance organization is Yahya Sinwar.
At the moment, Israel, governed as Ibrahim says “by many equations”, is trying to break them, all to try to crush the Resistance. Increasingly it seems that by the end of this war, the Resistance will either have to “start anew”, or Israel will, as Ibrahim calculated, be crushed by the equations it has tried to ignore.
[Dear Readers: For a few months I’ve imagined writing a speculative novel or novella of a post-genocide world in which a group of heroes travel the world catching the war criminals and enablers behind the current genocide. The last act of the story would be the actual trial, which would give me the chance to show how much of the Nuremberg Trial text applies directly to the situation we find ourselves in today. All of which is to say, this scene is rather stripped of the elements of dramatic writing, but it could nonetheless be considered an excerpt of a future book… ]
A favorite target of the now shattered US empire, the old port city of Hodeidah was hit with saturation airstrikes in the final months of the war that liberated the Middle East from occupation. At the very end, the aircraft carrier USS Trump’s F-35s emptied their bomb bays on a final destructive run, after which the Trump left the Red Sea and ran into ‘mechanical troubles’ in the Mediterranean. It never got home. But Hodeidah was rebuilt – with a set of buildings rebuilt in the old style – and in it, a palace custom-built for the express purpose of holding the proceedings that were about to occur.
Old buildings in Sanaa, Yemen
In the vast, main hall, the prisoners sat together in a glass-encased defendants’ box to the right.
Nuremberg defendants
The panel of judges shuffled inscrutably onto the elevated stage. Wardah and the other prosecutors sat directly across from their legal opponents: Egyptian, Saudi, and Jordanian lawyers defending the war criminals in the dock, their Western advisors sitting directly behind them. The proceedings were in Arabic, the jurisprudence Islamic, and so the defense team had deemed it best to have Arabs be the faces and voices of the defense and let the Westerners work behind the legal front line.
A 2020 meeting of the Iranian Supreme Court
A pale, thin man with an impeccable haircut sat in the defendant box wearing a familiar smirk. The younger woman beside him leaned forward, twirling her hair and looking bored, appearing confident that nothing would befall her from this silly court. Watching them, Wardah found herself unbothered by their inaudible whisperings and incomprehensible complicities. As the leader of the Yemeni prosecution team, she felt a responsibility to history, to the past, to the living, to the survivors, to the children who would have to rebuild the nation and whose grief cried out for justice. Like hers.
When the room quieted and the bailiff signaled to her that her turn to speak had come, she walked to the podium and looked at the judges, ignoring completely the assembled criminals on display to the side.
“When the first Nazis were defeated, some of them faced a trial. One of the prosecutors, whose words I will quote here today (1), said that that trial had a grave responsibility because the Nazi crimes were so calculated, so malignant, so devastating, that civilization could not tolerate their being ignored because it could not survive their being repeated.
“They were repeated. And that American man, Justice Robert Jackson, said that instead of vengeance, putting the Nazis on trial, was a tribute which Power paid to Reason. Like Resistance fighters in the field who did not shoot down the Israeli Nazi enemy helicopters when they came to evacuate their wounded, like the men of Ansarallah who assured the crew of the Galaxy Leader that they would not be harmed but treated according to Islam, we too will pay tribute to Reason here today and to religion also, by seeking justice instead of vengeance.
“The law, my predecessor said, must not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people, but must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. I could say, evils which leave no screen in the world untouched.
“The men that your honors are here to judge, are, like my predecessor called the German Nazis, ‘living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names.’
“Under the banner of ‘Zionism’, these men took from their own people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards their opponents, anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, all Arabs and Muslims, and indeed anyone else who stood in their path, they directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since… the previous trial of this kind. They excited the Western ambition to be a “master race” which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine. They replaced all rules and laws of war ever developed with their own Dahiya doctrine of mass murder of civilians, their Hannibal doctrine of killing their own people, and their Samson option of trying to blow up the world rather than lose the land they stole from others. They have demoralized and morally compromised the entire West beyond recognition. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.
“Like my predecessors at the Nuremberg Trial, we had to do an immense amount of legal work in a short amount of time. Less than a year ago, this Palace of Justice did not exist and the building that had stood here had been bombed. We too may suffer from incomplete research and would have benefited from more time, for the crimes were immense and the evidence for them as well. Our case is adequate for you to judge.
“Also like the last time Nazis were tried, the nature of these crimes is that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men and women has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. We, too, must draw a line between just and measured retribution and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war.
“These defendants have gone to great lengths to avoid being caught and tried. They did not extend the favor of a trial to the tens of thousands they tortured in their prisons. But they will be given a fair opportunity to defend themselves. We accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of these defendants for their commission.
“And like the previous Nazis, these modern versions are not accused of yielding to the normal frailties of human beings. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar.
“The Israelis performed their crimes and posted them as trophies on social media sites. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants re-enact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.
“The Jewish people should know by now that we Muslims do not hold them in fear nor hate. In our religion they are the people of the book. And if we are not awed by what the so-called ‘Jewish state’ has done to our people in war, Jewish people have long been truly integrated and celebrated in our lands and protected by just rulers of the Ummah. It is Zionism that led a portion of the Jewish people astray. Zionist aggression has left the whole region in ruins. Zionist readiness to pledge the West’s word without hesitation and break it without shame has fastened upon Western diplomacy a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Western arrogance has made the very phrase ‘Zionist’ a taunt – a word which used to be both proudly claimed and banned for use as an insult – that will be thrown at Westerners for generations. The Zionist nightmare has given the word a sinister significance that will linger: the Jewish, no less than the Muslim world has accounts to settle with these defendants.
“The fact of the war and the course of the war, which is the central theme of our case, is history. From the Nakba of 1948 to the Naksa of 1967, through to the 1973 war, the invasions of Lebanon starting in the 1970s, Israel seemed invincible. All the Arab armies were vanquished in five days of 1967, overrun by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. All of Palestine from the river to the sea was under occupation. Parts of Syria and Lebanon, a huge part of Egypt. The Zionists built colonies in the lands they occupied and displaced the inhabitants. They committed unspeakable massacres where they went. Aggressive wars, wars of colonization, war crimes, crimes against humanity, which the nations of the world had renounced.”
Wardah looked at her notes, wondering if she was belaboring the point. Hadn’t the war settled the issue? Wasn’t it a different world now? No, she would make this presentation as if she still lived in a world where the most obvious truths about Zionism required nearly impossible standards of evidence. So she continued.
“This war did not just happen – it was planned and prepared for a long period of time and with no small skill and cunning. The authors of this war achieved a stupendous work in organization. Our case will show these defendants all uniting in a plan they knew could be accomplished only through genocide. Their planning of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples – all these are ends for which they acted in concert and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one.
“The case as we present it here will be concerned with the brains and authority behind all the crimes. These defendants were of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. But unlike the old Nazis, who used lesser folk as tools, Zionism created through careful design of the education system and media structures, a population that celebrated genocide, that self-organized to deny aid convoys and attack unarmed Palestinians in mobs. This design was a constant work-in-progress and it is the designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with these agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war, whom we hope to reach. As for the masses who participated in the crimes organized by their betters, they must be forgiven after telling their truth in a different set of proceedings, in Palestine, that will follow these. The pursuit of punitive justice against a genocidal majority would not lead us anywhere good, in the view of the prosecution.”
Wardah paused to take a sip of water, before continuing (2).
“One question that we must address first is, why not use the existing tribunals? The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court? Why did we choose to bring the criminals here, to stand trial in our region, rather than in New York, at the United Nations? Because these bodies have failed. When South Africa brought the case, the ICJ ordered Israel to stop its genocide after several months. These defendants ignored the order. The ICJ ordered a stop again before the Rafah invasion. The defendants ignored the order. The International Criminal Court prosecutor, after years of inaction, found himself unable to distinguish between aggressor and victim, and asked for arrest warrants against both. The defendants ignored these – they said Israel never signed on and the Americans had a law threatening to invade the Hague if any American were tried at the ICC. These are the courts of racism, the courts of injustice, the courts of inequality. We believe that all are equal before God and our concept of justice cannot accept that some of God’s children are above the law.
“We will leave it to the Palestinian prosecutor to go through the history prior to October 7, 2023. The Deir Yassin massacre and the many other massacres of the Nakba, the crimes of aggression, occupation, ethnic cleansing throughout the decades. The way that the Western countries and institutions of international law, human rights, and free expression that were supposed to protect the vulnerable, all conspired to create a separate standard for Israel that let them commit any crime against our people. They are the best authority on this history and they can set it out for you.
“We focus instead on the systematic nature of the crimes committed by these defendants in the post-October 7, 2023 genocide war.
“The South Africans showed video and provided an extensive dossier full of these defendants going on record publicly ordering their soldiers to commit genocide. They said there would be no food, water, or electricity going to the civilian population; they cited biblical passages calling for the murder of women, children, and livestock; they made trophy videos of the destruction of homes, buildings, hospitals, water infrastructure, farmers’ fields. The destruction and stopping of aid trucks became a scene for partying. No attempt was made to cover up. This was the most unashamed, open celebration of genocide we have seen.
“But what the South Africans could not say was what we know: that the Resistance operation of October 7 was not an operation to kill Israeli civilians, but to take military prisoners alive to try to obtain a prisoner exchange, Israeli military captives in exchange for thousands of Palestinian captives who were held – tortured and starved and done to death – in the Zionist prisons until they were liberated at the end of the war. And as the Zionist newspaper Ha’aretz reported on July 7, 2024, in Yaniv Kubovich’s report “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive”, most of the Israeli civilians (3) who were killed on that day were killed by Israel, applying the Hannibal Directive. The genocide was built on a lie, a lie that was taken up, developed, and repeated by some of the defendants here today.
“We are bringing this case before you, your honors, because Western institutions of rights and justice chose to self-destruct rather than hold Israel accountable. We mentioned the ICJ, ICC, UN, and the Western media: all have lost their credibility, which is why we are holding the Tribunal here and in this form. But it is not just these institutions that have lost their credibility. The very conceptions of the conduct of war and diplomacy have been corroded and must be rebuilt from zero. It is for this reason that the prosecution of these defendants is so necessary.
“Regarding the conception of war. The Zionists put forward the following norms for the conduct of war:
All civilians, including children, are fair targets if a claim can be made that they are close enough that killing them is necessary to kill a combatant target. The shorthand they used was, ‘Hamas uses human shields’. Their Israeli army used actual human shields, tying children to military vehicles and forcing them to go into tunnels and houses, but were not held accountable for this.
The Zionists also put forward the notion that they can use any type of weapon, including two thousand pound bombs, for any purpose, including trying to kill an unarmed person in a tent. They removed any notion that a particular weapon might be overkill for the task for which it is used. In their conduct of war, they can use whatever weapons they choose.
In their view, if they can make a claim that any protected group of people or infrastructure might be used by a combatant, that it can be targeted. This includes all hospitals in Gaza, all medical personnel, all journalists, all food supplies, all water supplies, apartment buildings – everything, as per the Biblical quotes about Amalek, the enemy of the Israelites who is to be wiped out man, woman, child, and livestock.
Military censorship and manipulation of information is always present but in the view of the defendants, systematic and structural lying is merely a part of the war. Several of the defendants repeated a completely fake story about Resistance members eating lunch around the corpses of a family they’d murdered. This was before the thousands of trophy photos of Israelis posing with the toys and underwear of families they’d murdered, in the incitement period of the genocide.
In their zeal for extreme force protection, their soldiers target the unarmed and avoid combat with armed combatants. On the other hand, they kill their own soldiers and civilians if there’s any chance they might become captives (who could then be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners). This is the Hannibal Directive we mentioned earlier. They have institutionalized cowardice in war.
“We wish to punish the defendants for all of these: targeting of civilians, systematic lying to incite genocide, destruction of infrastructure, and total disproportion of weaponry. We wish to punish these crimes to eradicate this whole conception of war from history, so that if there are wars that must be conducted in the future, they are conducted according to laws of war that distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, use weapons that are proportional, do not target civilians or civilian infrastructure, and – even if information is controlled during war – do not use lies to incite genocide.
“In terms of diplomacy, the defendants allowed a successful exchange of prisoners in November of 2023. But then, after a pause, they resumed the war, recaptured the Palestinian prisoners and resumed their torture, and methodically targeted the remaining Israeli captives to kill them. In one operation they murdered three Israeli hostages in cold blood. In another operation they rescued three hostages while killing several others and hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Whenever ceasefire negotiations reached a point of near success, the Israelis would add new clauses and insist on continuing the war as a condition of a ceasefire! These are contrary to the principles of good faith negotiation. To the United Nations, the Israelis sent a buffoon to accuse the countries of the world of terrorism. The West vetoed multiple ceasefire resolutions and when they finally accepted one, they allowed Israel to ignore it.
“We wish to punish the defendants for abusing negotiation and diplomacy to continue the genocide, so that these conceptions of negotiation and diplomacy are also left behind and the world can move forward on better ideas.
“In 1975, the United Nations passed Resolution 3379, which argued that Zionism was a form of racism. The Israeli representative to the UN stood before the gathered nations and tore the resolution to shreds, just as the Israeli representative took a miniature automatic paper shredder to the UN charter in 2024.
Chaim Herzog rips up the UN resolution 3379, which said Zionism was a form of racismIsraeli Ambassador rips up the UN charter
“As you know, UN Resolution 3379 was repealed in 1991 (4). While the United States was laying waste to Iraq, whose president Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and dared to propose a “linkage” of Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait with Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, the resolution stating that Zionism was a form of racism was repealed through US pressure. Your honors also know that when our country, Yemen, voted against the US invasion of Iraq, we were told that this was “the most expensive vote we ever cast” and we suffered sanctions for it (5).
“3379 should never have been repealed. But today I am asking your honors to go further. I am asking your honors to rule that Zionism is not just a form of racism, it is a criminal enterprise, one which ultimately requires genocide to continue, and which therefore must be ended. Doing justice here will be a first step.”
Wardah looked at the other prosecutors: her counterparts from Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. To her, they seemed satisfied, and she felt she had presented her case well. The judges gave little away from their expressions, and Wardah again did not favor the criminals with her gaze.
The presiding judge called for adjournment until the next day, when the Iranian prosecutor would present his case.
Notes
(1) The first part of Wardah’s speech is basically a reproduction of Robert Jackson’s opening remarks at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Wardah alternates between quoting between quote marks, paraphrasing with modern updates, and quoting without quotation marks.
(2) If you read Justice Jackson’s speech, the middle part of the speech is the history of the Nazi party, its rise to power, and its conduct of WWII. This section of Wardah’s speech is not a copy/paste with find/replace of Jackson’s speech, but instead a part of the case as it is imagined would be laid out at a tribunal run by the Axis of Resistance.
(3) Ha’aretz was very late to report this. There were some reports in the Israeli media here and there and these were assembled carefully by Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone, and The Cradle. I did my own modest assembly of a few Western sources on substack in October.
(4) I made part of a video about Resolution 3379, its rise and fall.
Briefly straying from my lane to make a quick point
A Black American folk singer, Lead Belly, enjoined listeners in 1938 to ‘stay woke’ in a song about a false accusation against a group of young black men in Alabama. A century later and the word is exclusively used as an epithet, a code word that identifies its speaker as someone who has some opposition to left-wing politics.
That isn’t how the anti-’woke’ would put it, of course. Champions of the liberal value of free speech, right-wing anti-wokes believe that left-wing orthodoxies have gone too far and stifled these once widely available liberal freedoms. When asked for examples, the anti-wokes will generally present examples like drag shows, pronoun etiquette, and trans women competing in sports.
There are details and ongoing areas of study and work when it comes to how to implement these values in a way that allows everyone to be who they are (trans rights, sex and gender equality, etc.) There’s a lot to know about these issues and readers know this isn’t my lane. But to my eyes, comparatively untrained on these issues, the selected anti-woke examples look like a distraction or an outrage engine, like the way most of these same anti-wokes talk about immigration, crime, or terrorism.
Anti-imperialism is, and like all left-wing ideologies is based on the core value of equality. And the anti-’wokes’, whether they justify it as naturally ordained by science or divine will, generally hold a core value of hierarchy. It’s an irreconcilable difference.
Almost all anti-woke criticism is just right-wing politics and therefore holds nothing of interest for leftists.
There is one legitimate complaint in the antiwoke arsenal, which is against the language-policing that takes place in mainstream, liberal institutions. But language-policing in such corporate environments has nothing to do with equality and therefore nothing to do with anything truly left-wing. It is nothing more than an office game, in which the winner is the one who can master the language and the bureaucratic rules. Words and concepts that were developed in communities fighting for liberation – or even survival – have been stolen, appropriated by liberal professionals for use in their office power games. But the theft of these words and concepts doesn’t discredit the projects of liberation from which they emerged.
Now we can come back to my lane. You know the old saying that when you scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds? The Gaza genocide has scratched the liberals and the fascists alike. Turns out that when Palestine comes up, the right wing (squealing for police to crush speech and deport protesters) doesn’t care about free speech or assembly and liberal professionals didn’t mean anything they said about the liberation of oppressed groups by race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Anomalous exceptions aside, both antiwokes and the liberal professionals they claim to despise have revealed themselves to be enthusiastic supporters of genocide who hate us much more than they hate one another. There’s no use contemplating alliance with these people or searching for common ground.
I have over the decades, every few years, written something to protest left-wing language-policing and the adoption of liberal professional games. But leftists will find no allies among the anti-’woke’. They don’t want us and we don’t want them. They mock social justice warriors and they mock being woke, but it’s better to be a warrior than a coward and it’s better to be awake than asleep.
False friends are everywhere. Lead Belly warned us about them, and told us the state we need to be in, to remain vigilant.
The devolution of Israel’s military happened gradually but it has lost abilities it once had
Mao Zedong presented a staged model where a guerrilla army began with organization in safe and remote areas, building the ability to hold territory, then hit-and-run actions and raids, and finally engagement in conventional warfare to destroy the enemy’s army on the battlefield. Israel has been doing this in reverse: in 1967 it defeated the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies. But it could not defeat Hizbollah in 2006 and cannot defeat Hamas today. It once possessed the ability to occupy and hold territory and control populations. But in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank, Israeli warfare has devolved into an endless series of hit-and-run attacks on civilian targets, with the heavily armed Israeli army running away before their comparatively lightly armed opponents can catch them.
The gruesomeness of the hit-and-run attacks themselves, the revolting trophy photos that the Israeli army takes (e.g. posing in women’s lingerie, playing with the toys of dead children, blowing up houses and apartment blocks, etc.), the torture of thousands of Palestinian captives, by Israel’s imposed mass starvation on Gaza – these have obscured this reality. But beneath this stomach-turning surface is a cold military fact: the methods of occupation that Israel used for decades are unraveling.
In the 2007 book Hollow Land, Israeli academic Eyal Weizman analyzed what he called the “architecture of occupation”: the way Israel used the built environment to impose its will on the Palestinians. Befitting a book by an architect, Hollow Land is filled with drawings and photos of how the occupation worked from the early Zionist days until the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
The work would begin with small settler outposts, defended by the army and the settlers themselves.
The outposts would grow into full fledged fortress settlements that commanded the heights and looked down on the native villages below.
The Israeli army forced the occupied people to accept these new realities. Palestinian movement from place to place was controlled by checkpoints. The big terminal at Qalandiya, for example:
Hollow Land also has a photo from the major checkpoint controlling people entering and exiting Gaza from Israel, Erez.
But the Erez terminal was destroyed on October 7 — mostly, like so much on that day and since, by Israeli airstrikes. The giant Israeli army that went into Gaza to destroy Hamas withdrew from Gaza City, then attacked Khan Younis, withdrew from there, threatened an invasion of Rafah for many months, invaded, and is in the process of being driven from there. The Israelis enlisted American help in building occupation infrastructure – the famous pier which took so long coming, floated into the sea, and then was rebuilt in time to commit a joint US-Israeli war crime of immense proportions in the Nusseirat refugee camp. They are trying to build a base along a road in central Gaza. But their base construction has come under constant mortar fire and soon, so will the American pier.
The Americans themselves have been forced into this way of fighting: they sailed into the Red Sea to engage in a little bit of classical gunboat diplomacy, to warn Yemen’s Ansarallah (the so-called Houthis) not to try to stop Israel’s genocide. They were roundly ignored, Ansrallah has not hesitated to engage the US navy directly with missiles, and the US has responded with aerial bombardment of civilian targets – hit-and-run.
There is no occupation if you cannot stay in one place, and Israel cannot stay in any one place in Gaza. They even have to return to the same hospitals again and again after destroying them because they can’t stay until the resistance comes for them.
That is Gaza, and Gaza is unique: Israel withdrew from there in 2005 (because the resistance made it impossible to maintain the occupation) and the resistance in Gaza has built an extensive infrastructure from which to fight the Israelis. But the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is devolving too. Yes, there are still checkpoints and settlements controlling the lives of Palestinians there. The occupation isn’t over in the West Bank. But Israeli operations in West Bank towns like Tubas, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Nablus, and Jenin are raids: they go in heavy, besiege a house, fight gun battles with the resistance, have their bulldozers blown up by IEDs… and inevitably withdraw. And the duration of the raids seems to get shorter. Jenin had a raid a few weeks ago that was 48 hours long; the next one was 3 hours. In Tubas, the Israelis try to let their Palestinian Authority collaborators seize weapons and arrest resistance fighters on their behalf, so they can attack from a place of greater safety.
What explains this devolution from region-dominating conventional army to genocidal raider? The adaptations of the resistance have played the main role: their ability to defeat the ground forces of Israel render most of the occupation’s other infrastructural goals unachievable. Another factor: Israel slowly transformed its army into one that mainly staffs checkpoints and monitors electronic murder machines while serving as the institution responsible for socializing Jewish migrants and indoctrinating youths into Zionism.
But the arrogance of Zionist ideology and belief in racial superiority also played a role. Why train day and night to fight your racial inferior? Why risk death when you can kill by pressing a button? The Zionism of yesterday was stealing the land. The Zionism of today is killing from a distance. But stealing somebody’s land can only be done from up close. Too close, maybe, for illusions of racial superiority to hold up.
After months of threatening a Rafah invasion, Israel finally went in. They quickly took the civilian crossing with Egypt – in violation of the peace treaty negotiated between the two countries to Israel’s great advantage in the 1970s. They planted Israeli flags at the crossing, blasted the sign saying “I love Gaza”, and declared a kind of “Mission Accomplished” moment.
But like George W Bush’s speech which was supposed to be the end of the Iraq war but was actually the beginning of the Iraq insurgency and a major step in the long-term erosion of American supremacy, Israel’s declaration of victory is premature.
Over the next few days, Palestinian resistance groups initiated a series of operations (many of which they recorded in dramatic field videos) at a tempo nearly unmatched in the war, now in its eighth month. Resistance spokesman Abu Obeida told listeners that the fighters had scored hits on 100 Israeli military vehicles in 10 days in Rafah in the south of Gaza, Jabalia in the north, and Zeitoun in the north (from which the Israelis have since withdrawn). Israeli soldiers, Abu Obeida said, were suffering casualties “by the dozen”.
Under heavy fire in both Rafah and Jabalia, Israel is likely to withdraw from these areas as well. We can then expect a return to aerial bombardment and siege warfare on the starving population. Then more raids, perhaps into the middle of Gaza, during which Israel will lose more soldiers and more vehicles, before withdrawing. Then a period of bombing, then more raids. All the while, Lebanon’s Hizbollah will be hitting military installations on Israel’s northern border with escalating firepower and Yemen’s Ansarallah will be tightening a blockade on ships trading with Israel.
Based on the experiences of the 2006, 2008/9, 2012, 2014, and 2021 wars, Israel would have been expected to have accepted a ceasefire by now, having settled for the demonstration effect of killing between 40,000 – 200,000 or more (according to an estimate made by Ralph Nader) and unwilling to bear the growing costs in soldiers’ lives, displaced Israelis, and economic difficulties.
Why has Israel been so determined this time, compared to previous times? Is it the case that, having mobilized around half a million men, that the numbers of casualties sustained in these ground operations is bearable by Israel, even if Israeli casualties reach the thousands or even tens of thousands?
This is, likely, the calculation. Israel has mobilized all available troops and the US has provided all the firepower Israel can wield. But this approach of maximal firepower and maximum mobilization – of overkill and of over-mobilization – has disconnected Israel from normal military calculations and normal strategic thinking, rendering it vulnerable to the resistance’s counter-strategies.
To understand this vulnerability, let’s break down Western wars in history into three types: Clausewitzian, counterinsurgency, and genocidal.
Clausewitz says war is policy by other means; Counterinsurgency wars are about controlling a population; Genocidal wars are about destroying the foundations of life.
Clausewitz’s book On War uses the campaigns of Frederick the Great, the Prussian king who fought with his European neighbours, and of Napoleon, who fought all the rest of Europe combined (while also fighting a genocidal war against Haiti, but we’ll leave that aside for this article). In these wars, the goal is to inflict losses on the enemy’s military to compel the loser to do the winner’s bidding.
In colonial counterinsurgency wars, the goal is population control. Insurgent leaders are targeted for assassination. Insurgent and insurgency-suspected organizations are dismantled by arrest and imprisonment, physical destruction, and sabotage. Compliant leaders are installed and supported. Populations are overawed and terrorized by campaigns of torture and demonstrative massacres, including “punitive raids”. Recent examples of these wars are the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and general Israeli behavior in the West Bank.
In colonial genocidal wars, the goal is extermination. Food sources are targeted – both stored food and crops. Masses of people are killed indiscriminately including women, children, noncombatants. Survivors of massacres are driven into unlivable areas to die and ringed with enough firepower to kill them if they try to escape. Many of the US “Indian Wars” followed this pattern (see Stannard’s American Holocaust and Grenier’s The First Way of War) as did the German genocides of the Herero in 1905 and the Nama in 1908, reported in, e.g., The Kaiser’s Holocaust.
Israel has been trying to conduct a genocidal war on Gaza since 2005. The idea was to surround Gaza with the Gaza fence and the ring of settlements known as the Gaza envelope; to use automated weapons, AI targeting, and frequent “mowing the lawn” aerial massacres to prevent exit without being labor-intensive; and to gradually render the entire Gaza Strip unlivable by the destruction of farmer’s fields, denial of coastal fishing, and an ever-constricting siege of food supplies.
The strategy was foiled by the Palestinians in Gaza, who managed to keep making Gaza livable while also generating a military resistance capable of counterattack (the notorious rockets) and ultimately, on October 7 2023, of breaching the ring of firepower built to keep them contained in their long-term death trap.
To counter the Palestinian strategy, since October 7th, Israel has tried to further constrict the area through total siege, bringing about famine; destroy every hospital to deepen the unlivability of the strip; and finally to use their ground forces to break Gaza into smaller enclaves in the hope that each enclave might be made uninhabitable in a way that the entire Gaza strip could not be.
In response to this, the Palestinian resistance has maintained steady military pressure on Israeli troops forming the individual rings of fire to try to enclave Gaza, forcing the Israelis to withdraw after taking losses each time. The network of tunnels and the resilient local weapons industry has made it impossible for Israel to destroy the armed resistance, even as the Palestinian civilian population is targeted for genocide.
Now we can return to a discussion of why overkill and overmobilization haven’t brought Israel to victory.
Overkill means the ability to threaten is gone. Israel’s doctrine of massively disproportionate violence against civilians (called the Dahiya doctrine for a neighbourhood Israel destroyed in Lebanon) has culminated in Gaza in the most appalling string of war crimes that could, if an actual system of international justice were to materialize, at some point see its leaders in jail for crimes. But in the military context, the consequence is that Israel cannot use the threat of firepower to try to get compliance. If they are going to exterminate you no matter what, if they shoot anything that moves, if they attack hospitals – then there’s no benefit to complying and no additional penalty for defiance, since they’ll kill you in any case if they get the chance.
Overmobilization means most soldiers have nothing to do. The transformation into rubble of most of the urban surface of Gaza renders any counterinsurgency warfare strategy moot: there are no flows of people to try to control by setting up checkpoints, no one able to go to work or school as the schools and workplaces have been destroyed; no functioning civilian institutions to try to recruit spies and informants from; all leadership has moved underground. Would-be counterinsurgent troops have nothing to do except wander around in the rubble waiting to be ambushed from unseen tunnels. The Israelis have shaped the battlefield into one that gives them no role but to take a position, fire endless amounts of US-provided ammunition into the distance, and wait to be attacked.
Israeli soldiers hanging aroundIsraeli soldiers walking in the rubble
While the mobilization of half a million troops means that losses of dozens of soldiers per day can be sustained for a very long time, these huge numbers can’t really be brought to bear on the enemy even if the Israelis were to try to go into the tunnels, which they thus far have not been.
Mockery aside, the fact is warfare in the tunnels means multiplication of such incidents manyfold.
The Israeli army is much more than a military force: it is the melting pot meant to create social cohesion (now failing) in a country composed of people from all over the world with nothing in common. As Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro notes in The Empty Wagon, the Israeli Defence Forces officer training course contains modules like “What is Judalism? The uniqueness of the Jewish people; the people and land in a Jewish perspective; War and the army in a Jewish perspective; is Judaism a religion, a way of life, or a constitution?; the identity of the Jewish people.” Ben Gurion envisioned the army as the place where the “admixture of people which flows in from foreign exiles will be cleansed, refined and purified from harmful, foreign dross in the melting pot of Jewish brotherhood and through military discipline.” Shapiro notes, “sounds more like a rehab than an army.” Only a tiny fraction of this half million would have the qualities to even be accepted into, let alone complete, a training course on knife fighting in dark tunnels. Even the basics of staying out of windows or infantry cover for armored vehicles doesn’t seem to have been learned.
Meanwhile the seeping of the Hannibal doctrine – in which a soldier should expect to be killed by his comrades rather than risk becoming a captive and a potential bargaining chip to swap for thousands of Palestinian prisoners – into every corner of Israeli life since its application against masses of Israelis on October 7th and its pervasiveness in the army cannot but erode the confidence of the ordinary soldier. Not only does the Israeli army not have an ethos of “no man left behind”, the ethos is “don’t get captured or your comrades will kill you because your life is worth less to us than the Palestinian prisoners we’re torturing…”
Keeping bad news from the Israeli public is a high priority for the regime, and that seems to extend to the army as well, as soldiers don’t appear to learn lessons from their engagements with the resistance. Keeping this huge force in the field, supplied, and above all propagandized, is costly in proportion to its size – while military results do not appear to be.
In 1905, the Germans were losing the war to the Nama. 20,000 Germans, succumbing to thirst and driving themselves mad, were chasing 2,000 nimble Nama cavalry, led by Hendrik Witbooi, around in the desert endlessly.
Nama noncombatants had fled to the bush where they suffered from hunger hiding from the Germans. The Germans finally tried to convince the noncombatants to surrender by using missionaries, who promised to alleviate the starvation in exchange for surrender. They lied: when the Nama surrendered, they were sent on further death marches and into (perhaps a German innovation) the world’s first death camp on Shark Island. When the Germans couldn’t complete the genocide by war, they did so by deception.
But that’s also a trick that expires, and a century later, the Palestinians won’t be deceived.
There is no case of nonviolent anticolonial struggle
The US struggle for civil rights, remembered as the nonviolent movement of Martin Luther King, was also the movement of the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana, the movement of the Mississipi Regional Council of Negro Leadership which could “speedily mobilize substantial and deadly firepower” including E.W. Steptoe who had “guns all over the house, under pillows, under chairs”, of Robert Williams of Monroe, North Carolina’s NAACP who said in 1959 that “we must be willing to kill if necessary”, the movement of a night-long battle with police in Albany, Georgia in 1962 and in Birmingham, Georgia in 1963, when “every day of riots was worth a year of civil rights demonstrations”.
The Indian Freedom struggle, remembered as the nonviolent movement of MK Gandhi, was also the movement of the Hindustan Republican Army, of Chandrasekhar Azad and of Bhagat Singh, of the Telengana Uprising of 1946, of the Tamil Nadu anti-feudal struggle of 1943, of the underground guerrilla struggles after Quit India in Odisha, West Bengal, Bangalore and elsewhere, of the Toofan Sena in Maharashtra, of Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose, and of the Naval Mutiny of 1946.
The two most iconic tales of the deployment of strategic nonviolence turn out, upon historical examination, to have been armed struggles, replete with violence.
Through an analysis of the work of Gene Sharp (“Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence” part 1 and part 2), writer and academic Marcie Smith has revealed the existence of a sort of “nonviolence industrial complex”, a network of institutions linked to the US foreign policy establishment, dedicated to two things: 1. steering opposition to US-backed states and projects in nonviolent directions, and 2. to using methods of nonviolent insurgency as a part of a set of tactics (including covert, violent action) to destabilize US targets.
The jewels in the narrative crown of this nonviolence network are the US civil rights movement and the Indian Freedom Struggle, which is why I devoted the two previous articles in this series to showing that these were in fact armed struggles.
The narrators of the nonviolence network have one other weapon: quantitative analysis. But this weapon too, turns out to be a plastic replica.
In their book Why Civil Resistance Works, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan claim to have proven through statistical analysis that nonviolence is more effective than violence. Their analysis is worth detailed examination since it claims to have the authority of a huge dataset and logistic regression proving the chances of success are higher with nonviolence.
But what did they actually do? They made a list of several hundred revolutions from the 20th century (nearly all of which were in fact violent), coded some struggles as violent and others not, coded some struggles as successful and others not (in fact many of the successes delivered the countries and their economies directly over for imperialist plunder), and then after a quantitative assessment which amounts to counting the number of successful cases of each type, found that their “nonviolent” coded struggles had a higher chance of success. These nonviolent-coded struggles include:
the South African struggle (including its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe);
and the many East European color revolutions.
the Palestinian Intifada;
A quick skim of any of these histories show that these were all violent struggles. The data reveal the conclusion the authors believed at the outset and for which they coded their data. Why Civil Resistance Works is historical falsification covered with a quantitative mystique.
To determine the veracity of their analysis we need examine only those events coded as both nonviolent and successful. Nonviolent failures are of no interest, since they do not bolster the nonviolence narrative. Neither violent successes nor failures are of interest either, since to the nonviolence industry armed struggles are already failures.
The database published with the book contains 57 nonviolent successes. There are two types of movements analyzed in the database: movements for regime change and movements for secession. There are no nonviolent successes for secession movements: all 57 nonviolent successes are regime change successes. There are only 4 secession successes out of 46 attempts in the database (Croatia, Tigray, Bangladesh, and Aceh from Indonesia starting in 1976-2005). All of these were violent.
Philosophers of science know that there is a complicated set of human decisions that go into the translation of things occurring in nature into statistical data. Even such decisive phenomena as birth and death can only be entered in a spreadsheet as “0” and “1” by the declaration of a doctor. Of all the types of data to translate into “0”s and “1”s on a spreadsheet, historical data is the worst. Was the French Revolution a success, a failure, or is it too early to tell? In history, some failures are necessary prerequisites for future success; some processes simply cannot be classified as one or the other (Chenoweth and Stephan include a “limited success” category to try to capture these).
The relevant point here is that the coding of these 57 events as both “nonviolent” and “successful” ranges from deeply problematic to utterly preposterous.
Going through them:
In this database, the Palestinian liberation struggle apparently started in 1973, was violent, and a failure. The Intifada, 1987-1990, is considered a nonviolent partial success. The 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, which I won’t dispute was successful, is coded as a nonviolent process – which would be a surprise to the guerrilla fighters and defectors who fought the Shah’s soldiers in the streets. The 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon is coded as a success, but it did not change the regime and Lebanon’s political system continued as before.
The Cedar Revolution is not the only “color revolution” (short-hand for a US-backed regime change operation in a US enemy country led by US-trained political and media cadres) coded as a nonviolent success. Indeed a good part (14 of the 57) of the nonviolent successes are East Europe color revolutions: 1989 Germany, 1981 Poland, 1989 Hungary, 1989 Czech, 1989 Slovakia, 1989 Bulgaria, 1990 Russia, 1989 Estonia, 1989 Latvia, 1989 Lithuania, 2001 Ukraine, 2003 Georgia, 1989 Kyrgystan, 2005 Kyrgistan. In the background of all of these color revolutions was the threat of US-led NATO expansion and US nuclear war, as well as the fact of US violent covert operations. Three more of these East Europe nonviolent successes – 1999 Croatia, 2000 Yugoslavia, 1989 Slovenia – are from the incredibly violent US-led dismembering of Yugoslavia in a series of civil wars (described in, e.g., Michael Parenti’s book To Kill a Nation and Diana Johnstone’s book Fool’s Crusade).
NATO bombed bridge in dismembered Yugoslavia, 1999, one of the nonviolent successes in the database.
In Africa, in addition to coding the South African anti-apartheid struggle as nonviolent (which would be news to umKhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress), and the Ghanaian, Zambian, and Malawi Independence struggles as nonviolent (they were not), the majority of African nonviolent successes in the database were mass mobilizations to press for elections. These were: 1989 Mali, 2000 Ghana, 1993 Nigeria, 2001 Zambia, 1992 Malawi, 1991 Madagascar, 2002 Madagascar, 1985 Sudan (in active civil war at the time).
In East Asia, the 1960 April Revolution in Korea (in which 186 people were killed) is coded as a nonviolent success, as is the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines (after decades of guerrilla struggle and notable defections from the military). East Timor, widely recognized to have suffered a genocide from the 1970s to the 1990s, is coded as having had a nonviolent success in 1988, despite Independence coming in 1999 after a long guerrilla war. A 1973 popular uprising in Thailand, that had bomb explosions and dozens of deaths in riots, is coded as a nonviolent success. So, too, in Thailand, a long-running political crisis in 2005 that culminated in a military coup in 2006, is coded as a nonviolent success.
In the Americas, the database includes as nonviolent successes a 1931 naval mutiny in Chile, a 1944 armed revolution in Guatemala, 1958 Venezuela (which featured attacks on security services headquarters and resulted in the awful Punto Fijo pact), a clear failure to overthrow the system in Mexico in 1987, and struggles against dictatorships in Argentina (1977 and 1986), Uruguay (1984), and Chile (1983), all of which had prominent guerrilla movements. The database cites 2002 in Venezuela as a nonviolent success, but there were two things that happened in April 2002 in Venezuela: a violent coup against Chavez and its reversal when the army refused to endorse the coup: the coup failed, the the successful reversal of the coup involved military moves.
In Europe, a 1974 military coup in Portugal is coded as a nonviolent success. Of the churning conflicts, revolutions, and civil wars in Germany in the 1920s that culminated in the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the most violent events in human history so far, 1923 in Germany is coded as a nonviolent success.
There is, however, a specific type of conflict coded as a nonviolent success in the database that recurs in different parts of the world, in which a spent dictatorship gives way, in the face of a basically nonviolent popular movement, to an election. About eight of the 57 nonviolent successes belong to this pattern: 1963 and 1974 in Greece, 1977 in Bolivia, 1984 in Brazil, 1985 in Haiti (which led to a military coup and additional years of mobilization until Aristide was elected, then violently overthrown again…), 1990 Guyana, 2000 Peru, and 2001 in the Philippines. This particular set of eight cases (five of which took place in the Americas) could be used as evidence for the argument that, under the right circumstances, largely nonviolent popular mobilization can reverse a stolen election or force a weakened government to agree to elections. It does not prove at all that nonviolent movements have a better chance of success than violent ones. But even in these cases, the threat of violence existed.
There is value in analyzing and comparing movements of resistance in history. There may even be value in coding them and calculating probabilities. But there is no value to be had in building a model for probability of success based on violence and nonviolence by miscoding failures as successes and armed struggles as nonviolent.
We never needed a database to tell us that under some circumstances a social and political struggle can be kept on the nonviolent plane. The key factor is the investment elites have in maintaining the policy that is being challenged. Union struggles can often succeed in winning wage and working conditions improvements nonviolently. Every election where the loser congratulates the winner and there is a peaceful transfer of power is an example of a successful nonviolent struggle. But colonialism, struggles over land, in which oppressors have racial ideas of superiority over the oppressed? In these cases, whether it succeeds or fails, armed struggle alone has a chance. Only by wielding falsified histories and models can the nonviolence storytellers argue otherwise.
Palestine 2018: the final proof of the uselessness of nonviolence in anticolonial struggle
And so we turn to Palestine, a colonial struggle over land, in which the oppressors have racial ideas of superiority over the oppressed and are, since 2023, engaging in active genocide. Palestine has been an area of focus for the nonviolence industry for decades.
A February 2024 paper by the Center for Constitutional Rights has shown that US anti-terror legislation was “driven by anti-Palestinian agendas from the beginning.” The nonviolence industry has had a similar Palestine focus from the beginnings of Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute. The 1987-1989 Intifada was an object of fascination for Sharp and for the nonviolence industry. Sharp’s Journal of Palestine Studies article in 1989, “The Intifadah and Nonviolent Struggle”, identifies him as the author of the 1973 book The Politics of Nonviolent Action as well as the author of Almuqawama Bila Ounf (Nonviolent Resistance), published in Jerusalem by the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in 1986. In the article, Sharp argues – quantitatively again – that 85% of the intifada has been nonviolent. He simply asserts that armed struggle and nonviolent struggle are “not easily mixed to advantage” – and so the Palestinians should go from 85% to 100% nonviolent. After the usual arguments absolving Israelis of responsibility for the violence they mete out on Palestinians and the normal nonviolence argument that the the colonial repression faced by the victims is their fault for provoking their oppressors, Sharp suggests Palestinians go on a 21-day hunger strike, followed by “whistling or wailing at night, especially in dark streets” and “having the youths standing peacefully, not fleeing, holding small Palestinian flags, their right hands outstretched in a gesture of friendship.” Sharp dangles recognition before well-behaved Palestinians: “The shift to fully nonviolent struggle would also make possible more active support for Palestinian independence in Western Europe and the United States.”
After months of genocide, starvation, and the gleeful mass murder of tens of thousands of children, all filmed and celebrated across Israeli society and by Israel’s supporters in the West, Sharp’s arguments are striking for their absurdity as well as their vulgarity.
But Sharp was not alone.
Pakistani activist and academic Eqbal Ahmed made the argument to Palestinians numerous times. He reported to journalist David Barsamian in 1996 (published in the 2000 book Confronting Empire) that he’d told a group of Arab students in the US after the 1967 war that “armed struggle was supremely unsuited to the Palestinian condition,” that “Israel’s fundamental contradiction was that it was founded as a symbol of the suffering of humanity at the expense of another people who were innocent of guilt,” and that “you don’t bring (the contradiction) out by armed struggle. In fact you suppress this contradiction by armed struggle.” He told them in 1968 that
“This is a moment to fit ships in Lebanon and say, ‘we’re not going to destroy Israel. That is not our intent. We just want to go home.’ Reverse the symbols of Exodus. See if the Israelis are in a mood to sink some ships. They probably will. Let them do so. Some of us will die. Let us die.” Eqbal Ahmed imagined if Arafat were to “take on the role of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King and announce tomorrow, ‘I must stop these settlements. They violate the spirit of Oslo. We are committed to peace. You are making war. We do not want to use violence against you. Peacefully we will march against you. We will sit in. We will clog the roads, start a full-scale movement, and discipline the Palestinians not even to throw stones, intifada-style, because Israelis will use and justify bullets against stones. They will use soldiers against children. Don’t even give them that.’ Israel will divide. It will divide as a society the way America divided. I would keep it divided until it makes peace.”
But Eqbal Ahmed, despite being an insightful anti-colonial strategist, was wrong about the histories he cited (Gandhi and Martin Luther King) and wrong about what would happen in the face of Palestinian non-violence, which did not divide Israel but incited Israel to ever-more intense racism.
Norman Finkelstein wrote a whole book (What Gandhi Says) trying to assimilate lessons from Gandhi to the Palestinian struggle. His conclusions are ambivalent to say the least, since at times he writes things like “it might fairly be said that Gandhi fostered a death cult.” The book ends up being a presentation of the self-contradictory politics in Gandhi’s writing, not the practical manual of civil resistance Finkelstein may have hoped to create when he picked up Gandhi’s 100 volumes of writing as an aid for the US-based academic and activist “to think through a nonviolent strategy for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.”
Palestinians took up these ideas in good faith for years – in better faith than the method deserves. Hundreds of Palestinians died trying to do nonviolent struggle. So too did a handful of friends of Palestine, including Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, and others in the International Solidarity Movement.
Eqbal had suggested finding out “if the Israelis were in the mood to sink some ships.” They were – they already had been in 1967, if we count the USS Liberty – but in 2010 a nonviolent flotilla tried to go to Gaza*. Israel boarded the ships, killed some of the activists, and arrested, mistreated, and deported the rest.
Israelis attacked the Mavi Marmara as it tried to break the blockade on Gaza in 2010
But the culmination of the nonviolent vision, the maximum horizon of all nonviolence, the controlled scientific experiment of perfect nonviolence, occurred in the Great March of Return in Gaza in 2018. It proved that nonviolence does not work. From a scientific standpoint, the nonviolence debate ended in 2018.
As Gene Sharp’s article on the First Intifada opened the debate on nonviolence in Palestine, Jehad Abusalim’s article, “The Great March of Return: An Organizer’s Perspective”, in the same journal, closed the debate on the topic.
The Great March of Return started, Abusalim reports, with a facebook post by Abu Artema on January 7, 2018. Abu Artema asked, “What could the occupation bristling with arms do to a mass of human beings advancing peacefully? Kill ten, twenty, or fifty of them? And then what? What could it do in the face of an unwavering mass peacefully marching?” Abu Artema and others worked to make it happen and organized for months, calling for a date in March:
“To the surprise of all concerned, an estimated 30,000–45,000 people showed up on the first day of the Great March of Return. And on that day, Israeli snipers shot dead 17 Palestinians and injured some 1,400 others.32 The mainstream international media instantaneously referred to the carnage as “rioting” and “clashes” but to those on the ground in Gaza, it was beyond shocking: how could nonviolent protests unleash such fury as to cause Israel to kill 17 peaceful protesters and maim or injure another 1,400? That is how, from the very first day, bloodshed came to define the protest.”
By the end of the protest, cold-blooded Israeli snipers had killed 226 Palestinians and methodically injured 30,000. For the Israelis, it was sport. The Western media fluidly and easily lied about the march, its nature, and the murderous Israeli response. Neither Israel nor its sponsors faced any crisis or internal division about what they were doing to the Palestinians. Neither Israel nor the West paid any cost for inflicting these tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties.
Abu Artema, the protest organizer interviewed by Abusalim in the article, seems bereft of ideas at the end – he feels that more international mobilization is needed, some tool that prevents Israel from “targeting Palestinians in such a horrific way” and to “prevent the occupation from using propaganda to prime the public for slaughtering us.” The nonviolence industry was unable to come up with any such tools: the slaughter of Palestinians at the Great March of Return was not the fault of the nonviolent protesters any more than the genocide in 2023-24 was the fault of the Palestinian armed groups. Israel is a genocidal state: then as now, it is doing what it is organized to do.
Six years later, Palestinians are waging an armed struggle against the Israeli military in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli military has chosen to accept military casualties and defeats on the battlefield (including the methodical destruction of its armored vehicles and groups of soldiers) to focus entirely on conducting a genocide against Palestinian civilians, with the central goal being the destruction of all of Gaza’s hospitals and educational institutions and the murder of patients and medical personnel, while blocking food and water from reaching people. Palestinians’ allies in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are all engaging militarily with Israel and its Western sponsors. In the region, for the time being, the nonviolence case is closed.
Back in America though, in the solidarity movement, with the expansion of campus protests in April 2024, along with police repression all over the US, the nonviolence debate will rise again.
anti-genocide students face the cavalry in Texas
Anti-genocide students demand universities – which turned out, to the surprise of the students and faculty, to be investment banks that sometimes teach classes – divest from the military industry feeding the genocidal state. The pro-genocide establishment has called the police to crush the protests. What will be the outcome? Nonviolent or violent? Success or failure?
*As I write this, another nonviolent international flotilla is planning to leave from Turkey to Gaza.
