The Cowardly Left and the Palestinian Resistance

Juanlu González, Orinoco Tribune, November 22, 2023 —

Today, more than ever, the Palestinian people need clear and unambiguous support for their cause, their parties, and their organizations including the military.

We have been defending this for a long time and, of course, before October 7 of this year: the Resistance is not made up of terrorist organizations, but of the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.

The fact of fighting the occupier does not make them terrorists, but rather the true defenders of the Palestinian motherland, even if it is with the meager weapons that can be smuggled or manufactured inside an open-air concentration camp like the one in Gaza, today converted into an extermination camp.

The Palestinian people have been “negotiating” for 75 years, seeing how their land is reduced, colonized, devastated, and how its original inhabitants are expelled, without the guarantors of the “rules-based order” doing or saying anything about it. At this historical moment that Palestine is going through, armed struggle is not just an option. It is the only possible option.

But in the West, there is a light, bourgeois, and postmodern left that believes that the era of guerrilla decolonization struggles is over. A supposed left that, dormant, allows itself to be carried away by unipolar media currents. And so, time and again, they adopt the dominant discourse to not be left out of the political or economic conversation. Official subsidies are very juicy for NGOs that play at being progressive in appearance but that, in reality, are absolutely functional to the world order imposed by the Pentagon and Wall Street.

Despite the more than evident underlying ideological differences that we maintain, sometimes it is necessary to converge with this false left in mobilizations such as those currently being organized against the genocide in Gaza. In situations like the present, what is most important is to unite as many people and organizations as possible to show our collective condemnation of the massacres committed by the West in Palestine and try to stop this genocide as soon as possible. But for the sake of unity, we have sometimes had to hear savagery, such as the comparison between Israel and the Resistance, because both “murder civilians.” You could not be more hypocritical.

It has also hurt us that anti-imperialist intellectuals of global prestige have succumbed to media pressures and have assumed the discourse that Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian Resistance are terrorists, perhaps to open the microphones of mainstream channels to them.

However, many of us knew or sensed that everything was, once again, pure propaganda. The Hamas action of October 7 was aimed mainly at capturing hostages and placing the Palestinian issue back at the center of world diplomacy through a demonstration of bravery, ingenuity, and, why not say it, the use of cutting-edge technology.

If, in previous exchanges, the return of a captured soldier for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners was agreed, what could not be obtained with several hundred soldiers and civilians held by the Resistance? Hence, the extreme violence shown by the humiliated Zionist leaders, who have since acted like mad dogs, is motivated by their desire for revenge.

Survivors from kibbutzs in the occupied territories next to Gaza said the Jewish army fired indiscriminately against militants and their captives. Despite the importance of these statements, everything was silenced with a blanket of fake news of children with their throats cut that no one except the senile Biden saw or images of charred children made with artificial intelligence.

Much of the world, including the cowardly left, was shocked by the invented crimes of Hamas. And “Israel” used it, as it always does, to try to appear as a victim instead of the murderous executioner that it is. The voices of the Resistance and its supporters were silenced and erased once again from the discourse permitted in the collective West. It already happened to us in Libya when Gaddafi’s bombings against his people were invented, when the episode of the incubators supposedly destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s armies in Kuwait, and so many other times.

Coincidentally, all these propaganda operations always had credibility for pro-human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and others like it. Its permanent alignment with NATO’s discourse has traditionally served to fuel wars and convince people with the most progressive convictions to support the most reprehensible war actions. This has always been its function and continues to be so today. Whether you like it or not, accepting the imperialist narrative is, to a certain extent, equivalent to approving what comes next—the bombings and genocides.

Luckily, in our case, statements are piling up confirming that the IDF (the Defense Forces of “Israel,” what a contradiction) murdered hundreds of Jewish soldiers and civilians in the application of what is known as the Hannibal Directive, which forms part of the Israeli military code. Everything indicates that the leaders of this country prefer a dead Israeli citizen to a citizen captured by enemy militias.

Several days ago, recordings surfaced of Apache helicopters whose pilots have admitted that they were shooting at people, especially at those who were running. Hamas had cleverly given the order that no one should flee when they heard the aircraft. So, until they realized the ruse more than an hour later, they had already killed hundreds of their own nationals with machine guns. Those deaths have been blamed on Hamas.

They also fired at the vehicles from which militiamen were fleeing with their captives. All of this is recorded and documented. The truth is slowly beginning to emerge. But it is even worse, there are known orders to shoot at military bases with missiles or tanks where, indeed, Hamas is present, but so are imprisoned soldiers. They were all unceremoniously eliminated. Yet, Israeli military casualties are still recorded as deaths at the hands of Hamas. Until when? (it’s a rhetorical question).

In other kibbutzim, IDF military commanders made the decision to “bomb houses with their occupants to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.” This was revealed in another interview with a survivor published by the Israeli media outlet Haaretz. The village of Be’eri was liberated by “Israel” after murdering 112 compatriots who appear as civilian deaths credited to Hamas. Tell us, who is the terrorist here?

Enough of the complexes, the half measures, the cowardice. Today, more than ever, the Palestinian people need clear and unambiguous support for their cause, their parties, and their organizations, including the military. Resistance is their right, and it is their only option as a people. That is why we must respect it.