The scientific principles of war propaganda that we’re all suffering from today were laid down by Anglo-American writers amazed by their own performance in World War 1. What are these principles? Why did Anglo-American propaganda work better than German?
A Resistance View of the Long War
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
World War Civ 41c: October 1917
From July through to Red October 1917. The Kornilov Affair to the Bolshevik takeover. The culmination of our series on the Bolshevik Revolution.
AER 144: The Seventh Venezuela Coup is Being Defeated
With Joe Emersberger. The co-authors of the Monthly Review Press book Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela, discuss the seventh coup attempt on Chavismo which is in the process of being defeated.
World War Civ 41b: Russian Revolution pt2 – Lenin and Trotsky
Way back in World War Civ 6,7, and 8, we covered the Russian Revolution of 1905 including future main characters Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Now as the 1917 Revolution unfolds we revisit these protagonists and study their actions and writings in the years leading to October 1917. Perhaps history is grand movements of masses, but if there are individuals who can make a difference in world history, these were some of them.
AER 143: Escape from Christian Zionism with Jamin Hubner
A scholar who grew up in a Christian Zionist tradition, Jamin Hubner joins to talk about how the ideology is unrolled to kids and how he found his way out of it.
The Hodeidah Tribunal
A fictional story of Victor’s Justice
[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.
In the vast, main hall, the prisoners sat together in a glass-encased defendants’ box to the right.
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 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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
“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.
(5) Amply documented. E.g. Ian Williams, “A Costly Vote? Yemen Paid a High Price for 1990 Security Council Veto.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 2010.
World War Civ 41a: 1917 Russian Revolution pt1: to February
The leadup to the February 1917 Revolution, including the assassination of Rasputin, the abdication of tsar Nicholas II, and the rise of dual power between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet.
In defense of ‘wokism’
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.
Israel can’t occupy like it used to
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.