Palestine—the last judgement that happens every day

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the politics of the world took a drastic turn for the worse. Hopelessness in the communist camp was at its extreme.

Many staunch Marxists were deeply wounded and most of them while believing in its truth wondered what and where things went wrong. Denial or defence, it was the moment of despair and splitting of self, and as RD Laing says, “without understanding despair one cannot understand schizophrenia”. In an alienated world, “where could one go and scream” was an existential question.

After the stunning silence of a few years, the ice started melting. The World Socialist Forum was the first to challenge the new world disorder. Translation of Lenin’s book and biography of Che Guevara broke the thick silence.

When Abul Fazal—a highly learned Marxist and Pakistan’s last consul general in the USSR, ambassador in many Eastern European countries and Cuba –wrote a review of Che Guevara, one of my books, he told me he wasn’t expecting anyone to write about Marxism anymore. For the time being, he thought, Marxism had become a thing of the past. Such was the depressing state of spirit. But we knew that in “its hopelessness the dialectical theory would find its truth”.

The countries of the Global South went through an identical shock. The incident at Tiananmen Square sent waves of tremor through China. The students protest to advance bourgeois norms were crushed. The frequent visits of Milton Friedman and Henry Kissinger to China, the opening of its markets to the Western capitalism fuelled further fire about the demise of socialism. The official permission to purchase private property was the beginning of class antagonism.

Amid such a dismal outlook, the Left Front victory in Indian elections became a shimmering hope. The Communist Party (ML) was offered the premiership. If the latter had accepted it, it would have been a great, albeit a temporary, boast to the receding wave of socialism in the world.

The opportunity was wasted. Later Jyoti Basu, the founder of CPI (ML), regretted the party decision. But history has no time for repenting and rueing. That was the beginning of the end of the Communist Parties in India which for long had followed the electoral politics without engaging in armed class struggle. On its way to neo-liberalism Indian road paved through Israel, hence a settler-colonial entity was not only recognized but followed ritually.

The times changed. The word socialism began to fade from the memory of new generation. From Gaddafi to Saddam to Assad and PLO changed their priorities.

The so-called “end of history” meant a lone wolf was to rule the world, and the latter was exposed to its naked and barbaric capitalism. For Palestine the result was dreadful. Without recognition of Palestinian state, the right of refugees to return enshrined in the UN, and without defining the borders of a new emerging state Yasser Arafat stabbed Palestine with his own hands. After the Balfour Declaration the Oslo Accords were the second biggest betrayal the people of Palestine faced.

Despite the ghettoization and limited calories of food and water supplied to the people of Gaza—an open-air prison— the peaceful struggle of the people of Palestine and the “mowing of the lawn” by the apartheid regime—the only democracy in the Middle East— continued.

Daily death in Gaza became a norm so was the extreme repression of the “human animals”. From Operation Cast Lead to Operation Protective Edge to Operation Pillar of Defence, Gaza continued to face massacres after massacres with the Western backing and its “shared values”. When the US and the West talk about “shared values” with Israel they are sincere in their words and deeds. The history of imperialism is the history of mass murder on one pretext or another. This is its shared value.

All peaceful means to establish Palestinian statehood gradually vanished. East Jerusalem was supposed to be the capital of Palestinian state but in his first term Trump gave the entire Jerusalem and even the Golan Heights, an integral part of Syria, to the Zionist state. Despite flouting the resolutions of an impotent UN, the Arabs signed the Abraham Accords.

Palestinians, the affected party, was never consulted. Saudi Arabia was expected to sign it but in his over-confidence, Netanyahu brought a map of Israel devoid of Palestine to the UN. The weakened Arabs remained mum. But that proved to be the watershed moment for Palestinians.

Now or never was the call. The bell tolled not for the Palestinians but for the Zionist entity. With honour in one eye and death in the other the freedom fighters threw their gauntlets and trod on uncharted seas.

The bourgeois Israeli army, in habit of chasing the stone-throwing kids, could not fight those who had nothing to lose but their chains. With entire western might, six vetoes by the sole super power, the Tomahawks, the unending bombing exceeding six nuclear bombs, indiscriminate usage of White Phosphorous failed to bend the spirits of the freedom fighters. When socialist ideology that helped Southeast Asia and much of the Africa to draw its inspiration during freedom struggles disappeared, albeit temporarily, Islam became an alternative. Freedom or martyrdom became the slogan.

Many liberals object to the support of the left for the freedom fighters, fighting in the name of Islam. First, no one but the oppressed has the right to choose their leadership during and after a conflict or battle. Second, nature abhors a void, in the absence of left, struggle against the oppressor continues under alternative leadership. Third, for Marx religion is the expression of real needs and sufferings of humankind and if it is not acting as an opiate but a spur to resist so much the better.

For some armchair commentators, aggression of Hamas has triggered the genocide—without using the G letter. When death is the only outcome why not die gracefully standing on one’s feet rather than on one’s knees. “If I do not burn, if you do not burn, if we do not burn, then how will darkness come to light,” Nazim Hekmat inquires. “I’ve seen the silhouettes of so many people—so many children—burning alive, that I can’t look at fire anymore without feeling sick to my stomach” Francis Albanese says, “We must stop this massacre. May the Palestinians forgive us”.

In two years, under the public pressure the US has offered too many truces to Hamas only to chew its own words on each occasion. The latest one based on total surrender was partially accepted by Hamas. “If they had to surrender why did Hamas chose to fight,” the liberal gloated. Nobody is wearier of peace than Israel.

Hamas knows Israel like the back of its hands. By conditionally accepting ceasefire without surrendering weapons, Hamas has won on the diplomatic front. It slapped the castrated Arabs and Trump in their face for Israel has refused to stop the bombardment of civilians. Nothing wrong in walking one step back to regain two steps ahead. “Being captured is not the point,” Nazim Hikmet says, “the point is not to surrender.”

Much propaganda is afloat about the violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. Time and again it has been rejected, refuted and rebuked by many sources, the first being the voice of Max Blumenthal. Later Haaretz followed him. On the freedom struggle of 1857 Marx wrote, “...And if the English could do these things in cold blood, is it surprising that the insurgent Hindus should be guilty, in the fury of revolt and conflict, of the crimes and cruelties alleged against them?”

More than a week ago it was October 7, two years of genocide through aerial bombardment, starvation and silent complicity of the world have been completed. For Marx, “…through him and apart from him [Jew], money has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations”, it’s time to celebrate “the real individuals of our time, the martyrs who have gone through infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression. ...” “These unsung heroes” Horkheimer says, “consciously exposed their existence as individuals to the terroristic annihilation that others undergo unconsciously through the social process. These anonymous martyrs are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born.”

After the October Revolution of 1917, the revolutionary flame of October 7, 2023 lit by the freedom fighters of Palestine will linger and cherish forever the memory of dispossessed humanity fighting against oppression. To paraphrase Marcuse, they proved that pure existence doesn’t acknowledge a fact or goal, but acknowledgement occurs “when knowledge has freely determined that the fact or goal is in accordance with reason”. Israel is unreasonable and irrational hence its existence is highly questionable.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2025