![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/1.jpg\")
Israel repeatedly struck Beirut’s southern suburbs during the first week of March 2026.
\nThe war that the United States and Israel are waging in the Middle East is not solely directed at Iran. In addition to occupying the entirety of Palestine as well as the Golan Heights and other parts of Syria, Israeli troops are currently occupying parts of Lebanon while Israeli airstrikes pummel the country from above. At least 800,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon since the beginning of March. Left unchecked, the Israeli government will reduce Lebanon to uninhabitable wreckage, just as it has Gaza.
\n\nTo understand the consequences for people in Lebanon, we reached out to Elia Ayoub, who previously spoke to us about the uprising that took place in Lebanon in October 2019 against the sectarian rule of warlord oligarchs. How should we understand the latest round of hostilities in the context of the last several decades? How does this assault shape the prospects for Lebanese movements for liberation?
\n\nElia Ayoub is an anti-authoritarian historian and researcher from Lebanon. He hosts The Fire These Times podcast, runs the Hauntologies newsletter, and hosts online classes on modern Lebanese history. You can donate to support people displaced by Israeli attacks on Lebanon here.
\n\nHow did Israeli policies impact your life and the lives of those around you as you were growing up in Lebanon?
\n\nI would have to go back decades to give anything close to a full picture. Israel has been bombing Lebanon for a good part of the past four decades, even if we limit ourselves to starting in 1982. They militarily occupied south Lebanon until 2000, and then bombed Lebanon again in 2006. That was when they developed their notorious Dahieh military doctrine—so called after Beirut’s southern suburbs (Dahieh means “suburb” in Arabic)—which explicitly calls for disproportionate bombing of civilian areas to put pressure on Hezbollah. They bombed Lebanon again in 2023 and especially 2024. Then they signed a “ceasefire” with Hezbollah, which they have violated at least 10,000 times since, according to the UN.
\n\nAnd now they are bombing again.
\n\nIsrael violates international law as a matter of state policy. I was 15 years old during the 2006 war. I remember watching Israeli jets dropping bomb after bomb over Dahieh. Close friends who are from the South, Dahieh, and the Bekaa valley have experienced death, displacement, and trauma multiple times over. Virtually everyone in Lebanon has witnessed an Israeli bombing, regardless of their age. If you have lived in Lebanon for a long enough period, you have experienced Israeli state violence.
\n\nWe’re talking about millions of people from all walks of life, of all political persuasions—children and their parents and grandparents. For example, my 89-year-old grandmother, who fled the Nakba in 1948 as a child, has never passed more than a few years at a time in nearly a century of life without being directly or indirectly impacted by Israeli state violence. That’s all we know about Israelis. There is a widespread perception that they are incapable of existing as a political culture without war.
\n\nThis is entirely missing from most of the coverage I’ve seen, which is limited to inhuman geopolitical abstracts. What is happening right now is not just about Hezbollah (which is already unpopular in Lebanon) dragging the country into foreign wars. If this was simply about Hezbollah, Israel wouldn’t be ethnically cleansing entire villages by dynamiting them. Israel wouldn’t be spraying herbicides over large swaths of Lebanon and Syria to kill crops and wildlife in order to make the land unusable for agriculture. Israeli politicians wouldn’t be routinely threatening to bomb Lebanon back to the dark ages, or threatening to turn Dahieh into Gaza, or designating all Lebanese Shias—roughly a third of the population—as a hostile population.
\n\nHezbollah, a deeply reactionary party that I’ve long opposed—I say this simply to avoid confusion—would have never existed in the first place were it not for the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. There would have been no reason for a group that called itself the Islamic resistance to exist were it not for the fact that it was necessary to resist such a brutal foreign occupier.
\n\nAnd now, in the past few days, Israel has ordered the forced evacuation—effectively, the ethnic cleansing—of the entirety of southern Lebanon, Dahieh, and parts of the Bekaa. History is repeating itself, only now the weapons of mass destruction that the Israeli government possesses are even deadlier than before.
\n\n Israel repeatedly struck Beirut’s southern suburbs during the first week of March 2026.
\nHow have Israeli policies and actions towards Lebanon and the region as a whole shifted over the past decade?
\n\nA sort of stalemate prevailed for most of the period following 2006, with escalations here and there. The Israelis were busy bombing Gaza from 2008 onward, especially in 2014, and Hezbollah occupied with defending the Assad regime in Syria. During that period, Israeli politicians never missed an opportunity to tell Lebanon that they can destroy us whenever they want—that they intend to do so.
\n\nWhatever Israel did in Gaza, we knew that they wanted to do the same in Lebanon. It didn’t take a genius to conclude that. Israelis tell us these things outright.
\n\nWhat has shifted is that Israeli politics has become even more explicitly genocidal than before. The attacks of October 7th provided an already genocidal political culture with the excuse it needed. We’ve all seen the results.
\n\nFrom a Lebanese point of view, seeing Israel get more and more violent made a lot of people conclude that, once they are “finished” with Gaza, they will turn their eyes to Lebanon.
\n\nRepeated Israeli incursions and air raids have created mass displacement within Lebanon. How have Lebanese people organized themselves in these chaotic moments? What groups or movements have helped people escaping the war?
\n\nWe should remember that this latest round of mass displacement comes after a similar one in 2024 that mostly affected the same areas. There are established paths for those with connections to stay with friends or relatives, for those with means to rent out a place, and so on.
\n\nAs for those who do not have these means, they are the hardest hit; many have been sleeping on the streets. We often see neighboring villages that aren’t as affected sheltering those who are fleeing, at least temporarily, while people make their way to their destination, if they have one in mind. People are adapting to an evolving situation on a daily basis. Some are fundraising on their own or as part of groups, others are volunteering with soup kitchens.
\n\nHowever, it’s impossible to “escape the war,” as the consequences are felt throughout the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/2.jpg\")
Israeli armoured personnel carriers (APCs) on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border on March 8, 2026.
\nIn 2019, there was a burst of social movement activity in Lebanon drawing people together across sectarian lines to reject the domination of warlord oligarchs. What became of that time of possibility?
\n\nI wrote about this for CrimethInc. at the time.
\n\nThe 2019 moment was the biggest uprising this country had ever seen. It was only possible because of years of organizing and protests, years of governmental corruption, and—of particular importance to this conversation—a long enough period of time without Lebanon being bombed. We would have not been able to take to the streets if Israelis were bombing those streets and our homes—which is what is happening now, once again.
\n\nThis shows how Israel has been good to Lebanon’s sectarian regime.
\n\nThe horizons that opened up in 2019 were closed soon after by a combination of factors: repression (including by Hezbollah), economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the August 4, 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut. For most of the years since, most people have been simply trying to survive, with many people working on mutual aid, soup kitchens, and other forms of community building. We could reasonably attribute the emergence of those efforts to those few months in late 2019 and early 2020 that showed people—in particular, the generation that came of age after the 1975-1990 Lebanon wars—what is possible when we get together and organize.
\n\nThat’s where that time of possibility went. But I think we haven’t seen the end of that potential yet.
\n\nHow do you understand the relationship between Netanyahu’s government and Trump’s government today? Which is determining the course of events, and towards what end?
\n\nWe know from US officials, including Marco Rubio, that Israel made the call to attack Iran and the US decided to join—so in that sense, the Israeli government is the one making the call. It’s surreal that the smaller power managed to drag the much larger power into this, and that a decision made by a fairly small number of people in Israel has had such consequences for the world economy, not to mention the ongoing death toll and the environmental disaster.
\n\nThe Americans have no end goal. They did not plan ahead at all. Now we’re seeing Trump unhappy with Israel bombing Iranian oil depots, which means they didn’t even coordinate together. It’s unclear what the Israelis want beyond spreading chaos as an end in itself. It’s possible they were arrogant enough to believe that they could impose regime change in Iran via aerial bombardment alone, but as far as I can tell, they are happy simply to destroy as much of Iran as they can, while they can. This is a regime that has gotten away with carrying out genocide in view of the entire world for over two years, so it clearly believes it can act with impunity indefinitely.
\n\nThere are different ideologies on the American side as well. The Christian nationalist and Zionist Pete Hegseth is celebrating the destruction in Iran as a victory in and of itself. As for Trump, he is clearly out of his depth. He did not expect things to get this bad this quickly. He likely hoped for an outcome like the one in Venezuela, where he got rid of Maduro but kept the regime in place with Delcy Rodríguez in charge but subservient to the will of the US government. They cannot achieve that in Iran—not only because the Iranian regime is more powerful, but also because the Israelis have their own priorities.
\n\nIf the Americans were smarter, they would have understood by now that their problem is Israel. Even if your goal were simply to preserve US supremacy, American support for Israel has been a disaster. They have destroyed the illusion of Gulf security in a matter of days, destabilized the world economy, and proven to every government, once and for all, that the US cannot be trusted. However this ends, we are going to see a realigned world with reduced US influence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/3.jpg\")
The consequences of an Israeli airstrike on the southern suburbs of Beirut on March 9, 2026.
\nOf all the responses to the US and Israeli aggression modeled by different political forces in Lebanon and throughout the surrounding region, which could point towards a horizon of liberation?
\n\nIn Lebanon, groups like Buzuruna Juzuruna, which focuses on food sovereignty, and Egna Legna, an Ethiopian migrant women-run non-profit providing shelter, food safety and more, are examples of what is possible in the country beyond the sectarian and nationalist status quo. Queer Mutual Aid Lebanon is another one, as their definition of the queer community in Lebanon is not limited to Lebanese queers only.
\n\nIn times of war, “humanitarian” discourse can either reproduce existing power dynamics—for example, by ignoring migrant domestic workers or queer Lebanese people—or depoliticize an inherently political situation—for example, reporting on how migrant domestic workers are affected without mentioning that Israel is bombing civilian areas forcing everyone to flee. Groups like the ones I have cited cut through all of this. They operate on a logic of people supporting people because they’re people. That can be a very radical act.
\n\nMilitary attacks by foreign powers—especially by imperialist nations—often produce a strong patriotic feeling among those who experience them. How should movements for liberation engage with this?
\n\nThis isn’t really happening in Lebanon because the country is already fractured. There are many people who also blame Hezbollah for responding to Khamenei’s assassination by launching rockets towards Israel, so you’re not going to see a “rallying behind the troops” situation.
\n\nWhat are the most effective things that grassroots social movements elsewhere in the world can do right now to support those enduring this violence?
\n\nI always hesitate with questions like this one, only because “effectiveness” is a criterion that involves too many different factors to consider. As a general rule, I’d say adopting an anti-authoritarian framework is a good way to avoid downplaying the suffering of people who live under regimes like the Ayatollah’s while recognizing that this war has nothing to do with liberating those people.
\n\nI also think this is a situation in which the diasporas and their supporters outside of Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine can play a significant role. For example, there is very little space in Iran today for pro-Palestine activism, because the Ayatollah’s regime has long co-opted pro-Palestine discourse to its own ends—which have nothing to do with decolonizing Palestine and promoting an anti-Zionist solution that treats everyone equally regardless of religion or ethnicity. Iran has a system that can reasonably be described as gender apartheid. A state like that cannot liberate Palestinians from Israel’s ethno-supremacist apartheid.
\n\nThose of us in the diasporas can make the link between the authoritarianism of Israel and the authoritarianism of Iran without equating the two. This is crucial, because we need to be sensitive to the experience of those who are victimized by both regimes. To a Palestinian in Gaza, it could sound offensive to say that Iran is as bad as Israel, and vice versa to the Ayatollah’s victims in Iran. The absence of such nuance makes it easier for those—including parts of the Iranian diaspora—who promote the idea that Israel will liberate Iran.
\n\nThere is anti-Arab racism among the Iranian diaspora that, ironically, shares similarities with the Ayatollah regime’s repression of non-Persian groups such as Ahwazi Arabs and Kurds. It is a form of ethno-supremacy that attracts and is attracted to the Zionist ethno-supremacy that most readers of this platform are more familiar with.
\n\nOn the Palestinian diaspora side, more could be done to recognize the violence of the Ayatollah’s regime and the so-called “axis of resistance,” both of which have killed thousands upon thousands of people—including Palestinian Syrians who opposed Assad—while pretending to be pro-Palestine. Such connections are much more difficult to make in our region, but diasporas with more privileges can help build those desperately needed bonds.
\n\nWhile we’re at it, we should also be building bonds with members of the Jewish diaspora that reject Zionist ethno-supremacy in favor of building a common future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/4.jpg\")
The site of an Israeli airstrike targeting the Lebanese city of Tyre on March 6, 2026.
\nOne of the most exhausting things about horrific tragedies like this is that they force us to focus on harm reduction rather than on building the world of our dreams. If not for the US and Israeli attacks, what would you prefer to be thinking about, doing, creating?
\n\nI would be living in my home village in Lebanon, thinking about whether to go somewhere more rural where I could work on and with the land to build food sovereignty and promote mutual aid from the ground up across the country and beyond.
\n\nI would be spending more time in the woods there, learning local names for the animals and plants with my child, who has never been to Lebanon.
\n\nI appreciate this question, because it can be easy to forgot the scale of what was robbed of us. I do my best to keep hope and create roots wherever I am, but I am also always mourning what the multi-generational machines of destruction that are the Israeli and American states have done to our lives.
\n\nAs long as there is a rogue and hyper-militaristic Zionist state to our south, it is too dangerous for me to live in Lebanon with my child.
\n\nThis statement by a collective comprised of Iranian, Kurdish, and Afghani internationalist feminists argues that we must oppose the murderous assault that the Israeli and United States militaries are carrying out against people in Iran while at the same time refusing to condone the oppression perpetrated by the Iranian government. Genocidal imperialist projects will never liberate us, nor will patriarchal nationalist regimes protect us.
\n\nThe collective, Roja, composed this statement on June 16, the third day of the war. It was originally published in Persian. Much has happened since then, including the direct attack that the United States carried out on Saturday, June 21. Nevertheless, this text provides valuable analysis on the strategy of the United States and Israeli governments to reshape the Middle East.
\n\nFor background on the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) movement in Iran, read this; for more information on the uprising that broke out in 2022, start here. You can read another statement from Roja here.
\n\nRoja is an independent feminist‑internationalist collective based in Paris, whose members originate from Iran, Afghanistan (Hazara), and Kurdistan. The collective was formed in response to the state murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini and the nationwide “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (“Women, Life, Freedom”) uprising in September 2022. Roja focuses on political and social struggles in Iran and the Middle East, and on local and internationalist solidarity work in France, including with Palestine. “Roja” means “red” in Spanish; in Kurdish, “roj” means “light” or “day”; in Mazandarani, “roja” means “morning star.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/23/1.jpg\")
A sign at a demonstration in Paris organized by Roja, Feminists4Jina, and Socialist Solidarity.
\nWe stand against both of the warmongering, patriarchal, colonial powers. But this is not passivity. It is the starting point of our active struggle for life.
\n\nIf Israel drives Gaza’s children to the slaughter with a queer rainbow flag, the Islamic Republic of Iran drenched Syria in blood under an anti-imperialist guise. One commits genocide against Arabs in Palestine, the other subjugates non-Persian ethnicities within its borders. Netanyahu seeks to usurp the meaning of “Women, Life, Freedom” in order to disguise his colonial expansionism and military aggression as “freedom,” while Khamenei has poured all resources into building a Shia empire supposedly to combat ISIS and defend Palestine.
\n\nIndeed, these two longstanding foes mirror each other in killing and malevolence. We must not equate these two capitalist regimes in terms of their positions within the global order: the Islamic Republic’s capacity for military aggression is undoubtedly far less than the capacity of Israel and its Western imperialist backer. Still, the suffering it has inflicted is as absolute as the violence of Zionist fascism. Any attempt to relativize this suffering, quantitatively or qualitatively, is reductive and misleading. That suffering spans multiple forms of oppression, including the exorbitant costs of its nuclear project and taking human dignity a hostage.
\n\nThis asymmetrical war between Israel and the Islamic Republic is, above all, a war against us.
\n\nIt is a war against what we have created in the “Jin, Jyain, Azadi” uprising, what we’ve achieved, and what lies at its potential horizon: a feminist, anti-colonial, egalitarian uprising that did not emerge from state power, but originated in the popular struggles of Kurdistan—especially those led by women—and then echoed across the geography of Iran.
\n\nIt is simultaneously a war against the oppressed and working classes: against the nurses at Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah and the firefighters of the small town of Musian in Ilam, who were struck by Israeli air attacks—the former on June 16, the latter twice, on June 14 and 16.
\n\nThis war targets the infrastructure and networks that sustain daily life in this region.
\n\nTaking a clear, uncompromising stance on the war—condemning Israel’s assault and saying “no” to the Islamic Republic—is the minimum strategic foundation for shaping a collective campaign demanding an immediate ceasefire. “Women, Life, Freedom Against War” is not just a slogan; it draws a sharp boundary around a set of tendencies whose contradictions and conflicts are clearer today than ever.
\n\nOn one side are opportunistic advocates of regime change who, for years, have supported Western and US sanctions, beaten the drums of war, denied Gaza’s genocide—and now plead for “liberation” in abject subservience to their master, Israel. In short: those who minimize Western imperialist warmongering, above all the far-right Persian-nationalist royalists.
\n\nOn the other side is campism, the political position that lends its support to any project—no matter how authoritarian—that opposes the Western bloc, presenting it as “resistance.”
\n\nIn addition, there are forces that prioritize the struggle against Israel’s criminal assault by appealing to a “state of emergency” or “the people’s interest.” This latter group ends up either whitewashing the Islamic Republic’s crimes at home and abroad or adopting a strategic silence regarding them. These are the ones who, after October 7, 2023, issued warnings about the danger of indifference to the shared fate of Middle Eastern peoples—but instead of emphasizing grassroots internationalist struggle, blurred the line between popular resistance and state power. They correctly noted that Iran comes next after Lebanon and Palestine in the so-called “new Middle East order,” but only to downplay and deprioritize the struggles of women, ethnic minorities, and the oppressed classes in this “moment.” Their warnings remained abstract because they did utter not a word about the Islamic Republic’s longstanding appropriation—and ideological monopolization—of anti-colonial discourse since the 1979 revolution.
\n\nWe believe that only by drawing these boundaries—emphasizing the mutual and inseparable relationships between multiple social struggles in the region—can we form a solid front against Israel’s genocide and simultaneously wrest anti‑colonial discourse from the Islamic Republic’s monopoly while confronting ethno‑nationalists who deny the existence of ethnic minorities and “internal colonialism” within the Islamic Republic.
\n\nIn solidarity with the shared fate of Middle Eastern peoples—from Kabul to Tehran, from Kurdistan to Palestine, from Ahvaz to Tabriz, from Balochistan to Syria and Lebanon—which is the material basis of internationalist struggle, we address this statement to the oppressed and the downtrodden within Iran and the region, to the diaspora, and to the “wakeful consciences” of the world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/23/2.jpg\")
A sign at a demonstration in Paris organized by Roja, Feminists4Jina, and Socialist Solidarity.
\nThe ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the criminal Israeli state is not confined to this day, this year, or even this century. Yet the geopolitical fault line that opened up on October 7, 2023 now threatens to swallow the Islamic Republic and the people of Iran from within—at a staggering speed and with shocking intensity—casting a darkening horizon that strains our emotional and psychological limits.
\n\nThese may be the most critical days of our lives since the 1979 Revolution.
\n\nFrom the dawn of Friday, June 13, to Monday, June 16, the Israeli military carried out 170 attacks, striking 720 targets across Iran.
\n\nPhase One: Nuclear facilities, missile bases, air-defence systems, and assassinations of researchers and military commanders in residential areas—targeting dozens of senior commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces], inflicting an unprecedented blow to the IRGC’s military-security structure.
\nPhase Two: Coordinated strikes on refineries and fuel depots (Shahran in Tehran and Pars South in the Persian Gulf), ports, airports, and critical infrastructure affecting not only military arteries, but social reproduction and everyday life.
\nPhase Three: Assaults on symbols of governmental authority—ministries, official buildings, and the Islamic Republic’s main broadcasting agency in Tehran—the central hub of interrogators, torturers, and hate propagators. A media institution with a four-decade record of fabricating dossiers, spreading lies, and slandering the poor, women, Afghan migrants, and political dissidents.
\nAcross all of these phases, contrary to the seductive promises of fascist propagandists selling bomb-delivered freedom, what has unfolded is not “pinpoint strikes” on military targets, but the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, women, and children. As of June 15, at least 600 people have been killed and 1277 injured. [On June 23, as we publish this, the numbers are considerably higher.]
\n\nIn response, the Islamic Republic had launched over 350 missiles and drones at Israel by June 16. One major strike targeted northern Israel, including Haifa—the strategic industrial core and an energy-logistical hub. Although most of the projectiles were intercepted by the defense systems of the Israeli military and its allies, several reached civilian areas. As of this writing, 24 Israelis have been killed, including four women from a single family.
\n\nIn this dire situation, the Islamic Republic has not only abandoned a terrified populace—failing to provide even the most basic services such as transparent public information, air raid shelters, or alarm systems—but has also escalated state control: deploying riot squads, erecting checkpoints across cities, and sharpening its blade for executions under the pretext of “spying for Israel.” While this is unsurprising during wartime—indeed, it is symptomatic of the regime’s inability to ensure safety—it carries with it the whispered threat of “hanging traitors from every tree.” Such logic flows naturally from a regime whose very survival depends on internal repression, executions, the militarization of daily life, and relentless regional expansion.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/23/5.jpg\")
The Roja banner at a demonstration in Paris on June 14 against the genocide of Palestinians.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/23/6.jpg\")
A demonstration in Paris organized by Roja, Feminists4Jina, and Socialist Solidarity.
\nThe “War on Terror”—the imperialist project which unleashed bloodshed across Afghanistan and Iraq at the dawn of the 21st century—has now passed the torch to Israel: a “preventive” strike aimed at containing the Iranian nuclear threat.1 Once again, the dominant media script is repeated: Israel targets only “military sites,” deploying “precision missiles” and “smart drones” to deliver freedom and democracy to the Iranian people.
\n\nBut this narrative does not address Parnia Abbasi, the 24-year-old poet killed in Sattarkhan, Tehran. It makes no mention of the murders of Mohammad Ali Amini, the teenage taekwondo athlete, or Parsa Mansour, a national padel player. Not a whisper of Fatemeh Mirheidar, Niloufar Qalewand, Mehdi Pouladvand, or Najmeh Shams. These were neither “military targets” nor “nuclear threats”—only human beings, their bodies dismembered in global media silence, shredded by Israeli missiles. This is merely the tip of the iceberg of the “freedom” that Israel—backed by the West—intends to introduce by heaping up corpses and devastation.
\n\nReactionary forces that reduce “regime change” to a mere political reshuffling from above—without any real social transformation—are now openly embracing their longtime savior, Israel. Monarchists have turned bombing victims into statistics, shamelessly declaring, “The Islamic Republic executes thousands annually, so the killing of dozens or hundreds by Israel is justifiable.” This is the same dehumanizing logic—the quantitative calculus of death—that the United States deployed to justify destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “If the war continues, more will die, so drop the bomb.”
\n\nThe killing of civilians in Israel’s recent assaults, the heightened state control within Iran, the destruction of social infrastructure—none of these are “unintended mistakes” or collateral damage. They are the logic of war, especially when waged by a regime like Israel’s. The familiar claim that civilians or non-military sites are being used as “human shields”—once invoked in Gaza, now used to justify attacks on Dizelabad Prison and Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah—is a deliberate distortion, deployed to mask and invert the truth of this exterminatory logic.
\n\nThere is no such thing as a “just strike” or a “fair bombing.” The historical experiences of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya—yes, the very Libya that Netanyahu openly cites as a model for regime change in Iran—testify in blood to this truth.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/23/3.jpg\")
A demonstration in Paris organized by Roja, Feminists4Jina, and Socialist Solidarity.
\nThe unprecedented scale of Israel’s attacks indicates that Israel is attempting to achieve full-scale regime change—or regime collapse. We cannot dismiss Operation “Rising Lion” as a mere extension of the longstanding hostility between the two states. It is rooted in a broader regional process that began on October 7 with a blow to the so-called “Axis of Resistance” and has now reached deep into the core of Tehran’s power structures.
\n\nIsrael’s strike on the Islamic Republic marks the latest chapter in a broader transformation of Middle Eastern geopolitics and economics.
\n\nGaza, for Israel, is not merely a battlefield—it is a colonization project. The assault on Gaza is a campaign to exterminate or expel over two million Palestinians and transform the blood-soaked coast into Trump’s vision of a “Middle Eastern Riviera”—luxury beaches, casinos, and a free trade zone for white people.
\n\nStep by step, Israel has driven Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, destroying its infrastructure, killing commanders, and dismantling its war machine. The same is now unfolding with the IRGC. In Syria, a regime propped up by Russia, Hezbollah, and the IRGC—at the cost of half a million deaths and twelve million displaced—has abruptly collapsed under Turkish-backed rebels. The Tehran–Beirut Shia Corridor, once a strategic artery linking Iran to the Mediterranean, has become its Achilles’ heel—the runway via which warplanes now strike it.
\n\nIn the newly imposed order of the Middle East, a bloc of Israeli–US capitalist power is aggressively reshaping the region via logistical-economic routes (the India–Middle East–Europe Corridor), political-economic normalization (the Abraham Accords), and expansionist militarism in the form of the genocide and annexation of Gaza.2
\n\nAmid the disintegration of the “Axis of Resistance,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ longstanding doctrine of “neither war nor peace”—a strategy of manufactured crises and calculated brinkmanship—has collapsed. For years, the regime weaponized limited, controlled confrontations to forestall both total war and genuine peace. Today, it finds itself exposed on a battlefield where the rules have irrevocably shifted.
\n\nThis collapse, compounded by the regime’s total loss of domestic legitimacy—marked by the mass uprisings of December 2017, November 2019, and the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement—amounts to a final blow. The Islamic Republic can no longer manage, defer, or externalize its crises. It commands no legitimacy at home and holds no strategic leverage in the region. It is a scorched remnant in an emerging militarized, multipolar order.
\n\nIn this vortex of blood, the United States—racing against China and maneuvering through Russia—is striving to reclaim its fractured hegemony. Netanyahu clings to endless war as his ticket to domestic survival. And within the Islamic Republic’s ruling apparatus, many now aim to become instruments of regime change themselves. Meanwhile, the people remain hostage—trapped in a war that is not theirs, a war that offers no horizon of liberation.
\n\nRecalling the path from the “blessing” of the Iran–Iraq War for the Islamic Republic’s consolidation in its infancy to the regime’s mass execution of political prisoners in the summer of 1988 is as urgent today as remembering the imperialist course that led to the “Libyaization” of an entire society.3
\n\nThe history of “humanitarian interventions” in Iraq and Afghanistan—whether under the pretext of “weapons of mass destruction” or “crimes against humanity”—must be read alongside the history of those struggles in Iran that, from before the 1979 Revolution to today, have wrongly prioritized anti-imperialism above all else. Similarly, the settler-colonial history of Israel—from the 1948 Nakba to Nasser’s betrayal of pan-Arabism in 1967—must be understood from the vantage point of Turkmen Sahara and Kurdistan, sites of internal colonialism.
\n\nFor over a decade, ideologues of the “island of stability” (the name that the campists once gave to the Islamic Republic of Iran) have used the fear of “Syriaization” to shame independent popular struggles and call people to the ballot box, selling the IRGC’s bloody intervention in Syria as a deterrent strategy to prevent the “Syriaization” of Iran. Just recounting this history is enough to justify a decisive “no” to the discourse of campists—a discourse that, rather than relying on organized popular power from below, stoops to realpolitik and, in the name of anti-imperialism, treats the enemy of the enemy as a friend even when they are just as bad.
\n\nNearly 45 years ago, at the onset of the Iran–Iraq War, some progressive groups fell into nationalism—treating the war as a “national” event. That only served to consolidate Islamic authoritarian rule. Some remained silent as the Islamic Republic threw around the word “imperialist” to justify imposing mandatory veiling on women and deploying troops to Kurdistan; others, though they spoke up, failed to mobilize public opinion against the internal enemy fashioned in the image of an external one, thus helping to normalize a hierarchy centered on man/Persian/Shia.
\n\nRight now—when the “state of emergency” narrative suggests that this is some exceptional, disconnected moment—there is no greater imperative than invoking a plural, multi-layered historical memory. Only from a heterogeneous, multi-voiced historical memory—from the standpoint of oppressed peoples—can we say “no” to imperialism, war-based state control, and campism all at once. The project of remembering that layered history—from Kabul to Gaza, across shared fates and differences—we call internationalism.
\n\nIn a world oscillating between fascist militarization and seemingly endless wars, our path lies in active, mass organizing for an immediate ceasefire, for peace, and for the reproduction of life against the machinery of death. Our field of action is neither aligned behind states nor invested in casting hopeful glances toward them—it lies in caring for one another, in mutual aid, and in building a network of support, awareness, and solidarity—from elders and children to the marginalized and disabled—as we witnessed magnificently in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, in which solidarity among the oppressed became a force for living, resisting, and creating.
\n\nTransparency of information and consciousness-raising—without reproducing either Israeli or Islamic Republic narratives—must be the pillars of this cultural and political resistance.
\n\nSubmitting to fatalism and painting an apocalyptic future in which everything is already over—these are ways of reproducing the logic of death. Against that notion of the future, what is vitally urgent is to shape an all-out campaign aimed at immediate ceasefire and at opening a horizon of liberation:
\n\nWomen, Life, Freedom Against War
\nBerxwedana Jiyan e
\nResistance is Life
\nFree Palestine
\nRoja
\n18 June 2025
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/23/4.jpg\")
\nAlthough the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program has, from the very beginning, been a costly and undemocratic process with serious ecological consequences—pushed forward by the Revolutionary Guards to secure the regime’s survival in regional and global geopolitical competitions, at the expense of impoverishing society and destroying the environment—and although we recognize no “right” for the Islamic Republic or any other state to acquire nuclear weapons, and believe that nuclear arms and the global race for them must be entirely dismantled, Netanyahu’s attack is nonetheless based on a false narrative, reminiscent of the US invasion of Iraq under the pretext of eliminating “weapons of mass destruction”: namely, that Iran is only a few steps away from building “the bomb.” While the Islamic Republic has indeed significantly increased its stockpile of uranium close to weapons-grade, there is no evidence of a decision to build a nuclear bomb. Even if we assume that the Islamic Republic has acquired a bomb, it is the peoples themselves within the political geography of Iran who must decide their own fate with autonomy and self-determination—and this in no way justifies Israel’s military assault. ↩
\nThe “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation of October 7 can be interpreted within the context of this new architecture of domination: as an attempt to disrupt Israel’s normalization project through the Abraham Accords, and to interfere with one of the most vital routes of transnational capital flow—beginning in India, passing through Saudi Arabia and the UAE, reaching Israel, and extending from there to the shores of Greece in the Mediterranean. ↩
\nLibyaization refers to an imperialist strategy in which a state is first diplomatically pressured into disarmament—often under the guise of international agreements or humanitarian concerns—then subjected to military intervention, and ultimately pushed into state collapse and prolonged chaos. The term draws from the case of Libya, where the Gaddafi regime was persuaded to abandon its weapons programs, later targeted by a NATO-led military campaign in 2011, and eventually disintegrated into a fragmented, war-torn country without a functioning central government. ↩
\nAfter slaughtering more than 42,000 Palestinians, including 16,500 children, the Israeli military is now invading Lebanon and threatening to go to war with Iran. In the following in-depth account, an anarchist from occupied Palestine reviews the history of Zionist colonialism and Palestinian resistance, makes the case for an anti-colonial understanding of the situation, and explores what it means to act in solidarity with Palestinians.
\n\nYa Ghazze habibti, oh Gaza my love. Gaza, which Napoleon, one of its many occupiers, called the outpost of Africa, the door to Asia. This is because he passed through it on his way north and, upon defeat, passed though it again on his way back to Africa.
\n\nGaza, which has always been a central point for passing empires, trade routes, occupations, and cultures, owing to its geographic location along the coast line of the Mediterranean. Gaza, through which passed the Via Maris, connecting Egypt to Turkey and Europe. Gaza, through which the Greeks, the Romans, the Rashidun Caliphate, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British, the Egyptians, and Zionist forces pressed their claims—writing its story as a history of occupations, wars, atrocities, and resistance.
\n\nGaza my love, which was always a battleground, yet always stood still. Gaza, which buries 41,0001 of its inhabitants, commemorating a year of an ongoing war of annihilation, facing a scale of destruction that has already exceeded the bombing of Dresden by the allied forces during the Second World War, and a daily death rate that is higher than any other conflict in the 21st century.
\n\nAlmost a year into the genocide, some things should be clear. The destruction of Hamas is incidental damage. The chief goal is the mass slaughter of children, targeting Gaza’s future. Of the 41,000 deaths reported thus far, about 16,500 are children.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/9.jpg\")
\nBut Gaza is not helpless. The people of Gaza fight, and their courage and resilience are an inspiration for the entire world and generations to come.
\n\nBefore we discuss the present situation, it is important to review the history. For those of us who grew up and live in the entity, the belly of the colonial beast, it feels like history began on October 7, 2023. This is the only narrative Israelis are getting. But things don’t just happen in a vacuum—and similar things have happened before, in similar wars of decolonization and liberation. A little historical background will enable us to zoom out and understand these events as part of long-term processes.
\n\nThen we can talk about possible futures.
\n\nGaza has a long history of occupations and resistance, but our current understanding of the “Gaza Strip” as a rectangle on the map in the south of Palestine does not derive from the natural features of the land—it is an artificial, modern creation. The Mamluks in the 13th century were the first to use the term Quta’a Ghazze (Gaza Strip), but they were referring to the entire south of Palestine, all the way to the modern-day West Bank. The Gaza Strip as we know it was created in 1948.
\n\nWe cannot understand what is known as the Gaza Strip without discussing the Zionist attack on Palestine in 1948, the massive ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba. Without this context, it’s impossible to understand why most Gazans are not originally from Gaza, and why 80% of the population are refugees. Gaza is an artificial strip of land that became a vast refugee camp after the massive ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Zionist militias. Out of the nearly 800,000 refugees expelled from their villages, many escaped to nearby countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. Those who tried to cross into Egypt found a closed border; unlike other neighboring countries, Egypt did not accept refugees, similar to what the Egyptian government does today. This is how the Gaza Strip emerged: as a Zionist means to control demographics and population.
\n\nMany of the Kibbutzim and towns that were attacked on October 7 were built on the ruins of communities that existed there before. Bedouin tribes and other residents from 11 villages around Gaza were expelled to the Gaza Strip, and their lands, which were classified as “abandoned,” were expropriated by the state and turned into military training grounds and settlements. Towns and kibbutzim were built on them to prevent attempts to return. The deportation order, documented by historians as Order Number 40, included an order to burn the villages and leave no remains. We can assume that some of the fighters who attacked these settlements on October 7, 2023 were second- or third-generation refugees who were seeing the ancestral lands of their parents or grandparents on the other side of the blockade for the first time.
\n\nBy the end of these expulsions, in 1950, the population of Gaza had tripled as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees. There was no infrastructure to receive so many refugees, and until 1950, there was no aid organization like UNRWA in place to assist refugees. Despite that, historians tell of incredible solidarity from Gaza’s locals, who in time of crisis chose to share what little resources they had with the refugees, keeping them alive. By the decision of the United Nations, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was established in 1950 and began the task of building refugee camps and schools and organizing aid for the huge number of refugees who, until then, had slept in local schools, mosques, fields, and private homes of locals that opened their doors for them.
\n\nThe newly-arrived refugees in what would become the Gaza Strip created a looming threat for the Zionist colonial project. Some claim that Gaza has been under siege since 2007—but in reality, Gaza was under siege from the very beginning, passing through various stages of siege over time. The establishment of the Gaza Strip was a calculated decision by David Ben Gurion, the architect of the Nakba and Israel’s first Prime Minister, to give up a piece of Palestine in order to build a huge refugee camp for expelled people fleeing south. In addition to controlling the demographics of the rest of Palestine, the isolation of the strip served another purpose. Its geographical distance from the West Bank, from the Palestinians that remained in the territories occupied in 1948, and from the rest of the Arab world helped to fragment the fabric of Palestinian society. This was a calculated colonial strategy to carve up the land into isolated ghettos—into what were called Bantustans in South Africa—in order to drive a wedge between different classes of occupied people.
\n\nBy 1967, Israel had solved its original demographic issues but created new geographic ones. The expansionist appetite had risen again and the Gaza Strip was occupied along with the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula. Israel later returned the Sinai to Egypt, but the rest of the newly occupied territories posed a significant challenge for the Jewish state, as it was not clear that a simple repeat of 1948 was possible. A new model of ethnic cleansing was called for. The conditions had changed, rendering it more difficult to justify physically expelling people from their land; the next best thing was simply to lock them in place.
\n\nThe top priority was to prevent by all means the emergence of a situation in which settlers would mix with the natives, so Israel constructed two open-air prisons: one in the West Bank and a more tightly controlled one in the Gaza Strip. Unlike the territories occupied in 1948, these new territories were never officially annexed to Israel. The population never received citizenship. They were denied any rights; their villages were surrounded with checkpoints, walls, and settlements; and military rule was put in place. Indeed, ethnic cleansing and military rule have often gone together throughout history.
\n\nAnother thing that goes together historically with ethnic cleansing and military rule is resistance. The outbreak of the first intifada from the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza in 1987 set off revolutionary waves throughout the region. This was not solely due to the intensity of the insurrection, but also because it signaled a turning point at which Palestinians took matters into their hands and fought for their own liberation.
\n\nIn many ways, the Palestinian Liberation Organization had already been doing this starting in the 1960s, taking away the Arab states’ role as “liberators” and shifting the focus to revolutionary Arab guerrillas and Palestinian diaspora communities, mainly in Jordan and later in Lebanon. But the first intifada in Palestine broke out spontaneously. It was not under the control of any particular militarized party or organization; it was led by a network of grassroots groups and organizations that came together under the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), a network of coordination between the various regional committees, organizations, and parties involved in the uprising.
\n\nThe fact that the uprising broke out in Gaza is significant. It is not surprising that it began in a refugee camp. Among Palestinians, the camp is the lowest class; it is also the most revolutionary, always the front line of both popular resistance and armed struggle. It is where guerrillas traditionally organized and strongholds of resistance were formed. Due to its centrality in the struggle, it is also where many of the most horrifying atrocities have been committed and the harshest repression inflicted. Refugee camps in Lebanon were hotbeds for revolutionaries during the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and ’80s; that was also where Lebanese fascists perpetrated the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, under the watchful eyes of the IDF.
\n\nTo this day, refugee camps such as those in Jenin and Balata in the West Bank remain a hotspot for armed resistance, with many factions, such as the Lion’s Den and Balata Brigade, that insist on remaining unaffiliated with any major faction of Palestinian politics, beyond the control of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The youth in these camps have defended their homes against Israeli raids time and time again, and have paid dearly for doing so. Since October 7, 2023, the refugee camps in Gaza have been a central target for the genocidal forces.
\n\nThe first intifada articulated the refugee camp as the leading force in the Palestinian revolution. It also showed how explosive the situation was.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/12.jpg\")
\nThe outbreak of the intifada came as a complete surprise to both Israel and the PLO. Israel never imagined the Palestinians would revolt, and the PLO never imagined they would do it outside of their control. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO and its biggest political party, Fatah, saw the uncontrollable and horizontal nature of the intifada as a threat and sought a way to bring it under the control of his organization. This, alongside Israeli and US interference, led Fatah to compromise on their positions and seek peace negotiations with Israel.
\n\nThis sequence of events, the details of which are beyond the scope of this article, led to the signing of the Oslo Accords, the migration of the PLO to Palestine, the creation of the Palestinian Authority, and the subsequent management of the occupation by Israel’s loyal subcontractor. Among other things, the Oslo Accords involved giving up of 80% of the land in return for the promise of a “two-state solution” and the recognition of Israel. It also meant the division of the West Bank into three areas: area A, comprising 18% of the West Bank, which would be under the control of the PA; area B, 22% of the West Bank, which would be under the civil government of the PA and the security control of Israel; and area C, 60% of the West Bank, which was placed under “temporary” Israeli control.
\n\nThis also led to security coordination between the newly-formed PA and Israel, which meant that Palestinians were suppressed, jailed, beaten, and executed by Palestinian cops and jailers rather than Israelis. At the same time, the PLO “abandoned terrorism” and armed resistance, dedicating itself to peace negotiations and “nonviolent solutions.” The last part of the agreement, the creation of a Palestinian state, was never implemented.
\n\nThe accords served as a textbook counterinsurgency tactic. The goal was to crush the uprising, domesticate or isolate the revolutionary wings within the PLO, remove troublesome areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Israeli management, and at the same time, impose the role of cop on the PA while giving the rising masses false hope.
\n\nBut not everyone was duped. The Oslo Accords did manage to end the first intifada, but they also signaled a fragmentation within Palestinian society, including within the PLO itself, dividing those who favored peace agreements against those who remained committed to the original goals of the Palestinian revolution—refusal to acknowledge the Israeli state, liberation from the river to the sea, and commitment to armed and popular resistance. These two camps were to define Palestinian society and struggle for years to come.
\n\nIn the midst of the uprising, a few men from the local Gaza chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based religious social movement, met in a house in Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on December 9, 1988. This was to have significant implications for the future of the Palestinian resistance. Under the spiritual leadership of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a refugee from the village Al-Jura, near Majdal Askalan (known today as the Israeli city Ashkelon), the group decided to split off and start a new movement, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat alMuqawama alIslamiya)—as an acronym, HAMAS. A few months later, the nascent organization released its charter, in which it presents Islamic revival and jihad as a form of anti-colonialism and lays out its political and religious philosophy regarding the connection it sees between Islam and Palestinian liberation. Despite affirming that Islamic rule would allow “Muslims, Jews, and Christians to live together in peace and harmony,” the rest of the text is full of antisemitism and conspiracy theories, articulating the movement’s understanding of Zionism, Israel, and Judaism at that time.
\n\nA decade earlier, in 1976, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin had applied for a permit from the Israeli authorities to establish the Islamic Association, which was to be an umbrella organization that would provide legal and administrative cover for the Muslim Brotherhood’s social, religious, educational, and medical services within the Gaza Strip. Israel approved the license. This is one of the sources of the myth that Israel “founded” Hamas. In fact, Israel had nothing to do with “inventing” Hamas; as an occupying authority, it merely granted a permit to one of the institutions of the Muslim Brotherhood about a decade before Hamas existed. There are couple of ways to explain why this happened.
\n\nIsrael had a policy of noninterference with social Islamic organizations. But it is also helpful to understand the social dynamics at that time. The 1970s were the height of Palestinian revolutionary leftism; secular and Marxist-Leninist organizations were the dominant forces in the armed resistance. Religion, on the other hand, was seen as a private matter, and Israel had an interest in enabling the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic movements that could function as a counterforce to weaken the nationalist movement and create social division.
\n\nThe creation of Hamas, a decade later, while building on the charitable and social infrastructure of the Brotherhood, redefined Islam as a political movement tied with anti-colonial resistance, taking inspiration from many political parties in the Arab world that combined Islam with nationalism. They drew on the legacies of legendary figures such as Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam, a spiritual leader and militant active in Palestine in the 1920s and ’30s, who pioneered defining Islamic Jihad as anti-colonialism and organized guerrilla fighting against the French, the British and the Zionists. Hamas’s armed wing, the Al-Qassam brigade, bears his name.
\n\nHamas was active in the uprising from the start, clashing with Israeli forces but also with other Palestinian factions that they perceived to be collaborationist. Several factors enabled Hamas to position itself as the leader of the resistance camp, including the PLO’s implicit acceptance of partitioning the land of historic Palestine into two states and abandonment of the revolutionary path, which caused the Palestinian national movement to fragment into the “resistance camp” and the “negotiation camp.” At the same time, geopolitical processes including the fall of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the Palestinian left in Lebanon were shifting the context. The intifada first erupted out of the refugee camps of Gaza, Hamas’s home territory and main base of support.
\n\nFast forward to the year 2000. After negotiations failed to deliver and the Palestinian state that was promised in 1999 never came, a second, bitterer, and more militarized intifada erupted, triggered by a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon—then-leader of the opposition Likud party—to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. While the first intifada was popular and decentralized, the second intifada began similarly but quickly fell under the leadership of armed militarized factions, popularizing practices such as suicide bombings and other kinds of deadly armed attacks against Israeli forces and citizens.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/16.jpg\")
\nYasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO and the president of the Palestinian Authority, proved to be quite a pragmatist. To the dismay of Israel and international patrons, he refused to denounce armed attacks, often even encouraged them, and more than once, the police forces of the PA found themselves exchanging gunfire with Israeli forces. He appeared to view the “peace process” and the state-building project merely as tools for Palestinian liberation, worth pursuing as long as they worked, but was prepared to abandon them and change course as needed. In response, in 2002, Israel laid siege to the Mukataa, the Palestinian parliament building in Ramallah, trapping him until his eventual death two years later in 2004.
\n\nIn his place, Mahmoud Abbas came to power—a Fatah party member with US support. To ensure that Arafat’s pragmatism would not recur, the US and other international donors initiated efforts to “professionalize” the PA. These led to a significant structural shift, resulting in an extensive security sector reform with US support and training, the tightening of security coordination with Israel, the de-politicization of the PA and a large part of the Palestinian public, and the appointment of Salam Fayyad as Prime Minister—a neoliberal American-educated economist accused of purging the PA’s institutions of overly critical voices.
\n\nIn her book Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, Palestinian anti-authoritarian author Dana El-Kurd details how such aggressive methods of international intervention are used to insulate the PA from its constituency, the Palestinian public, making it answer to international donors instead—especially the US and European Union. They make threats of sanctions and cuts in aid whenever the PA strays from path laid by its masters, the global Western powers. The creation of the PA and involvement in its management were crucial for the US in order to impose its priorities in the region. Palestinians have never been permitted to manage their own affairs in a way that isn’t approved by the United States.
\n\nThis was visible following Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006. Hamas managed to capitalize on the discontent that followed the failure of the Oslo Accords, the PA’s policies, and corruption and feelings of frustration, gaining 76 of the 132 seats of the legislative council and winning the right to form a government. The resistance camp was at the height of its popularity, as one year before, in 2005, Israel had initiated the Disengagement Plan, evicting all 21 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip along with the Israeli military, following five straight years of armed uprising. Although Israel continued to control Gaza’s border, airspace, and maritime space, this was still seen as a significant achievement of the armed struggle, which managed to force land capitulations from Israel while the “negotiations” and the “peace process” remained stuck.
\n\nIn fact, few voted for Hamas for religious or ideological reasons. By building guerrilla infrastructure during the 1990s and the second intifada, Hamas had simply managed to position themselves as a leading force for the national cause, the most significant alternative to Fatah.
\n\nShocked by Hamas’s victory, the United States and Israel quickly moved to initiate what amounted to a coup. They put intense pressure on the new government to “moderate” its views—for example, to accept the US-led “peace process,” the two-state “solution,” and not to threaten Western influence in the region. The “Quartet on the Middle East,” an international body composed of the US, the EU, the UN, and Russia, which was assigned to manage the “solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” according to the “peace process,” conditioned aid to the Hamas government on three demands: acknowledging the accords signed between the PLO and Israel, denouncing “terror,” and officially recognizing Israel. Following Hamas’s refusal, the government was isolated, all aid stopped, and economic sanctions imposed.
\n\nThe Gaza civil war of 2007 saw armed street fighting over the Gaza Strip between the armed wings of Hamas and Fatah. The battle resulted in a victory for Hamas and the subsequent taking over of the Gaza Strip. In defeat, Mahmoud Abbas declared the dissolution of the government, fired Ismail Haniyeh (the Hamas prime minister), and declared a state of emergency. Instead, Salam Fayyad, a more “moderate” Fatah politician approved by the US and Israel, was appointed PM. Abbas also outlawed Hamas’s armed wing. No elections have been held since.
\n\nThe events of 2007 created a new situation in Palestinian governance, in which Palestinians were under two Palestinian Authorities—the PA under Fatah rule in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza. This benefited Israel, further fragmenting Palestinian society and dividing Gaza from the West Bank and the rest of Palestine. Starting in 2007, Israel intensified its siege of Gaza as a collective punishment for electing Hamas, fully isolating it from the world—basically turning the world’s largest refugee camp into the world’s largest open-air prison. The strip was fully fenced from all sides (including the Egyptian border), tighter control was imposed on its maritime and air space, movement outside and inside was highly restricted, and Israel decided which goods were permitted to enter.
\n\nThose who equate Hamas with ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban would be surprised to hear that during sixteen years ruling Gaza, Hamas never implemented Sharia law. It was an authoritarian and conservative government; it was highly repressive, especially to women, queer people, and political dissidents; yet there were constant internal debates and arguments, elections, and representative bodies. The organizational structure has been detailed in depth; suffice it to say that while it was an hierarchical organization, the system of Majlis Al-Shura (General Consultative councils), composed of elected members from local council groups, with representatives from Gaza, the West Bank, leaders in exile, and prisoners in Israeli jails, does represent a somewhat democratic top-down model of governance.
\n\nNot only does Hamas not resemble Salafi jihadism, they were its mortal enemies. Salafi cells that tried to mobilize in Gaza were violently repressed. Hamas have no intention of establishing a pan-Islamic caliphate; they were always more nationalist than religious, limiting their activities to the geography of Palestine. All of this is not to vindicate them—we should remain critical—but I believe that we must be fair and accurate in our criticism, understanding nuance and context, so as to avoid spreading Islamophobic nonsense that throws all Islamist organizations into one basket.
\n\nIsrael appeared to be fine with Hamas taking over. This served the purpose of further dividing the Palestinians, putting a governing body in control in Gaza to manage it, and providing a justification for Israeli attacks. It portrayed itself as fighting a jihadist Islamic-fundamentalist terror organization in the many airstrikes that followed.
\n\nPalestinian historian Tareq Baconi details in his book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance how Israel initiated the strategy of “mowing the lawn” in Gaza. It would bomb Gaza every once in a while, just enough to damage Hamas’s military capabilities and massacre hundreds or thousands of Palestinians—keeping Gaza in check, but leaving Hamas in power. Israel conducted five major military operations in Gaza up to 2023 and a few smaller ones. This strategy of keeping Gaza in a frozen state—always under crisis management, one step away from collapse, isolated from the world, and without a long term plan—was to explode in Israel’s face on October 7, 2023. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
\n\nFrom Hamas’s side, there are many ways to explain why they decided to take part in electoral politics. It seems that Hamas saw government something like how Arafat saw it—as a tool of resistance, one of many tools with which to pursue liberation. Like Arafat, they were to discover the tensions and contradictions within this approach. As the head of the resistance camp, the leaders of the revolutionary government, Hamas often found itself as a pacifying force. Several times, they had to restrict other militant factions in Gaza, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that were interfering with their ceasefires. They also didn’t participate in some military clashes with Israel, like the 2022 escalation with between Israel and the PIJ. Some now interpret this as a deceiving tactic, duping Israel to believe that they weren’t interested in escalation in order to surprise them on October 7, but I don’t buy it. It might be true to some extent, but there is no denying that many times, Hamas were in fact deterred, and had to walk a tightrope between maintaining a militant stance and restricting other armed factions in order to keep escalations from getting out of control.
\n\nThe transition from social movement and guerrilla formation to governing body wasn’t so obvious. Al-Qassam, the armed wing, despite securing a great deal of autonomy from the governing bodies, still found itself having to deal with the growing tension between resistance and government. This is not new in the Palestinian movement. In his book The Palestine Question, Edward Said detailed this dilemma within the PLO in its revolutionary days, when revolution and the state-building project often clashed. When it finally came time to move forward to a state, they completely betrayed their people, sold out the revolution, and capitulated to the disciplining powers of the world order. But Hamas took a different approach.
\n\nAfter taking over Gaza in 2007, Hamas had the choice whether to repeat the PA’s path in the West Bank, selling out the resistance and becoming collaborators with the occupation, or to maintain their defiant stance. They chose the latter. Neither Israel nor the international powers were able to fully domesticate them, and they maintained their commitment to decolonization, resistance, and armed struggle—at least in principle, and sometimes in practice. We could see this during the 2021 escalation, the Unity Intifada. While Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem, was threatened with eviction, Jerusalem was burning and an uprising was spreading all over Palestine; Hamas declared an ultimatum for the Israeli forces to withdraw from Sheikh Jarrah and the Al-Aqsa compound, followed by a barrage of rockets fired into Israeli cities.
\n\nThis was one of the few instances in which Hamas broke out of the cage that was built for them. The rocket attack against Israel was not used to ease the siege, negotiate about conditions in Gaza, respond to the assassination of one of its militants, or press any other matter within their immediate circle of concern as a governing or military body; rather, it was an act in solidarity with a neighborhood in Jerusalem and in response to Israeli raids on the Al-Aqsa compound. This positioned them once again as a leading front in the resistance, representing Gaza’s participation in the unity uprising and acting on issues that concern all Palestinians.
\n\nThe contradictions between armed struggle and popular struggle are a constant subject of debate among Palestinians. Some critics accused Hamas of sidelining the popular struggle that erupted during the uprising by shifting the focus to armed struggle. The reality is more complicated. Hamas is much more than its armed wing; it is an entire movement that experiments with many different methods of struggle, evaluating each strategy according to the results. Hamas has a lot of experience with popular resistance—for example, during the 2018-2019 Marches of Return, in which Gaza residents marched unarmed toward the fence, inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the US, demanding an end to the siege and to be permitted to return to their homes on the other side. This was not a Hamas initiative—it was organized by grassroots activists and civilians in Gaza—but Hamas, as a governing body, had to permit the marches, participated in them, and was involved with some of the funding. Israel’s response was to massacre 223 protesters, including 46 children, by sniper fire. The world did nothing. By contrast, the events of 2021 proved that Palestine only becomes an international issue when Israeli citizens pay a price.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/4.jpg\")
Palestinians are being killed whether armed or not, “violent” or “non-violent,” during peaceful marches as well as militant combat. Israel’s problem with the Palestinians is not this or that tactic, but their existence as a people. The March of Return, Gaza, 2018.
\nIn view of this, I want to propose one way to see October 7. No one outside Hamas knows exactly what led them to decide to initiate such an attack. There are many theories, and I’ll add my own. Hamas might have reached the conclusion that the “resistance government” was no longer working, that it was in fact actually an obstacle, and decided to return to its origins as a guerrilla formation and social movement. They might have tried to do this many times before, as we can see from the many reconciliation attempts with Fatah; they showed a willingness to relinquish control over Gaza and work toward elections time and time again. Baconi’s Hamas Contained details many such attempts and how they were derailed by Israel and the US. Perhaps they thought it was time for something extreme to force them back to the path of resistance, a kind of a government suicide. They have made it clear since October that they are willing to give up governing Gaza, but won’t disarm—another indication that they are attempting to return to their origins.
\n\nFor the revolution to live, the government must die.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/10.jpg\")
\nThen October 7 happened.
\n\nA year has passed and it’s still not known exactly what happened that day. This is what we know for certain so far.
\n\nIn the early hours of October 7, 2023, Hamas, alongside other militant factions in Gaza, launched Tufun Al-Aqsa, the Al-Aqsa flood operation, a coordinated surprise attack against Israel. Thousands of rockets were fired into Israel and thousands of militants breached the siege, broke the fence, occupied military bases, and infiltrated Israeli settlements.
\n\nThe attack caught Israel off guard; it took hours for the army to respond. According to witnesses, there were three main waves breaching the Gaza fence, which was open for hours. The first wave to break the fence involved Hamas and the other chief armed formations in Gaza, including PIJ, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The second wave was comprised of smaller and less organized armed groups, including probably a few Salafi jihadists. The third wave included unarmed civilians, journalists, bloggers, and curious passersby.
\n\nThere is no denying that some of the participants committed atrocities against Israelis. Plenty of evidence, in some cases from the GoPro cameras of Palestinian fighters themselves, shows them shooting indiscriminately into Israeli settlements, killing civilians, and taking hostages to the Gaza Strip. A massacre also took place at the (now infamous) Nova music festival.
\n\nAt the same time, a barrage of lies, made-up atrocities, and propaganda circulated. Israeli rescue teams, military officials, Sara Netanyahu, and Joe Biden spread debunked stories about beheadings, killings of children, sexual violence, and other things that never happened. This inflamed the situation and served to justify the genocide.
\n\nSome Israelis were reportedly killed by Israeli fire. The Hannibal Directive is an Israeli army policy aimed to prevent kidnapping by any means, including striking Israeli civilians and forces. The reasoning is that the political price for releasing kidnapped Israeli soldiers or civilians via agreements is too high—as it has repeatedly resulted in the release of many Palestinian prisoners in exchange—so it’s better to attack even at the risk of harming the kidnapped. On October 7, Israeli forces deliberately shelled military bases, Israeli settlements, and cars presumed to be carrying Israeli hostages back to Gaza.
\n\nBy the end of the day, about 1140 Israelis were killed, 3400 were wounded, and 251 were taken captive. Initially, corporate media reported much higher estimates.
\n\nEven a year later, Israelis seem unable to comprehend this attack. For them, it came out of nowhere. They perceive it as a “second Holocaust” (a very popular narrative in Israel), an inexplicable and irrational attack by barbaric jihadist forces seeking to kill Jews for no reason.
\n\nBut it is a gross mischaracterization to think of October 7 as an isolated event that occurred in a vacuum. Practically all of those who are twenty years old or younger in Gaza have spent their entire lives in a reality of siege, bombings, and massacres, raised by relatives who still remember the events of 1948 and how they were expelled from where the Kibbutzim are now. From the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s slave rebellion to Oran massacre in Algeria, every decolonial war of liberation, every slave revolt, every ghetto uprising has always involved atrocities, often targeting civilians. We cannot demand of Palestinians a purity that we do not demand from any other historical struggle for liberation. We can grieve the atrocities, but we cannot condemn a ghetto uprising, we cannot condemn a slave revolt. We must always understand everything in context with an analysis of power relations.
\n\nThe attack that took place on October 7, 2023 was followed by a genocide that has been ongoing for a year now. As of the end of September 2024, well over 41,000 people in Gaza are reported dead, although the real number is probably a lot higher. More than 95,000 have been injured. About 1.9 million people are internally displaced, some of whom have been uprooted more than ten times. More than half (60% according to Al-Jazeera) of Gaza’s residential buildings, 80% of commercial facilities, and 85% of school buildings have been damaged or destroyed; 17 of 36 hospitals remain partially functional; 65% of the arable land is damaged.
\n\nThe current war of annihilation differs from the previous rounds of escalations and massacres—and not just in scale. Israel is no longer pursuing a policy of “mowing the lawn.” Gaza, the open-air prison, blew up. Consequently, the entire population had to pay. Indeed, the Israeli authorities made it clear from the beginning that their intention is genocide.
\n\nAll those years, while Israel had thought it was damaging its military capacities, Hamas was digging a complex network of tunnels below Gaza, getting armed, and preparing for the ultimate fight. Gaza is unfit for guerrilla warfare in the traditional sense, as it is a mostly flat strip of land without mountains or forests that fighters can escape to. The narrow alleyways of the refugee camps could be useful in some stages of the fighting, and they were, but Israel made it clear that those would be the first places to be targeted, as in Lebanon and the West Bank. The network of tunnels, which stretches across the entire strip all the way to the Sinai Peninsula on the other side of the Egyptian border, was necessary to allow fighters to attack and escape, reappear in another place, hide, rest, store weapons, and hide captives. During the years of siege, the tunnels were also crucial for Gaza’s economy: in addition to weapons, they were also used to bypass the Israeli siege in order to smuggle in basic necessities.
\n\nWas Hamas not aware that the Israeli reaction would be so deadly? It’s impossible to say for certain what their calculations were. We can assume that they knew that the attack would result in a bloodbath—maybe not on this scale, but they must have known that Israel would respond severely. According to the equation that Israel created in 2014, for example, after Palestinian militants kidnapped and killed three Israeli settlers in the West Bank, Israel killed about 2200 people in Gaza, the worst massacre in Gaza until 2023. So what would be the price for 1140 Israeli casualties, then?
\n\nShould we conclude that Hamas doesn’t care about Gazans’ lives? The answer is more complicated.
\n\nWe can begin by saying that blaming the resistance for the violence of the occupier makes as much sense as blaming the Kurdish fighters for the Dersim massacre or the occupation of Afrin, or blaming the rebels of the Warsaw ghetto for the Nazi repression. A settler colony’s drive is always to acquire more land while diminishing the number of natives. Throughout all the years of Zionist colonization, Zionists have always presented their atrocities as responses to previous attacks—but the actual goal was always ethnic cleansing. The Gaza Strip itself was built as a solution for ethnic cleansing, a locked ghetto to control demographics, and Israel has been killing people there and in Palestine as a whole ever since. To expect people not to fight, to be helpless victims, was never realistic.
\n\nAccording to Hamas themselves, in the document Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, published after October 7, they ask—what did the world expect Palestinians to do? After 75 years of suffering under a brutal occupation, after all initiatives for liberation failed, the disastrous results of the so-called “peace process” that Oslo promised, and the silence of the so-called international community, were they really supposed to die in peace? They note that the Palestinian battle for liberation from occupation and colonialism did not start on October 7, but 105 years ago, against 30 years of British colonial rule and 75 years of Zionist occupation. Ten of thousands of Palestinians were killed between 2000 and 2023; all of those deaths took place with American support, and every kind of protest, including peaceful initiatives such as the marches of return in 2018, has been brutally repressed. In light of murderous aggression with full impunity, the document asks,
\n\n\n\n\n“What was expected from the Palestinian people after all of that? To keep waiting and to keep counting on the helpless UN! Or to take the initiative in defending the Palestinian people, lands, rights and sanctities; knowing that the defense act is a right enshrined in international laws, norms, and conventions.”
\n
A similar narrative was expressed by Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, speaking on October 7.
\n\n\n\n\n“If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the peaceful victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity. Standing, fighting, fighting back, and standing as dignified martyrs.”
\n
We can also consult Palestinian revolutionary and martyr Bassel Al-Araj. Writing in 2014, just ahead of the Israeli military ground invasion of Gaza on July 17, he made several points2:
\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n\n- \n
\nThe Palestinian resistance consists of guerrilla formations whose strategies follow the logic of guerrilla warfare or hybrid warfare, which Arabs and Muslims have become masters of through our experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza. War is never based on the logic of conventional wars and the defense of fixed points and borders; on the contrary, you draw the enemy into an ambush. You do not stick to a fixed position to defend it; instead, you perform maneuvers, movement, withdrawal, and attack from the flanks and the rear. So, never measure it against conventional wars.
\n- \n
\nThe enemy will spread photos and videos of their invasion into Gaza, occupation of residential buildings, or presence in public areas and well-known landmarks. This is part of the psychological warfare in guerrilla wars; you allow your enemy to move as they wish so that they fall into your trap and you strike them. You determine the location and timing of the battle. So, you may see photos from Al-Katiba Square, Al-Saraya, Al-Rimal, or Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, but do not let this weaken your resolve. The battle is judged by its overall results, and this is merely a show.
\n- \n
\nNever spread the occupation’s propaganda, and do not contribute to instilling a sense of defeat. This must be focused on, for soon, we will start talking about a massive invasion in Beit Lahia and Al-Nusseirat, for example. Never spread panic; be supportive of the resistance and do not spread any news broadcast by the occupation (forget about the ethics and impartiality of journalism; just as the zionist journalist is a fighter, so are you).
\n- \n
\nThe enemy may broadcast images of prisoners, most likely civilians, but the goal is to suggest the rapid collapse of the resistance. Do not believe them.
\n- \n
\nThe enemy will carry out tactical, qualitative operations to assassinate some symbols [of resistance], and all of this is part of psychological warfare. Those who have died and those who will die will never affect the resistance’s system and cohesion because the structure and formations of the resistance are not centralized but horizontal and widespread. Their goal is to influence the resistance’s support base and the families of the resistance fighters, as they are the only ones who can affect the men of the resistance.
\n- \n
\nOur direct human and material losses will be much greater than the enemy’s, which is natural in guerrilla wars that rely on willpower, the human element, and the extent of patience and endurance. We are far more capable of bearing the costs, so there is no need to compare or be alarmed by the magnitude of the numbers.
\n- \n
\nToday’s wars are no longer just wars and clashes between armies but rather are struggles between societies. Let us be like a solid structure and play a game of biting fingers with the enemy, our society against their society.
\nFinally, every Palestinian (in the broad sense, meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities), every Palestinian is on the front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your duty.
\n
One last note before we move forward. In the book Blessed is the Flame, the author Serafinski reviews ghetto uprisings and concentration camp resistance under the Nazi occupation from an anarcho-nihilist perspective. The book shows that despite the repressive and paralyzing conditions in concentration camps, acts of resistance such as sabotage, mutual aid, and uprisings still occurred, often despite severe consequences and very low chances of success. The motivation behind many of these acts was the desire to rebel as an end in itself. Serafinski builds on the idea that jouissance, or enjoyment—the creativity and life of the act or rebellion itself—is worthwhile in its own right, independent of its consequences. Examples show that in the direst situations, people choose not to be passively led to the slaughter, but engage in desperate, wild acts of resistance, escaping established logic, morality, and fields of discourse. Against impossible conditions, they choose impossible action. This is reminiscent of Bassel’s understanding of romance as the reason for war.
\n\nAnd people often do what is within their range of capabilities, not what is the most “right.” This is something we have to accept.
\n\n\n\n\n“What really counts is the strength we feel every time we don’t bow our heads, every time we destroy the false idols of civilization, every time our eyes meet those of our comrades along illegal paths, every time that our hands set fire to the symbols of Power. In those moments we don’t ask ourselves: ‘Will we win? Will we lose?’ In those moments, we just fight.”
\n\n-“A Conversation Between Anarchists,” Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire
\n
\n\n\n“Even your observations and criticism of the paradoxes of the 2014 war were that it made most of society a passive audience awaiting death. You objected to a death that is not surrounded by a romantic narrative. You know that the balance of power between nations is determined by the ‘potential energy’ and ‘kinetic energy’ (a crushing energy). And you know that potential energy—and its function in war—is to transform into a crushing force. I believe that the possibility of creating romantic narratives around martyrdom and heroism is one of the most important elements of potential energy, in which we outperform our enemy.”
\n\n“Why We Go to War,” Bassel Al-Araj
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/8.jpg\")
Breaking out of the ghetto.
\nPeople in Gaza have not been helpless victims since October 7. Yes, Gaza is devastated by the genocide, but the resistance is fighting like hell, despite incredible odds. As of mid-September 2024, Israel has reported 789 of its soldiers and security forces dead. Other reports indicate at least 10,000 killed or wounded. About 1000 Israeli soldiers enter the Defense Ministry Rehabilitation Department every month, according to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Incredible footage circulated online by guerrilla forces shows them popping out of tunnels, blowing up tanks, sniping at and ambushing Israeli soldiers, and blowing up buildings with soldiers inside. The Israeli military admitted that many tanks have been damaged during fighting.
\n\nIn the city of Khan Yunis, for example, which Israel has repeatedly invaded, so far, every attempt to defeat the guerrilla forces has failed. In many of the cities, refugee camps and stronghold of resistance where the IDF announcing that they “dismantled the local brigade,” guerrilla forces immediately reappear and regroup following their withdrawal.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/5.jpg\")
The resistance continues.
\nIn the West Bank, the IDF has conducted several incursions into towns and refugee camps, inflicting mass destruction on its infrastructure, killing at least 719 and injuring more than 5700 as of September 2024. Armed resistance, though nowhere near as intense as in Gaza, has claimed the lives of 12 Israeli soldiers and left 27 injured. Several militants in the West Bank have also conducted armed actions against Israeli settlers in the West Bank as well as inside Israeli borders.
\n\nSettler violence against Palestinians has intensified significantly since October, with more than 800 attacks and pogroms, killing at least 31 Palestinians, injuring more than 500, and damaging around 80 houses, almost 12,000 trees, and 450 vehicles, according to the UN. About 850 Palestinians were forced to leave their houses as a result of settler and military violence. Settlers also blocked humanitarian aid entering Gaza from Jordan, Egypt, and Israeli ports.
\n\nInside the occupied Interior, also known as 1948 occupied Palestine, or “Israel,” Palestinian communities have found themselves facing a fascist dictatorship. Protesting the genocide was impossible during the first few months, as police violently repressed demonstrations, attacked activists, raided their homes, and jailed people, sometimes for months, for shouting slogans or holding signs. In October and November 2023 alone, Adallah, a legal center for Palestinian citizens in Israel, documented 251 arrests, interrogations, and “warning calls” in response to actions like participating in a demonstration, posting on social media, and expressing opinions in universities and workplaces. Many Palestinian students were expelled from universities; many workers were fired. In some places, this repression eased over time—but in others, especially “mixed” cities like Haifa, protesting the genocide is still impossible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/11.jpg\")
Protesting for Gaza under intense police repression, Haifa, May 30.
\nSo far, despite isolated armed groups in the West Bank defending their communities from Israeli raids and conducting armed attacks on nearby settlements and checkpoints, not to mention some attempts in the Interior to organize protests, there is no popular uprising, like the Unity Intifada that broke out in 2021 during the previous major assault on Gaza. Israeli repression has proved to be effective in pushing many people into silence and paralyzing street movements. This might change, as repression can also lead to escalation, but for now, we can’t rely on an uprising inside Palestine to stop the genocide.
\n\nThe situation inside prisons has become inhumane. Palestinian “security prisoners” face torture, violence, and sexual abuse from Israeli guards. The torture camp Sde Teiman rose to world infamy following leaks from whistleblowers and testimony from released prisoners revealing a routine of abuse, beatings, physical and psychological torture, sexual violence and rape, medical neglect, and amputations of body parts. Conditions in “security” prisons all across the country have deteriorated, with the far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir giving orders to reduce the rights of prisoners to the bare minimum. They are confined to dark, overcrowded cells, hand- and leg-cuffed to each other, sleeping on beds without mattresses or on the floor, on a bare-minimum diet. Thousands of new prisoners have been arrested over the past year; under the sadistic management of Ben-Gvir, repression, incarceration, and concentration and torture camps are set to expand. About 60 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.
\n\nThe front of those in exile has been active. Palestinian refugees have managed to mobilize mass demonstrations in many places. In nearby countries, there has been a significant street movement of thousands in support of Palestine. In Amman, Jordan, people have clashed several times with police and security forces outside the Israeli embassy, demanding that their country drop its relationships with Israel and the United States. Mass mobilizations have also occurred in Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Bahrain, and all over the refugee camps and cities of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab and Muslim world, often despite repression from their reactionary governments, which fear that the mass mobilizations might turn against them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/13.jpg\")
Thousands in the streets of Amman, Jordan, celebrate resistance and solidarity.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/6.jpg\")
Protesters clash with the Lebanese army near the US embassy in Beirut on October 18, 2023. No regime is “pro-resistance.”
\nIn the “West,” a solidarity movement sprang up in the cities of Europe and North America. Much has been said about the inspiring mobilizations on campuses and the various blockades, marches, and acts of sabotage. Those in the imperial core have a particular responsibility to take action like this. We can only hope such movements will grow.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/17.jpg\")
\nGermany, the country with the largest Palestinian diaspora community in Europe (around 300,000), became a unique battleground. The German state has been hostile toward Palestinian liberation for many years, cracking down on marches, censoring speech and slogans, banning solidarity events, and, in some cases, banning national symbols such as the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag. In Germany, anti-Palestinian racism and support for genocide is shared by the state, the police and repressive agencies, the far-right, and Islamophobic, anti-Arab, colonial, and pro-apartheid elements in the “anti-fascist” scene.
\n\nNonetheless, Palestinians and their supporters are still resisting. Germany is fully complicit in the genocide, supporting it both materially and rhetorically, providing weapons to Israel and going as far as backing Israel in its genocide case at the International Court of Justice. We can only hope the movement there will continue to break the walls of fear and find ways to escalate.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/14.jpg\")
Globalizing the intifada.
\nAs for the so-called Axis of Resistance—some armed militant groups in the Middle East declared a solidarity front with Gaza. In Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, American bases were targeted. For months, Iran, despite attempting to monopolize “resistance,” chiefly acted as a pacifying force, repeatedly ordering groups to reduce attacks in order to avoid entering into direct confrontation with Israel and the US. Iran attacked Israel with a major missile attack on April 2024, but this was mainly symbolic, as it was announced in advance and caused no significant damage.
\n\nShortly before the publication of this article, in response to the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iran initiated a second direct attack on Israel. On October 2, 2024, 180 rockets fell on Israel. Again, most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel, the US, and allied regimes such as Jordan. Some mild damage was caused to military bases and a Mossad facility. At this time, the only known victim of this attack is a Palestinian from Gaza staying in the West Bank city of Jericho.
\n\nThe Houthi movement, a Shia Islamist organization in control of a large part of Yemen as part of the ongoing Yemeni civil war, which some describe as an Iranian “proxy” and part of the “Axis” although quite independent, have been firing missiles at Israel and attacking commercial ships at the Red Sea, considering any Israel-linked ship as a target. They have reportedly caused a huge impact on the global economy and a a significant damage to international trade, damaging commercial vessels and forcing many more to reroute around South Africa, greatly extending their journey.
\n\nIn south Lebanon, Hezbollah engaged in daily rocket and UAV clashes with Israel, though initially, these were largely restricted to military bases close to the border and a few northern Israeli communities. In response, Israel bombed villages and communities in south Lebanon and attacked Dahieh, a suburb of Beirut where some Hezbollah operatives live, killing civilians as well. The situation has been escalating; as of the beginning of October 2024, Israel has invaded south Lebanon, following many escalations.3
\n\nIn the fog of war, the world order is marching forward. The US sees the genocide and escalation in the Middle East as an opportunity to enhance its power in the region. Israel Channel 12 reported in October 2023 that “two hundred and forty-four US transport planes and 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war [sic].” That month also saw special US military aid to Israel reaching 14.3 billion dollars.
\n\nIn the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean Sea, and the many US bases in surrounding countries including Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, the US has deployed several fighter squadrons as well as a THAAD battery and several Patriot anti-missile batteries. They seek to deter any attack on Israel by regional powers, but they are also actively participating in the fighting—like the US-led international coalition to strike the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea and the militias in Iraq and Syria.
\n\nThe US has also directly intervened in Israeli decision-making in order to influence the course of war. President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin participated in Israeli government and war cabinet meetings, exerting significant pressure to implement their post-war vision. After realizing the American vision might be harder to initiate as long as Netanyahu is in charge, Americans also met with opposition leaders and Israeli civil society organizations.
\n\nIn that vision, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are united under a “reformed” (meaning American-controlled) Palestinian Authority, and a “two-state solution” is implemented, following a series of normalization agreements with local regimes, in order to “integrate Israel into the region,” ensure its safety, and build a strong pro-American bloc to increase American influence and isolate competing quasi-imperialist regional powers such as Iran and Russia.
\n\nThis is nothing new. The US has been interfering in this region to maintain its hegemony for decades now. A neocolonial policy of supporting corrupt and reactionary puppet regimes that serve as local proxies in order to guarantee American control over resources is a long US tradition. Ilan Pappe tells us how, following the British withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, the US was in a dire need of a pro-Western regional power. The US decided to invest further in Israel following its military victory in 1967, a major blow to secular nationalist movements in the region.
\n\nThe Oslo Accords constituted an international intervention in local Palestinian politics. Not only did they serve to break a popular uprising led by decentralized and horizontal networks of grassroots activist groups and parties—they established an authoritarian, collaborationist puppet regime for the colonized to govern themselves according to US, EU, and Israeli incentives. When that regime failed to serve its global sponsors, with Arafat thinking he had more room to maneuver than he was allowed, it was quickly abolished and replaced by more obedient actors. In 2006, when Palestinians voted for the wrong candidate in democratic elections, a coup was initiated and the entire population punished. Palestinians are not allowed to make decisions regarding their own destiny. They must be kept under tight control, as they tend to reveal unruly elements unfavorable for US hegemony.
\n\nIn recent years, in what Noam Chomsky dubbed “the Reactionary International,” Israel has signed a series of agreements and normalization pacts—known as the Abraham Accords—with local dictatorships, monarchies, and repressive regimes. This took place under US mediation, in opposition to the will of the populations of those countries. The states to join the normalization treaty so far include the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Saudi Arabia was reportedly also on its way to normalization with Israel, but the process froze following October 7.
\n\nThe economic impact of these agreements includes formal investments and business relations between the countries, especially regarding hi-tech industries, and also military relations and weapons trade. According to Israel’s Ministry of Defense, the value of Israeli defense exports to the countries with which it normalized relations in 2020 reached $791 million. Oil deals between the UAE and Israel threaten to inflict ecological disaster in the Red Sea and exacerbate concerns regarding climate change.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/3.jpg\")
A utopia for reactionaries and weapon manufacturers, a nightmare for the peoples of the region.
\nThis entire trajectory, coupled with the “two-state solution” as an aftermath to the “conflict,” represents a pattern in the US involvement in the region. A proposal was even made to have “moderate” (meaning US-controlled) regimes from the region take control of Gaza in the aftermath of the genocide until a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (domesticated enough not to cause its international patrons any further troubles) could take their place as the sovereign.
\n\nThe regional theater of conflict between the American reactionary authoritarian alliance and the Iranian reactionary authoritarian alliance resembles Cold War campist politics. If back then, people were limited to choosing between the American bourgeois model and the Soviet bourgeois model, today it appears that the choices for the peoples of the region are once again between American imperialism and reactionary, tyrannical, expansionist, and quasi-imperialist powers like Iran, Russia, Turkey, and to some extent China. These countries have their own visions for the region and their own alliances with other repressive regimes, all of which brutally crack down on revolutionary movements that interfere with their plans or steer away from their monopoly on “resistance.™”
\n\nIt won’t be easy to escape the trap of being caught between these two camps and the dark future both of them represent for the region. But we could start by focusing on grassroots struggles on the ground, instead of on states and their proxies. No government is going to save us from this hell.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/1.jpg\")
Authoritarians and petty tyrants compete for our obedience, but no world order they can offer us will fulfill our aspirations for freedom and dignity.
\nPalestinians have been betrayed by their leadership over and over. The PLO sought to be the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” only to crush the first intifada—which had broken out beyond its control and against its wishes—and plunge into the disaster of the Oslo Accords. They went on to become fully entangled with the US regional order, making it one of the most successful examples in the history of the domestication and neutralization of revolutionary movements. The Palestinian resistance as an uncontrollable and ungovernable force, beyond the control of various waves of “representation,” authorities, and mechanisms of pacification and manipulation, remains threatening to all those who compete to impose their preferred world orders and whatever forces seek to bind it to their own interests.
\n\nFor years, regimes in the Arab world used the Palestinian cause as the only issue around which people were allowed to mobilize and protest; this enabled them to allow people to let off steam while silencing criticism of their own policies. They also used this issue to claim legitimacy, as it was always widely supported by the peoples of the region. Dana El-Kurd shows how the movements organizing around Palestine in those states became schools for activism for the participants, enabling them to eventually oppose their own governments as well. Many of the movements that went on to participate in the Arab Spring started with Palestine solidarity organizing.
\n\nEven so-called “radical” regimes masquerading as supporters of the resistance, such as the Syrian government, turned to impose siege and slaughter Palestinians as soon as the latter were perceived to threaten their interests or to join freedom movements, as in Yarmouk refugee camp in 2014. Whether “normalizing” regimes or “resistance” regimes, authoritarians have always treated the Palestinian cause as a tool of legitimacy, empty rhetoric to be thrown around to ensure stability, even though their policies were anti-Palestinian in practice. In moments of truth, whenever the situation is getting out of control, they reveal their true faces.
\n\nToday, many governments in the region are actively suppressing Palestine solidarity movements and opposition to the genocide, as they see that these movements might “get out of control” or threaten normalization efforts that they hope will boost their economies, militaries, and repressive capabilities. Our best way out of this mess might be a revolutionary alliance of freedom movements throughout the region, and hopefully the world—a Liberation International that would stand proudly against the reactionary international led by the US and the authoritarian international involving Iran.
\n\nPalestine is deeply connected to the Syrian revolution, the tragedy of Sudan, the revolutionary feminists of Iran, the Rojava revolution, the uprising in Lebanon, the many movements in the Middle East since the Arab Spring, and—more globally—the Stop Cop City and Black Lives Matter movements in the US, the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous peoples everywhere, the anti-junta resistance in Myanmar, Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, and all struggles for freedom and liberation. We draw inspiration, strength, and lessons from each other. A Palestinian victory in Gaza would send waves of freedom to the farthest corners of the earth, while an Israeli victory will embolden those pursuing violent and genocidal strategies everywhere, strengthen the grip of reactionary and authoritarian alliances over entire populations, and enable them to further crush movements of liberation, whether in the name of “stability” or of “resistance.” If we depend on each other, we had better start acting accordingly. Who knows how much time we have left.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/15.jpg\")
“It is true that we go to war to seek romance, and perhaps I was ashamed of admitting this to myself. You know how much of a cliché this term has turned into. I used to run away from this romance whenever it tried to sweep me away, and I used to try and make sense of all those motives. We’re too arrogant to admit this reason but we all know that what draws us towards heroism and martyrdom is the same thing that we are so ashamed to admit: romance.” -Bassel Al-Araj.
\nAnarchists have reacted to the genocide and the solidarity movement with several layers of cognitive dissonance. Some positions were confused or naïve, lacking nuance and understanding of the material conditions prevailing in different geographies and political contexts—for example, sloganeering “No war but class war” arguments calling for the “Israeli and Palestinian proletariat” to “unite” against “their common oppressors” and other class-reductionist nonsense. Other positions went all the way to Islamophobia and conspiracy theories: “Israel created Hamas,” “Hamas are just like ISIS.”
\n\nHamas is the subject of the most significant cognitive dissonance. Anti-authoritarians want to support the Palestinian movement, like any other movement for freedom and liberation, but they can’t comprehend that Hamas is an organic and integral part of that movement, so they make up stories to the effect that Hamas is the invention of the occupier, that Palestinians don’t really support them, that we can somehow tell the story of the resistance without them. They wish to somehow separate Hamas from the broader cause. How much easier things would be if that were possible!
\n\nHamas are in fact a national liberation movement dedicated to the liberation of Palestine. The idea of using the religious concept of jihad as anti-colonialist resistance and self-defense is not new; it goes all the way back to the struggle against the French in Syria in the 1920s, if not further. It has appeared in Algeria and many struggles since. It has nothing to do with the Salafi-jihadist brand, and a pan-Islamic transnational caliphate is not on the table. The Palestinian liberation movement is heterogeneous and diverse; it includes many ideologies and ideas we might disagree with. Hamas deserves criticism for its patriarchy, its homophobia, its reliance on reactionary forces such as Iran and the Assad regime, its brutal repression. Brave anti-authoritarian Palestinian groups have already offered this, like Gaza Youth Breaks Out back in 2011. But our criticism should be fair and grounded in reality, not simply a litany of preconceived notions.
\n\nWe also need to talk about the settlers. There any many different ways to analyze Israeli society. We can use the useful distinction that historian Ilan Pappe makes between the State of Israel and the State of Judea. In short, on one side, the liberal, secular, and “democratic” (Jewish democracy, for Jews only) wing of Jewish supremacy, apartheid, and settler colonialism, the one leading the anti-Netanyahu protests in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities; on the other side, the more far-right, theocratic, and openly fascist wing, composed chiefly of West Bank Jewish pogromists and their allies. The anti-fascist author and journalist, David Sheen, offers another useful schema, dividing Israeli society into supremacist, opportunist, reformist, and humanist camps.
\n\nAll of these analyses explore the internal debate within settler society over the best way to manage apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. These social rifts are not new, but they have been exacerbated over the last few months. If we do not understand them, we might reach the wrong conclusions.
\n\nFor example, some comrades cite the Anti-Netanyahu protests to pressure him to accept a ceasefire in order to strike a deal with the resistance to release hostages as evidence that many Israelis oppose the regime. Some people even present it as a mass anti-war movement. This is inaccurate. It fits the anarchist narrative because we are used to insisting on the distinction between people and states, and many Israelis really do oppose Netanyahu. But support for genocide is overwhelming across various political camps.
\n\nA huge sign in neon lights over protesters in Tel Aviv tells the whole story—bring back (the hostages), and go back (to Gaza). This is a brazen proposal to resume fighting as soon as the Israeli captives are released. This does not necessarily represent all the thousands of participants, but it does indicate the Zionist logic of these demonstrations—another manifestation of Jewish supremacy, maybe its liberal camp, but nonetheless, there is no concern for Palestinian lives there. Honest, genuine, anti-Zionist voices calling to end the genocide do exist in Israel, and they hold small demonstrations every once in a while, which are often repressed by police and attacked by fascists. They are a tiny, hated, and insignificant minority, with no hope of becoming a mass political power any time in the near future.
\n\nThe inconvenient truth is that when it’s time to commit a massacre, Israeli society puts aside all petty arguments, stops pretending to be a civil society in a “democratic state,” and unites for the task. Then it is revealed what Israel is in reality: a huge military base. There is no mass opposition to genocide. The mass protests against the judicial overhaul stopped for a few months following the shock of October 7, then reappeared in the form of protests for the release of hostages, renewing the discussion about genocide management. All the reservists’ threats to refuse to serve came to an end after October 7, 2023; they never really intended to follow through. Rebellion and protest in Israel are always limited to narrow Zionist narratives that explicitly delineate what is acceptable and what’s not. The fascist and liberal wings of Zionism might express it differently, but Jewish supremacy and the complete dehumanization of Palestinians are the common threads.
\n\nThe situation was bad already, but the radical left has shrunk significantly since October 7, with the attacks shocking the Israeli society to its core, awakening settler anxieties and pushing many “leftists” into the warm hug of Jewish supremacy. We can expect this to continue. The reason for this is that the “Israeli left” is overwhelmingly predicated on the notion that “the end of occupation” (decolonization) would mean that they could continue their convenient settler lifestyle minus the guilt. For example, one of the main messages of the anti-occupation bloc during the mass movement against the judicial overhaul that existed up until October 7 was that “the occupation” (which typically means the 1967 occupation) is an “obstacle to Israeli democracy,” and if only we could take care of that, the rest would be fine. It is not easy to find anyone who sees that the entire Israeli regime is illegitimate, that the occupation began in 1948 not 1967, that the land is stolen from the river to sea and decolonization means the radical transformation of power relations.
\n\nAlfredo Bonanno said, “The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalized insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them.” I like Bonanno and think that most of his observations are brilliant, but this particular analysis does not fit the reality on the ground. It’s part of a long tradition of Western thinkers who focus on settler society, as if it could be a meaningful vehicle for change. I strongly disagree. There is no historical precedent for societies of settlers or slave masters rebelling against their own privileges, and I don’t think Palestine would be the first to break from this trajectory.
\n\nThere are settler-colonial societies, like the US, that managed to develop a proud tradition of race traitors after a long development. We saw this during the George Floyd uprising; French Algeria offers another example. I believe that this is theoretically possible for the settler society in Palestine, maybe in some point in the future, but probably not right now. Some Israelis went far beyond the “Israeli left” and fully betrayed “their” society, switched sides, and joined the Palestinian popular struggle, under Palestinian terms and leadership. Some even joined the armed struggle. These are very few, far from representing a significant phenomenon in Israeli society.
\n\nThose who want to express solidarity with the very few anti-Zionist Israelis should do so. It’s a good cause and they would appreciate it. But honestly, support for the Palestinian resistance is much more important right now. We should stand with the resistance against the violence of settler colonialism and genocide.
\n\nThis might be inconvenient, but we must have this conversation. No one has to agree with me, I’m speaking from my own perspective and conditions, and this can be seen as my attempt to appeal to my camp of origin, the anti-Zionist Israeli radical left. In my opinion, the “Israeli Left” is a dead end. I have no reason to doubt the intentions of many of my former and current comrades in the “anti-occupation bloc” and “radical bloc” in Tel Aviv and other cities. They are honest, brave, rebellious souls; many of them really are in it for Palestinian lives, fighting to end the genocide.
\n\nBut those who have managed to escape the cult of Zionism must now take another step forward. To them, I want to say that we must stop seeing ourselves as actors within Israeli society, trying to improve or reform it in order to save it from itself. It would be better to adopt Al-Araj’s framework of the liberation camp vs. the colonial camp,4 and Fanon’s understanding of the adoption of the resistance identity as a political choice rather than an issue of race or origin, and work to shed the settler identity completely.
\n\nThis is what Palestinians have been calling on us to do for years. There is no reforming a sick society; it will not work to appeal to the interests of a system that is rotten to its core. There hasn’t been a single second in the history of this state since its inception that wasn’t predicated on intense violence and complete dehumanization. This is a call for desertion, full race treason and betrayal, switching sides, with all the risks, repression, torture, and death it might entail. This is not easy, but we have a rich global history to draw from. We can recall John Brown and his militia, or the French in Algeria switching sides and joining the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale, “National Liberation Front”). What those people understood, at crucial historical junctures, was that despite what liberal interpretations of “identity politics” tell us, when revolution calls, it’s not about being a passive “ally” or checking your privileges, but throwing yourself into the struggle. Identity becomes a political choice, based on actions, rather than origins.
\n\n\n\n\n“The settler is not simply the man who must be killed. Many members of the mass of colonialists reveal themselves to be much, much nearer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation.”
\n\nFrantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
\n
Anxieties about decolonization are not coming out of nowhere. Nothing is promised to us. Not even liberation itself, to be honest. Some colonial projects have ended somewhat peacefully, with regime transition and reconciliation committees, as in South Africa; others have ended in a bloodbath, like in Algeria. Even the libertarian, confederalist example of Rojava hasn’t been a smooth process. In none of these cases was it perfect. Liberation is always a messy and bloody process in real life.
\n\nEve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in their essay Decolonization is not a metaphor, explain that decolonization is incommensurable with other social justice struggles—it is meant to be unsettling, as it would undoubtedly relieve the settlers—including workers—of their stolen resources. We must be honest about what we’re saying. For example, in the debate about the phrase “from the river to sea,” about whether it means democracy or the abolition of Israel—the simple answer is that it means both. Decolonization on Palestinian conditions—the abolition of Zionism, the return of the refugees, the end of military rule, and equal civil rights—will mean that Palestine goes back to what it was before Zionist colonization, a majority Arab land. I believe Jewish people would be welcome to stay—those who are willing to live equally with the rest of the people on the land, without a racist system of segregation and privilege based on ethnicity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/2.jpg\")
The Radical Bloc in Tel Aviv.
\nAs for class reductionism, there’s no material basis for “class solidarity” between “Palestinians and Israelis.” Under settler colonialism, this is not the same class. Jews and Arabs are not equal, not even when they work in the same workplaces. As Frantz Fanon noted, in a colonial context, national oppression is primary and class oppression is secondary. Settler colonies do not simply exploit the labor power of the colonized or the land resources of the colony, like other kinds of colonialism; they are predicated on the complete erasure of the colonized through ethnic cleansing, genocide, or both.
\n\nAccording to historian Ilan Pappe, Zionism, like any other settler-colonial movement, requires the annihilation or expulsion of the native population in order to succeed. Many such movements were composed of European refugees escaping exclusion and persecution, looking for a place to build their own new Europe. Indigenous populations are always an obstacle to such utopian visions, and so the solution is typically a massive campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Similar settler-colonial projects, such as the US, Australia, South Africa, and Canada, also often found a religious justification for settling, used a superpower to gain a foothold in a foreign land, then looked for ways to get rid of both the empire that aided them and the majority of the Indigenous population.
\n\nIsrael has made it pretty clear that wherever it engaged in massive ethnic cleansing camping, such as 1948, or during the current genocide in Gaza, its targets are not the Palestinian proletariat, but the Palestinians as a people. All classes and social groups are a target.
\n\nIf even Marx recognized that the struggle for the eight-hour workday in the US couldn’t really begin before the abolition of slavery, today’s Western leftists should be able to reach the same conclusions regarding settler colonialism and apartheid. If we want to have a meaningful footing in the solidarity movement, we must acknowledge that some issues cannot be reduced to class.
\n\nRevolutionaries have already made this mistake before. Many male anarchists in the CNT (Federación Anarquista Ibérica, “National Confederation of Labor”) during the Spanish revolution were dismissive of the women’s organization Mujeres Libres (“Free Women”), proclaiming that gender repression was secondary to the class struggle, and that in any case the revolution would solve it. Today, we know that overthrowing capitalism won’t simply abolish patriarchy. We could create a classless society that would still be sexist and oppressive to women and other genders. Some leftists see the Kibbutz movement as an example of libertarian socialist societies, ignoring the fact that the Kibbutzim are a racist and colonialist project for Jews only, built in the context of the Zionist land theft, often on the physical ruins of villages that were ethnically cleansed. Without a proper analysis of settler colonialism and an understanding of national oppression as a primary issue unto itself, any understanding of the situation in Palestine will remain an awkward attempt to import foreign worldviews and solutions into geographies with radically different problems.
\n\nAlong with the commitment to free Palestine, I would like to suggest to comrades to allow Palestine to free them as well. It can work both ways. Don’t participate in the movement just to preach, but also to listen. We should not give up our perspectives and critiques, but we must use this this opportunity to enrich ourselves and broaden our horizons by learning from other liberation struggles, instead of simply trying to impose our preconceived notions on them. I would love to discuss sensitive subjects with my Palestinian comrades, such as the dependence of the armed resistance on reactionary elements like Iran and Assad’s Syria5. But I must be able to do this as a comrade, from inside the struggle, after developing trusting relationships and accepting a Palestinian worldview, not as an annoying leftist critiquing from the outside. If all we do is spend time with those like ourselves, it will show, and it will reflect badly on us. People notice this, and it will sabotage the relations of trust that we are trying to build within the movement.
\n\nThe colonial world order has divided the world into the “civilized” part, the impenetrable Global North where liberal democracy prevails, and vast genocide fields filled with a surplus population to be exterminated, enslaved, robbed of resources, and forgotten. In a settler-colonial context, this process happens in the same territory, without the geographic distance between the colony and the metropolis. Ghettos, besieged cities, military rule, and a system of ethnic segregation are constructed, dividing the colonized into several classes of oppressed people, building mental barriers where physical ones are absent, and making sure to prevent any mingling of natives and settlers.
\n\nThere are several ways in which the colonial order can get out of balance. One way is fascism, in which the colonial practices are brought inside, into the metropolis. In this case, genocidal and racializing practices that were previously reserved for the surplus population in the colonies are utilized against unwanted populations at home. But the colonial order can also go out of balance during uprisings. The natives, refusing to be confined to their place, break the supposedly impenetrable fortress of the colony—which turns out to be very much penetrable—and, as Fanon put it, they flood the forbidden cities, taking everything in their path.
\n\nIsrael sought for decades to maintain a population of Westernized, liberal democratic settlers, experiencing home (Europe) away from home, after their original home became too dangerous for them. Other, non-European Jews were welcome to join, as long as they were Jewish and accepted Western hegemony. Concrete walls, isolated ghettos, and mental barriers were instilled in order to separate the settler society from the brutal daily violence necessary to maintain this order. There is no one way to do this. Strategies include cultural erasure (for example, Palestinians with citizenship become “Israeli Arabs”); massive ethnic cleansing campaigns when possible (like in 1948) and when not—small ones, like the Judaization6 of the Galilee, the Naqab, and neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa7; military rule8; conflict management, strict racial segregation, and counterinsurgency, as seen in the Oslo Accords, the separation wall in the West Bank, and the siege of Gaza; and genocide. Today it seems that conflict management, at least, has failed to deliver.
\n\nIsrael has been humiliated more than once in the last few years. The state lost control during the uprising of 2021 and again on October 7, 2023. The Palestinians have proven time and time again to be an uncontrollable force, capable of threatening a nuclear superpower supported by the strongest empire in the world, despite that empire pouring billions of dollars into security apparatus, counterinsurgency, and advanced technology. Israelis have noticed that the state is incapable of delivering security despite its mighty power, and they are starting to panic. We can only expect that the punishment for rebelling will be crueler each time as pressure grows from shocked Israelis and the international powers to keep rebellious Palestinians under control.
\n\nIt is entirely possible that as time passes, the genocide fields will expand, and more people will be treated as surplus population. There is no guarantee that we, the privileged citizens of civilization, will not eventually find ourselves on the wrong side of that wall. Racialized minorities know that already, and as for the rest of us—we shouldn’t count on our whiteness, as Jews found out during the Second World War, Irish people experienced under British occupation, and Ukrainians are finding out today. Just as whiteness can be ascribed, it can also be taken away.
\n\nWhenever an empire brands a new demographic as surplus population, the borders around “civilization” shift. The more they succeed in trapping a growing part of the earth’s population in a living hell, the bleaker and more uncertain our own future becomes. The more they succeed in crushing the rebellion of the undesirables, the more their success will inform other empires and competing world orders. Just as we are inspired by every slave revolt and ghetto uprising, regimes also take notes and inspiration from each other when it comes to repression. We are all deeply connected.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/18.jpg\")
Haifa, May 2021.
\nWhat should we do, those of us situated in this or that entity, citizens of the Global North, whether as settlers in the colony or the imperial core? It’s hard for me to say. Situated in the occupied Interior, which, as I said, does not openly rebel at the moment, is it fair for me to advocate for things I don’t do myself? We feel the need for an insurrection, but our communities are devastated and broken, people are paralyzed, and the wounds are still open from the last round of repression. I can’t tell anyone what to do. All I can do is share my perspective. It’s for you to analyze your conditions and see what fits.
\n\nComrades in the imperial core of so-called North America have showed some amazing and inspiring resistance. Comrades in Europe have too. Sabotage, port blockades, marches, campus occupations—all of these are meaningful, and some have won significant achievements. I don’t want to claim, as some do, that these actions have accomplished nothing so far. We don’t know what the state of Gaza would be right now if not for these courageous actions. Movement building is important in itself. A whole new generation has been politicized and radicalized, and they will carry the struggles forward.
\n\nBut one thing is certain. We didn’t stop the genocide.
\n\nWe need to focus. The genocide has been in progress for a year, and at this point, it shows no sign of slowing down or remaining confined to Gaza. I believe the time to escalate is now. The implications are enormous. Right now, Israel is committed to go to war with Lebanon and perhaps also with Iran. The worst-case scenario seems to be unfolding. This is going to make the situation spiral out of control even more; it could cause a full-blown regional war involving an unimaginable amount of death and destruction. We are facing a completely psychotic world order intent on causing the maximum amount of devastation to everything that stands in its way. We cannot remain passive spectators. We are involved and what happens will reflect on us.
\n\nFrom the looks of it, throughout the course of the occupations last semester, comrades in the US developed many insurrectionary elements to develop and expand. They also faced many cops—some in uniform, others concealed within the movement, like liberals, pacifists, professional “activists,” and reformists. People need to find ways to deal with them. Don’t fall for counterinsurgency tactics intended to pacify you, divide and fragment the movement, define for you what is “acceptable” and “legitimate,” or delimit the boundaries of the protest. Be brave, uncontrollable, and ungovernable. The rest is up to you to analyze, as far as tactics go, but don’t let anyone confine you.
\n\nAlso—ignore smear campaigns. They might become louder if the movement becomes more successful. I already saw Zionist media and propaganda depicting the protests as “antisemitic pogroms.” I shouldn’t have to spend a single moment explaining how ridiculous this is.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/19.jpg\")
\nWe all know that the repressive agencies of Israel and the US are training together, and share tips, tools and tactics on how to repress populations and movements of freedom. This should concern anyone involved in local struggles, such as Stop Cop City, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous solidarity, and support for migrants and refugees. We also know that Israel is exporting weapons and repressive technology everywhere. AI tools are being developed and used to automate identifying and killing “suspects.” And we know it goes the other way around—Israel is bombing Gaza (and now also Lebanon) with US weapons and full support. This is an American (and European) war as much as it is Israeli. The imperial core of the Global North is absolutely involved and is a belligerent part of the aggression, and this makes its citizens an active part as well.
\n\nIt’s not entirely possible to physically join the armed struggle on the ground the way one can in Rojava or Ukraine, but there is no need to. People can come to Palestine to participate in the popular struggle, as brave American and European citizens already have; some of them have become martyrs themselves. This helps, but the resistance is asking for something else: turn your own cities in the imperial core into a battleground. Bring the war home. Open another front. Join the liberation camp, as Al-Araj puts it, and raise hell against the world order that allowed this to happen. They must feel consequences. I believe an uprising is still possible, here in the Interior as well, but it will require us to be brave, like Gazans are.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/7.jpg\")
\nOne last thing I want to ask—as I was writing this piece, the fighting on the fronts in Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere escalated significantly. If a full-blown war erupts elsewhere, the attention of the world will shift and Gaza could be forgotten. People should fight for the lives of Lebanese people as well, but don’t stop talking about Gaza and acting for the sake of people there. The genocide there isn’t over. It might even accelerate once attention shifts away from it.
\n\nRaise your voice, raise the flag of revolution.
\n\nNo voice is louder than the voice of the uprising.
\n\n\n\n\n“If I must die,
\n\n
\nyou must live
\nto tell my story
\nto sell my things
\nto buy a piece of cloth
\nand some strings,
\n(make it white with a long tail)
\nso that a child, somewhere in Gaza
\nwhile looking heaven in the eye
\nawaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
\nand bid no one farewell
\nnot even to his flesh
\nnot even to himself—
\nsees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
\nand thinks for a moment an angel is there
\nbringing back love
\nIf I must die
\nlet it bring hope
\nlet it be a tale.”-Refaat Alareer, (1979-2023), writer and poet. On December 6, 2023, he was murdered by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza along with his brother, his sister, and their children.
\n
According to official statics from Gaza’s Ministry of Health. In addition to that number, more than 10,000 are missing, and it is unknown how many more are still buried under the rubble. It’s important to remember that Israel systematically destroyed Gaza’s health care system, bringing it to near collapse, and since then, the numbers are stuck at around 40,000. Other estimates state a much higher number. ↩
\nTranslated by Resistance News Network. ↩
\nThis front has escalated and currently the future for people in Lebanon is uncertain. On September 23, an IDF attack on Lebanon killed at least 570 people. On September 27, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, was assassinated, and millions in Lebanon are uprooted from their homes. Now Israel is invading south Lebanon. ↩
\n“I no longer see this as a conflict between Arabs and Jews, between Israeli and Palestinian. I have abandoned this duality, this naïve oversimplification of the conflict. I have become convinced of Ali Shariati and Frantz Fanon’s divisions of the world (into a colonial camp and a liberation camp). In each of the two camps, you will find people of all religions, languages, races, ethnicities, colors, and classes. In this conflict, for example, you will find people of our own skin standing rudely in the other camp, and at the same time you will find Jews standing in our camp.” -Bassel Al-Araj ↩
\nThis is a touchy subject. Hamas initially supported the Syrian revolution back in 2012 and broke ties with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. This move severed the financial support that the movement received from Iran. A decade later, in a controversial statement, Hamas restored relations with Assad. The political chaos and shifting of alliances in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, the military coup against Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and the closing of Gaza’s tunnels on the Egyptian side, and the normalization pacts between various local regimes with Israel all served to isolate Hamas and force it to “pick a side.” In either case, I believe that, just as anarchists and anti-authoritarians in the West were able to understand the decision made by people in Rojava to accept American aid while facing the genocidal army of ISIS in Kobane, they can also understand the decisions made by Palestinians under difficult conditions. Until we have built a Liberation International that can offer actual material support to struggles on the ground, there will be a limit to how much we can criticize decisions made by those facing the threat of annihilation, caught between competing empires and regional orders. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize at all, but we should at least do so with nuance and context. ↩
\nThis is the official Israeli term. ↩
\nUnder neoliberal global capitalism, ethnic cleansing can be privatized as well. Judaization attempts can be under the management of settler organizations or real estate agents, thus allowing the issue to be presented as a simple real estate dispute. The involvement of American settler organizations in the attempts to evict Palestinian residents in east Jerusalem, and gentrification in Jaffa and certain neighborhoods in Haifa, is intrinsically linked to decades-long ethnic cleansing campaigns, under different faces, as colonial systems adapt to new opportunities and circumstances. ↩
\nThere was only half a year, in 1966, when Israel wasn’t imposing military rule on Palestinians. Internal communities of uprooted people inside what became Israel were under military rule until 1966; then Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza a year later and imposed military rule there. ↩
\nEleven years ago, on March 15, 2011, protests broke out in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Over the following years, a revolution took place, wresting much of the country from Assad’s control. Yet as governments around the world intervened to support various factions, the struggle became more and more violent, culminating with the rise of the Islamic State, on one side, while the Russian government stepped in on the other side to enable Assad retain power at a tremendous cost in human lives. Millions of Syrians were forced to flee.
\n\nIn Paris, some exiles from the Syrian Revolution founded the Syrian Cantina, a community center providing a space for social movements and organizing events to bring together revolutionaries and grassroots organizers from around the world. In the following interview, the participants recount how they were politicized in the course of the revolution, describe the challenges of becoming organizers in a new country, and analyze the roots of a false “anti-imperialism” that silences the voices of the people whose interests it claims to defend. As millions are driven into exile from Afghanistan and Ukraine to Sudan and Haiti, this is an invaluable document about how refugees can continue their organizing in new contexts, how locals can help to make this possible, and the meaning of international solidarity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/12.jpg\")
Lunchtime at the Maison Ouverte (the open house), the first space that hosted the Syrian Cantina.
\nFirst, introduce the Syrian Cantina.
\n\nL—: Some of us met in an occupation of the Paris 8 University in 2018, demanding the collective regularization of undocumented immigrants who were living on the streets that winter. Some of us helped with Arabic translation, some with cooking, others with mediation and negotiations. That was the first decisive encounter between some of the French and Syrian people who are now members of the Cantina.
\n\nA few months later, there were more university occupations: some focusing on refugee struggles, others on student struggles. With a group of Syrian students, we thought that we had to intervene in the student movement and not restrict our activism to refugee issues. We began doing interventions in occupied campuses to talk about the mobilization of students in Syria during the revolution. This allowed more encounters and links with the “radical left” circles in the Parisian region.
\n\nIn late 2018, the Yellow Vests movement erupted; both Syrian people and French people who went on to become members of the Cantina participated. The following March, some comrades who were involved in the Yellow Vests of Montreuil invited us to speak on the anniversary of the Syrian Revolution about self-organization and the lessons we could share from our experiences for the uprising that was taking place. It became clear for us that we wanted to organize in Montreuil, especially as we were finishing our studies and wanted to continue our political activity beyond the student movement and refugee struggles.
\n\nThe Syrian Cantina was born out of our desire to create a space for refugee self-organization and the need to recreate a sense of “home” for us in France.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/10.jpg\")
The Syrian Canteen contributes a dinner to the first anniversary of the Yellow Vests movement.
\nD—: We wanted to continue the revolution, to continue our path pursuing our goals from the Syrian revolution. We don’t want to resign ourselves, to stay calm and quiet once in exile. In France, it is possible to do many things, there are many political movements and communities that we can organize and share experiences with in order to build solidarity and prove that freedom is possible. People in France have a lot of experience in revolutionary activities. Also, we wanted to show that there is an alternative to both Assad and the Islamists.
\n\nL—: We cook three times a week and share our culinary heritage—through cooking lessons, for example. At the same time, we organize concerts, film screenings, expositions, and the like. The idea was to articulate connections between different spheres: a cultural space for mutual aid and transnational solidarity. And so we have language classes in Arabic and French. We also organize discussions regularly—for example, about the links between the Syrian and Palestinian struggles, or the recent mobilizations in Sudan against the military coup, or encounters with exiled comrades from Afghanistan to inform us about the situation there. All of our activities are free or pay-what-you-can. Lastly, we have two major annual events: one is the anniversary of the Syrian revolution and the other is our internationalist festival, “The People Want,” where we invite comrades from all over the world. At the last one, in November 2021, participants came from India, Chile, Greece, Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, and the United States. We discussed the potential of international feminism, debated old and new forms of internationalism, and compared revolutionary hypotheses. We are currently preparing the fourth one.
\n\nWe are based in a self-organized social center called the AERI [Ateliers d’expérimentations révolutionnaires et imaginaires, “Workshop for revolutionary and imaginary experimentation”]. It is a space for solidarity and mutual aid involving dozens of other collectives and activities. People from many different nationalities and backgrounds meet and organize in this space. Everything is either free or pay-what-you-can. There are activities like yoga or feminist martial arts, 3D printing and coding workshops, a bakery, photo lab, and a lot more. Of course, there are also collectives such as the Yellow Vests, who have a canteen of their own, and the Popular Solidarity Brigades, who were very active in mutual aid work during the lockdown. It suits us well to be in the midst of this diversity of practices and approaches; this space gives us the opportunity to anchor ourselves and our work in the active and rebellious territory of Montreuil and to contribute to the construction of local autonomy here. It also gives us the opportunity to meet a wide range of people, from neighbors who have no relationship to any political community but are curious to discover the space to political activists involved in struggles related to migration or housing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/15.jpg\")
A concert at the AERI space.
\nOn a regular basis, we also organize events with French collectives or refugees/exiled activists in France. Last year, we were at the ZAD in Sacaly and the Longo Mai farm in the south. Finally, we work with different collectives and groups internationally: we have started building a small network thanks to our annual internationalist festival.
\n\nThis is how we met and started working together.
\n\nOne of my dreams is to participate in the creation of some kind of movement from below for the self-organization of refugees. Not only Syrians in France, but other nationalities—and, why not, on the scale of Europe, to get started. Like an international of exiled persons!
\n\nD—: One day, we would like to see the Cantina inside a free Syria. For now, a Syrian Cantina has just started in Luxembourg. We are so happy and proud that our project was able to inspire people in another country. We hope that more Syrian Cantinas will flourish all around the world!
\n\nL—: The next time there will be a popular uprising in Syria, we hope that our work will contribute to lessening the world’s indifference, so that the abandonment that Syria suffered from 2011 on will never recur again.
\n\nWhat were your experiences with politics in Syria before the uprising?
\n\nL—: When the first protests broke out, I was 18 years old. I don’t think I would have been politically active the way I am today if it wasn’t for the Syrian Revolution. Before the revolution, I used to say that I hated politics; I saw it exclusively in the form of state politics, and as such it was full of lies and deceit. Politics in Syria before the revolution was almost exclusively the domain of the government. Additionally, the regime’s propaganda and surveillance were everywhere, inescapable. We had to endure it from very early on in primary school (where we were all forced to be members of the Ba’ath Party). I wanted to rebel against what I perceived to be authoritarian, though I wasn’t capable of naming it as such at the time. To me, it was more like a style, or an instinctive refusal of the highly punitive and incompetent authority that we had to deal with in school and in society at large. At 17 years old, I was kicked out of high school after I had an argument with the “nationalism” teacher. The next day, the school’s principal told me that some of my classmates’ parents had called to say that I was disturbing their kids’ education. My lower-middle-class family was politicized, but I only really understood that after the revolution.
\n\nD—: I worked in the sports field. I was a coach at first, then I started doing coordinating and office work for different missions: the Arab women’s sports association and the Syrian women’s football association. I had a clandestine engagement in a political party in the 1980s.
\n\nA—: In the 1980s, if you were involved in any kind of political activity outside what the government allowed in the framework of the single party, or if you wanted to disobey the party line, you had no right to a normal life. My father was active in a leftist movement. Because of his activities, both of my parents had a hard time finding work. I started going to the meetings of the party that my father was involved in. I also participated in round tables and in the organization of demonstrations in support of Arab countries. We protested in support of Palestine and then Iraq, since these were the only demonstrations that we were allowed to hold. During the demonstrations, we chanted slogans against Arab heads of state, but these were also partly addressed to the regime. Although the party I was involved in became public, many militant activities had to remain clandestine. At the university, it was very difficult to be politically active; student unions were controlled by the regime and highly surveilled.
\n\nR—: Like many Syrians before the outbreak of the revolution, my activities were limited to timid criticism of the regime in the private space of the family. My father is a former opponent of the regime; I grew up surrounded by former communist activists and former prisoners.
\n\nI quickly realized that people would be risking their lives if they got involved in politics, given the surveillance and repression. When I first learned about the Hama Massacre, which occurred in February 1982, ordered by Hafez al-Assad, I was nine years old. I saw old bullet marks on the wall of Hama and asked my father about them and he told me the story. The next day at primary school, as usual we had to venerate Hafez al-Assad with some slogans. I was so upset that I told my friend from Hama that she should not sing the propaganda chants because of the massacre that Hafez had committed in her city. A few hours later, my friend’s father called my father and asked him to keep me silent. People were afraid of each other.
\n\nStories of repression, prison, and massacre have fed a deep hatred towards any authority that reduces life to its basic dimensions (work, eat, sleep) and annihilates all creative and critical thinking.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/2.jpg\")
Graffiti in Syria in December 2012: “It’s almost here!!!”
\nWhat were your vantage points on the Syrian revolution?
\n\nL—: I remember when protests started in Tunisia and Egypt, I could not even conceive of the possibility of an uprising taking place in Syria. I thought to myself and told my friends: the risks are too high. Well, the price was too high, but a revolution did take place in Syria. In the very first months, some friends were arrested and tortured and had to leave the country. I was not involved in organizing, I was too afraid to end up in jail… rape is a common method in Assad’s prisons.
\n\nA—: I participated in the demonstrations in Douma, a suburb of Damascus. In April, when I returned to my hometown, I was questioned by the police and then released. At first, they didn’t arrest many people who were in political parties like me. I think it was a strategy to figure out who the people who were organizing the protests were. Then I was blacklisted by the regime and kicked out of university. I went to Aleppo and joined the struggle there clandestinely. I did documentation and humanitarian work.
\n\nD—: I was very proud at the start of this revolution. I had so much gratitude and respect for the children of Daraa, who were among the first to demand the fall of the regime and who finally changed the history of the country. I participated with many athletes in showing the ugliness of the regime by forming a group called the Free Syrian Athletes Association. We were able to write to the International Federation and provide it with pictures and documents showing how the regime was pressuring well-known popular athletes and trying to instrumentalize them to delegitimize and suppress the demonstrations.
\n\nThe regime made the Abbasieen Stadium in Damascus into a military base. We heard terrible stories about repression taking place there. The regime wanted to change the identity of places as much as the identity of individuals.
\n\nIf we go back to the basic principles of Olympic sports, we find peace and reconciliation. We find the rejection of discrimination. With the Free Syrian Athletes Association, we succeeded in preventing the representatives of the Syrian Olympic Committee from participating in the International Olympic Committee conference, on account of their violating the Olympic Games Charter.
\n\nI think that revolution is a way of life in which we strive for what is fair against everything that has become outdated, everything that has been proven to be dysfunctional, no longer valid. It is a means to achieve more justice so that we can live in a more beautiful world. The Syrian Revolution was a necessity, it is a local cry from one of the oldest inhabited capitals in history against tyranny and all forms of dictatorship.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/4.jpg\")
Graffiti in Syria in October 2012: “Unbeliever in the impossible.”
\nR—: When the uprisings started to spread in the Arab world, we stayed nailed to the television watching the news. Their cause was ours. We shared the same experience of life under different repressive regimes. I still remember my family shedding tears when the first demonstration took place in March in Syria. We would have never thought it was possible.
\n\nA process of coordination and organization of the movement progressively emerged on several levels.
\n\nI was 16 years old at the time, and with a bunch of friends, we took it upon ourselves to organize demonstrations, drawing graffiti and slogans on the walls, at the high school level. We skipped classes in order to go and inform people orally about the holding of a demonstration at such a place and such a time, avoiding using the telephone and other means of communication that could be monitored.
\n\nWhat was remarkable during the revolution was the return of emphasis on the local scale, its particularities and its influence. The names of small districts and small towns came back to the detriment of the vast agglomerations. An uprising from below was taking place while Syrians had never been so united.
\n\nFor more on the Syrian revolution, we recommend the following books:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/5.jpg\")
Graffiti in Syria in July 2012: “Freedom.”
\nWhy did you ultimately have to flee Syria? What was your experience like as refugees?
\n\nD—: The decision to flee became inevitable, especially after I received a direct threat ordering me to remain silent and abandon all organizing activities. I felt that I was in danger and I was concerned about the safety of the only daughter I had. So I left.
\n\nA—: In 2013, with Da’esh entering the conflict, I had two choices, either taking up arms or leaving, so I left.
\n\nL—: I had to flee because my family decided that it was no longer safe for us to remain. I tried to convince myself that I was able to live in Syria even if my close family members left, but it was not very reasonable.
\n\nI remember that I spent half of my asylum interview with the French immigration authorities holding back tears. It was so exhausting to have to prove to people who had probably never set foot in my country, who probably knew nothing about the revolution and who didn’t give a fuck about emancipation in our region that I actually came from the place I come from, and that I would be in danger if I were to return to that place.
\n\nThat was 2015. Friends even recommended that I take pictures with “known figures of the Syrian Revolution’’ in order to prove to the French authorities that the Assad regime considered me to be “dangerous” and, as such, “qualified” for refugee status.
\n\nMy experience as a refugee is the result of state bureaucracy and discrimination; it is an experience of loss and deracination. There is one moment that I will never forget. When you seek asylum in France, you receive a letter to inform you that your passport (which you had to submit to the government as proof of your nationality) is conserved in the immigration office “archive.” When I got that letter, I imagined a really big hall with passports just packed one beside the other. I wonder what the hell they do with all of them?
\n\nAnyway, this is by no means novel—but beyond the Kafkaesque, humiliating, and racist administrative process, in which you spend the night outside waiting in line hoping to get an appointment in the morning, while cops yell at you and threaten to send you “back to the camps” if you don’t stand correctly in line… beyond all that, it is always important to remember that asking for asylum means letting a state decide whether you have the right to exist in a given part of the world. I urge people who experience seeking asylum to reflect not only on borders but also on the state as an institution that grants itself ridiculous prerogatives.
\n\nAll the same, I did not have to walk nor take the sea to reach France. The people who had to do those things have more horrifying stories to tell.
\n\nStill, let’s be clear, Syrian refugees in France and other places in Europe are more or less “privileged” in comparison to other nationalities and skin colors. Access to refugee status was easier for Syrians than for people coming from Chad, Ethiopia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and other places. Again, this is a consequence of the state’s power to determine which places you have the right to flee from and which places are considered not to “represent sufficient danger.” Which is just absurd!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/7.jpg\")
Graffiti in Syria in June 2013: “Refugee.”
\nWhen you arrived in France, what did you find there? How much did French political communities understand what was happening in Syria?
\n\nL—: At the beginning, when we started the Cantina, some people came up asking “What can we do to help the Syrian refugees? I can bring clothes!”—although we said very clearly that we were creating a popular cantina in the neighborhood. It was difficult for people to conceive Syrian refugees as actors who can express solidarity, not simply as those who receive it.
\n\nIn France, I found a very vibrant militant scene, especially after 2016 and the mobilization against the labor law. It is different today; I think the French radical groups are at a low ebb now after the explosion of the Yellow Vest movement, which benefited immensely from autonomous, anarchist, and anti-authoritarian circles but ultimately posed very serious questions—even impasses—in relation to organization and strategy in social movements. Repression was quite serious. Today, other hypotheses are needed to take back the streets in a way that can threaten the government.
\n\nWhat is impressive to see in France beyond the insurrectional side of radical circles is the communalist movements: whether that is the different ZADs [Zone à Défendre, or Zone to Defend”] or different local projects and initiatives in active and politicized territories all over France. We were inspired by a popular canteen in Paris, la cantine des pyrénées. A few of us were used to cooking there and one member of the Syrian cantina used to take French classes there and help out with cooking. It is a wonderful place and each neighborhood needs a solidarity place like this one, so we created our project in Montreuil.
\n\nWe learned a lot from French activists: the liberty they have allows them to think and practice things that were unimaginable to us before the revolution. For some of us, being in France was the first time we were exposed to anarchist or anti-authoritarian literature and ideas. Of course, some Syrians who were involved in self-organization did not necessarily call what they were doing by this name. Speaking with comrades here in France, we realized that what we were doing in Syria was what autonomous movements dreamed of doing in France. There was a period of time during which we had to harmonize our understandings of what we fight for and what we want. At some point, we managed to arrive at this: the local councils in Syria as a modern form of the Paris Commune.
\n\nNow let’s speak of the less positive aspects.
\n\nMost people sympathized with Syrians, having in mind images of killed children and destroyed buildings. For a period of time, I would avoid saying that I came from Syria, because sometimes that triggered a sort of “Oh, you poor girl” reaction. When you hear that regularly, it really becomes annoying.
\n\nMost political communities, especially at the early stages of the revolution, understood that there was a peaceful mobilization happening in Syria and supported it. Some radical circles had a problem calling that a revolution, though, because the protests did not immediately overthrow the regime and the demands for free elections or representative democracy were not perceived as sufficiently revolutionary (as people in France knew very little about the quasi-totalitarian situation in Syria), or else because the movement did not involve an anti-capitalist dimension. To put it simply, the revolution was “impure” and had no single defined narrative. Some militant leftists, in the confused 21st century, still want the sort of popular uprising that would resemble the sanitized versions they have read in theory or history books.
\n\nAnyway, in the early years of the revolution, people seemed to understand that it was not crazy Islamist terrorists on the streets of Syria. Yet they could not perceive these people as potential comrades. Most people who were on the streets were not anarchists: but where are anarchists a majority in any popular nationwide uprising?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/3.jpg\")
Graffiti in Syria in December 2012: “Tanks are forbidden to turn here.”
\nThings got much more complicated as the mobilization militarized. Many radical circles were confused and could not take a position; one must understand that France is a very Islamophobic country. Many people could not accept the fact that you can be religious, Muslim, a combatant, and a revolutionary without wanting to impose Islamic law in Syria and without necessarily being any more misogynistic than some male comrades in the West.
\n\nIn general, even in activist communities, people were ignorant about the existence of self-organized structures and practices within the Syrian revolution. Everyone talked about Rojava without understanding that there were local councils, hospitals, schools, coordination committees, and media centers self-organized in most of the neighborhoods, towns, villages, and cities in the areas liberated from the regime, independent from the influence of the PKK. In the discussions following our presentations, many people were like, “Why didn’t you speak about Rojava?”
\n\nIn one way, they were right. Our silence in relation to Rojava was not completely justified. From our point of view, the obsession with Rojava common in radical circles in the West pushed us into a strange position, compelling us to say “Hey, we exist too!” We were in danger of reproducing the same errors in our own analysis, behaving as though Rojava and the Syrian Revolution were two entirely separate realities. We realized this and tried to develop a discourse that would enable us to speak about the Syrian revolution without centering the discussion on Rojava, but at the same time without ignoring its existence.
\n\nMost people would say the events of the Syrian revolution are too complicated. To give these people the benefit of the doubt, let’s say that yes, the armed conflict that is still taking place in Syria is not an easy subject to master. However, this is no excuse to claim that there is no popular uprising in Syria involving ordinary (very brave) people.
\n\nI think that this is what happened in radical circles: on the Kurdish side in Rojava, things seemed clear. Most people I talked to had the same discourse: Rojava was a revolution in a Middle East filled with Islamists and dictators. The points of reference were very clear: anti-fascism, feminism, ecology, and direct democracy. Ironically, I think this is the reason why some people who supported Rojava knew so little about what was happening on the ground or about the ideological underpinnings and history of the PKK.
\n\nCertain French radical circles, especially the autonomous ones (with a few exceptions), were relatively closed in on themselves. A culture of secrecy and opacity was performed dogmatically in many situations, which made it easy to feel excluded from many militant spaces; sometimes this was a habit rather than an intentional tactic, which is especially unfortunate. Additionally, we could instantly feel that there was a certain expected language and other codified forms of conduct that were incomprehensible to newcomers. At the beginning, I thought that the problem was that my French was poor; later, I discovered that even politicized and engaged French people often feel excluded as well in autonomous circles. It wasn’t easy to find a point of entry. As much as I understand the necessity of non-public activities—since we have spent our whole lives in Syria under surveillance—it is a shame to lack public points of entry that could be welcoming to activists from other countries.
\n\nIn most radical circles, it was seen as praiseworthy to include non-French and especially non-European activists in French collectives and actions—it was considered a good sign of diversity. At the same time, there was very little space for non-European activists to contribute to transforming French militant discourse and practice. I think the principle of equality is to listen to what activists from other countries have to say, not only in terms of stories and testimonies, but also in terms of analysis, strategic reflection, and tactical experience.
\n\nR—: I arrived in France five years after the revolution began. The French were divided in terms of knowledge and involvement when it came to supporting the Syrian movement. On the one hand, there are those who have in mind the image of a war and of an international conflict with thousands of migrants landing in their country. For this part of the population, the portrayal of Syrians as victims has managed to direct their support to the humanitarian sectors. This contributed to them putting aside the political aspect of the revolutionary movement, seeing the Syrians who arrived in France as passive victims who needed help, unfit to be actors in political life.
\n\nOn the other hand, when I arrived in France, I met a group of anarchist friends who are loyal to the revolution. They are politically involved in the French support movement and have a more bottom-up perspective. They don’t rely on the mainstream media for information, but listen to Syrians—reading and listening to their testimonies, contacting them and getting involved with their struggles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/11.jpg\")
Delicious food, courtesy of the Syrian Cantina.
\nWhat were the most useful things that people in France did to extend solidarity to you?
\n\nL—: There are many initiatives and associations in France that are still welcoming refugees and helping them with housing, language classes, administrative processes, gaining access to university education, and so on. This was decisive and really helpful, especially in the first period after I arrived in France.
\n\nSome initiatives were also organized to send humanitarian aid and resources to projects inside the liberated or besieged territories, especially self-run schools and hospitals.
\n\nAnother thing that was useful was the possibility to use spaces in social centers to host events and talks about the Syrian Revolution. We would like to thank the Parole Errante in Montreuil, which opened its doors to Syrians. Having a space to organize is crucial. We would also like to warmly thank the Maison Ouverte in Montreuil, which hosted our project in its initial phase.
\n\nOther types of useful support are related to media and information. Websites like Lundi.am did a great job covering the Syrian revolution; the journal CQFD dedicated a whole issue to the Syrian revolution and regularly published articles and reports from the point of view of the civil mobilizations and progressive forces on the ground. We can also mention different translation initiatives, which worked to make literature on the Syrian Revolution accessible in French.
\n\nFinally, it was helpful that some groups hosted talks, reading groups, and events at which Syrian revolutionaries were invited to share their experiences. Those were crucial moments not only for informing people about the Syrian Revolution but also to give us the chance to meet people, creating a network of allies and establishing personal relations between activists.
\n\nOne of the things that was not very helpful was speaking about the Syrian “conflict” or “war” on our behalf, exclusively from a geopolitical or humanitarian standpoint. Both standpoints contributed to rendering invisible a popular struggle that was facing the regime not only on a military basis but also on the level of civil society. Both standpoints depoliticize the resistance and minimize the political agency of the actors on the ground. The humanitarian approach focuses on the figure of the victim, whether it is the Syrian who experiences the war or the refugee who manages to escape it—in both cases, as a helpless individual who invites sympathy (but ultimately apathy). The geopolitical approach is less empathetic: war victims and refugees are numbers in a game of Risk in which all analysis is state-centered, forgetting that it is people’s efforts to live with dignity that matter most.
\n\nOn western forms of solidarity, we recommend “A Critique of Solidarity.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/14.jpg\")
Preparing dinner the Syrian Cantina at the AERI space.
\nHow have Syrians’ experiences in the diaspora differed according to class, ethnicity, social connections, and other factors?
\n\nL—: From early on, the regime tried to use the divide and conquer method in order to combat the popular uprising. The regime’s propaganda used the ethnic and religious diversity of Syrian society to pit communities against each other and instrumentalize tensions. When people today call what happened in Syria a “civil war,” they need to take into account how it was in the regime’s interest—indeed, it was a conscious strategy—to frame the situation in those terms in order to be able to present itself as the “secular” entity, the sole power that could guarantee peace for ethnic or religious minorities. In fact, the majority of us in the Syrian Cantina come from religious minorities. The regime has never protected our interests, and if it did so at any particular moment, it was purely out of political calculation, not out of a belief in the modernist principle of separation between state and religion.
\n\nAfter eleven years of armed conflict, it would be naïve to say that tensions do not exist between ethnic or religious communities. However, we insist that in the first years of the revolution, support for the regime and opposition to it were not distributed according to ethnic or religious lines. Even today, in any ethnic or religious community, you will find people who support the regime and others who oppose it, including among Alawites (the branch of Shiism that comprises Assad’s religious minority).
\n\nHowever, the war was definitely much harder on the lower classes. The consequences of inflation rendered basic necessities barely affordable to a large part of the population. For those who don’t have family members outside the country who can afford to send money in a foreign currency, daily survival is absolutely critical.
\n\nAs is always the case with wars, certain classes get richer by means of monopolies or by creating new markets and profit models based on the scarcity of certain items. Additionally, Assad’s Syria, especially under Bashar, has been a system of crony capitalism in which corruption is encouraged as long as the regime gets its share of profits and maintains political control. This has intensified over the past decade; the most recent example is the growing drug industry, as Syria has become one of the chief producers and exporters of the drug captagon, which has contributed to stabilizing the national economy a bit.
\n\nMany of the people who were not able to get to Europe or other western countries could not secure a visa for lack of money or social connections, or could not gather enough money to find a non-legal means of escape, whether by obtaining fake travel documents or by crossing borders illegally. Illegal migration is expensive!
\n\nSo the two chief factors determining whether people could get to European countries are definitely class and social connections; this also explains why most Syrian refugees are still in neighboring countries. But let’s not forget, some people also decided to stay in Syria, whether because they refused to leave the struggle or because they refused to leave their homes, perhaps out of fear of experiencing the uprooted life of a refugee.
\n\nThe experience of being a refugee differs significantly according to whether you live in Lebanon or Turkey or in France or Germany. The common thread, without a doubt, is a sort of ambient racism. One thing needs to be said in relation to Europe, and France in particular: Islamophobia is one of the chief causes of discrimination, especially for women. If you happen to be a practicing Muslim, and if that is somehow visible in the public sphere, you will have a harder time as a refugee. In France, this is even true for French citizens.
\n\nTo be clear: Islamists stole the revolution in Syria and did a tremendous amount of harm to the communal and social fabric. They are our enemies as much as Assad! However, that should not leave any space for Islamophobia, whether among Europeans or “secular Syrians.”
\n\nThose who are inside Syria deserve material support, especially those who are internally displaced in refugee camps in atrocious conditions, spending several winters in tents under the snow with little hope of change. There are several initiatives that you could support, such as this one.
\n\nBeyond material support, there is recognition and moral support: it is important to remember that any future change in Syria will be first and foremost carried out by those who are still there, even if the diaspora will have an important role to play. We need to pay attention to what the people there have to say, to the mobilizations and initiatives they are capable of organizing even in regime-controlled territories.
\n\nYou can check this Facebook page for memes and anti-regime slogans posted anonymously from within Syrian territories controlled by the regime today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/6.jpg\")
Graffiti in Syria in July 2012: “Revolt and defy oppression.”
\nWhat would have been necessary to make the Syrian Revolution turn out differently?
\n\nL—: I don’t know if we can provide an analysis of how the revolution could have “won”: we are aware that the fall of Assad would not have automatically brought freedom and dignity to Syria. We are also aware, as some of us learned from living in European countries, that free elections and “democratic transitions” do not guarantee a functioning democracy in which people are able to determine for themselves how they live. The examples in Tunisia and, more recently, Sudan show us that toppling the regime is just the first step in a much longer struggle towards self-determination and justice.
\n\nHowever, we can describe some elements that could have reduced the immense losses we suffered and perhaps might have changed the balance of power in favor of the forces working towards emancipation.
\n\nA no-fly zone before the Russian intervention in 2015. A no-fly zone would have changed the balance of power in favor of the rebels who, in the first years of the revolution, had the capacity, on multiple occasions, to achieve a military victory against regime forces. A no-fly zone was requested by civilians on the ground, not only by armed groups. Today, we see the same demand in Ukraine: “Close the sky and we do the rest.” We cherish our autonomy and hence refuse external intervention. However, we know that if we had not received barrel bombs non-stop on our heads (targeting hospitals and schools as well as military positions, just as is happening in Ukraine today), more of us could have survived and resisted. We could have dedicated more time to imagining and implementing political alternatives to both the regime and the Islamists, instead of digging our loved ones out of the rubble of our destroyed homes.
\n\nWe see the same thing today—a situation in which American and other western activists refuse the idea of a military intervention, putting forward anti-imperialist arguments. One of the arguments is that a military intervention is not in the interest of the local population. The paradox is blatant: as the local population asks for military intervention, western activists whose lives are not threatened comfortably write anti-war texts explaining how we should put first and foremost the interests of the local population that they are not ready to listen to. Paternalism.
\nMore decisive military support: access to more defensive weapons more quickly. In Syria, there was a huge problem regarding timing. When military support reached the rebels, it was always too late and insufficient, as if to render it impossible for the regime to fall. It is difficult to write this text today without making references to the Ukrainian case. But let’s refrain from comparisons for the moment and focus on Syria.
\n\nThere was a lot of hesitation to support Syrian rebels, especially after military intervention in Libya turned out so badly. The hesitation and indecision of various western countries during the first years of the Syrian Revolution, when it came to providing the rebels with defensive weapons that could counteract aerial attacks and missiles, paved the way for other actors to intervene, imposing their external vision of what the armed (as well as civilian) opposition should look like. The hesitation of the West—which avoided threatening the regime, intervening with “intelligence and training,” but always too late—contributed to prolonging the armed conflict for years, giving Islamist forces the opportunity to take control of territories. The transnational support for Islamist armed groups outpaced material aid to the Free Syrian Army and other brigades that were neutral on religious matters.
\n\nIn one sense, we can’t say that western countries carried out no real military intervention in Syria. The international coalition did intervene to bombard ISIS positions—and to do that, they ignored all treaties and legal frameworks. Western countries intervened in Syria to support the Kurds and combat ISIS, but never to attack the roots of the bloodbath, Assad’s power. It was Assad that was responsible for more than 90,000 of the 159,774 civilian deaths over the past eleven years, according to both the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) and the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).
\n\nThis selective approach, in which western governments refused to act against Assad while acting elsewhere in Syria, represents an intentional intervention in the Syrian conflict.
\n\nAs for Barack Obama’s famous “red line,” Syrian revolutionaries and opponents of the Assad regime view Obama as having handed over the “Syrian file” to Putin, hoping that Russia would take over the role of the United States as the world’s police. In 2013, around two thirds of the territories in Syria had been liberated and self-governed. In 2015, the Russian army began coordinating the military operations of the Syrian regime. In 2016, when Aleppo fell, it marked a point of no return in terms of the balance of power. A military defeat became almost certain for forces opposed to the regime, thanks to Russia but also to Iran and Hezbollah.
\n\nTo be sure, we lived with refugees from the disastrous war that the US inflicted on Iraq, and we know what US imperialism means in our countries. Yet, in this particular case, unfortunately, the withdrawal of the US and other European countries from the war of influence in Syria meant years of continuing massacres and, ultimately, the stabilization and consolidation of Assad rule. Eleven years later, Assad is still in power, despite being among the 21st century’s most renowned butchers.
\nWe should have been more alarmed, sooner, about the expansion of Islamist groups. In some territories, people took too long to recognize the threat that Islamist groups represented to civil mobilization and the spirit of the revolution. In the protests in the early years of the revolution, we called for unity between ethnicities and religions against tyranny. The growing presence of Islamist groups radicalized the whole terrain, so if you wanted to get financial support or weapons from neighboring countries you had to modify your discourse—shifting it to a religious tone, changing the name of your brigade or association, and putting “God is greatest” on your banner. Rebels and revolutionaries considered the regime to be the chief enemy, so combating Islamist groups and discourse wasn’t always a priority.
\n\nThis is somewhat understandable, since up to today, the regime remains the principal cause of deaths and displacement in Syria. We should never forget that the regime also played an active role in releasing Islamists from prisons during the revolution, and avoided direct attacks in their bases. Considering that Islamist groups were also fighting the regime, revolutionaries hoped that in the short run, Islamists would help bring Assad down and then it would be possible to deal with the Islamists’ presence. It is also important not to forget that there were many protests, up to today in Idlib for example, that opposed both the regime and the Islamist groups—who have not failed to be tyrannical wherever they have taken control of territory.
\nSupport for and recognition of self-government initiatives such as the local councils would have been a crucial factor. It was practically impossible for nation-states to acknowledge non-state actors, and even more so to acknowledge those that were self-organized, decentralized, and without clear leadership (in contrast to the Kurdish case). Those local councils were the best entities that could represent the interests of the Syrian people, since they organized the politics of daily life and took over managing services. Their members were democratically elected or appointed by locals, in a model similar to the Zapatista council of good governance.
\n\nIt is not surprising that states did not want to recognize these entities—though comrades should have! Instead, governments symbolically recognized the Syrian National Coalition or Council, a sort of top-down structure trying to find diplomatic solutions; they just met with United Nations representatives from different countries and held a series of talks that had practically no effect on the ground. For a period of time, the Syrian National Coalition had some support from revolutionaries, but hope that change would come through these mechanisms rapidly vanished and a large part of the revolutionaries became critical of these coalitions, which were disconnected from reality.
\nMore alliances with components of the Kurdish revolutionary movement. Whether it was the Syrian National Coalition or other political entities plagued by nationalism and racism, the refusal of a plurinational Syrian horizon and the idea of federalization was a missed opportunity for revolutionaries in Syria of all backgrounds, Kurdish and otherwise. Instead of the Kurdish revolutionary movement having to be neutral or cooperate with the Assad regime, we could have imagined the Syrian revolutionary forces and the Kurdish revolutionary forces joining together on the basis of common interests in order to overthrow the regime. There were many reasons, on both sides, why this did not happen. But for the future of Syria, a reconciliation between these two revolutionary forces will be necessary in order to overthrow all types of tyranny, including the regime and the Islamists, and to ensure that no new repressive power structure can emerge, not even from the PKK or PYD.
\nFinally, the revolution would have turned out differently if leftists had not repeated Assad’s propaganda to the effect that there was no alternative: you had to either stand with Assad or you stand with the Islamists. There was an alternative! All of this is difficult to explain now, but discourse is always a major part of the battlefield, and the people’s struggle and resistance were just not audible. The consequences of this were huge: the distortion and falsification of the historical record.
\n\nToday, if you go to Wikipedia (in English, for example), you can’t even find an entry for the “Syrian Revolution.” You can only find the Syrian “civil war.” It is so violent to find that this historic event that changed the lives of millions of people, if not politics worldwide, has become completely invisible. This language is reductionist and inaccurate. In fact, if we want to be precise and nonpartisan, the least we can do is to acknowledge that it was not a civil war but a transnational conflict, since practically all the western governments and powerful regional or international states intervened in Syria in one way or another.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/16.jpg\")
Preparing the dinner for the Syrian Cantina at the AERI space.
\nHow do you continue organizing to support people in Syria and people in the Syrian diaspora today?
\n\nL—: We try to provide financial support to initiatives in Syria and the surrounding region. Most of these initiatives are “humanitarian” and aim to address the harsh living conditions, especially in refugee camps. We have organized campaigns in the Parisian region to collect first aid necessities, clothes and medicine, and other resources to alleviate material hardships in periods of intense conflict in the territories under siege.
\n\nWe organize an annual event to celebrate the anniversary of the Syrian Revolution: it is very important for us to invite speakers who are still organizing and active inside Syria. It is also an occasion to renew the heritage of the Syrian revolution and speak about the aspects of it that few people here know about, such as the experience of local councils. This year, we will hold a talk on the axis of counterrevolution, in which we try to deconstruct pseudo-anti-imperialist arguments that support Hezbollah or celebrate leaders like al-Sulemany without acknowledging that those powers were not only counterrevolutionary in Syria but also, more importantly, in Lebanon or Iran as well.
\n\nWith regards to the Syrian diaspora, we try to make the cantina a home that is open and accessible to everyone (well, except for regime’s apologists) and a meeting place to discuss politics, organize, and meet with other political communities in France. We believe that having a physical space for Syrians to meet is crucial in exile: most of us have relatives, friends, and families scattered around the world, our lives are fragmented, and there is a constant feeling of estrangement in relation to the world and other people, given our collective and individual traumas. The Syrian Canteen is a space to find respite and refuge.
\n\nIt is also important for us that this space is open and welcoming and accessible to refugees from other countries. We don’t want to organize exclusively among Syrians. Our community, just like our existence, has become transnational and we have to embrace that instead of engaging in a process of self-ghettoization.
\n\nFinally, we try as much as possible to share news about mobilizations that take place in Syria as a reminder that people still live and organize there, despite the long years of war and violence.
\n\nYou mentioned your complex relationship to the experiment in Rojava. Many people have heard about it over the past decade, but people do not always understand it in the context of the Syrian revolution as a whole. Can you describe how you see these events?
\n\nO—: I can try to answer from a French point of view,1 because since 2015 I have tried to reflect on the enthusiasm of radical and libertarian Western leftists for Rojava, and on the differences between the Syrian revolution and the Kurdish revolution (see this article in French). As a supporter of the Kurdish cause in Turkey, I started out very attracted to the experiments in Rojava before being quite confused by discussions with Syrian revolutionaries in exile who had a completely different point of view on the subject.
\n\nIn my opinion, the question is not whether to support Rojava and the Kurdish revolutionary movement. Rather, the problem emerges when this is done in a fantasized way, and even worse when this support is coupled with a total ignorance of the context in which it has taken root and its relationship with the Syrian revolution that started in 2011. To try to understand all this in order to be able to take a position, we must return to the differences and disagreements between these two revolutions of different types.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/1.jpg\")
A mural in Syria in May 2014.
\nBefore presenting them in detail, there is something fundamental that must be remembered: the Kurds who were oppressed as an ethnic minority for decades by the Syrian regime are not interchangeable with the Kurdish revolutionary movement embodied by the PKK in Turkey and the PYD in Syria, two sister parties that set up the Rojava project starting in 2012. It is important to make this distinction, because while many Kurds have participated in the Syrian revolution and contributed their experiences of political struggle, the PYD and PKK have remained neutral or even opposed to the Syrian revolution. We could say that they took advantage of the destabilization created by the uprising of 2011 to fulfill their project of establishing an autonomous Kurdish territory organized according to the ideological principles of their party, democratic confederalism. Nearly 40,000 fighters and cadres of the PKK, formed in the mountains of Quandil in Iraq and Turkey, arrived in the Kurdish majority territories of northeast Syria in 2012.
\n\nThe most important reason for the antagonism is the PYD’s relationship with the murderous Bashar regime: while the details of the negotiations are still unclear, it seems that in early 2012, the PYD-PKK negotiated with the regime to return to Syria and take over the three areas of Kurdish settlement on the border with Turkey—Afrin, Kobane, and Jazira—in exchange for neutralizing Kurdish demonstrators who were with the revolution and promising not to make a common front with the Free Syrian Army. Arriving a few months after the outbreak of the revolt, the PYD-PKK cadres went so far as to repress demonstrations expressing opposition to the Syrian regime.
\n\nOnce the PKK-PYD was installed in northeastern Syria, a game of alliances definitively buried the possibility of a junction between Syrian and Kurdish revolutionaries. The two sides, both heavily dependent on foreign aid to guarantee their survival, have come to form opposing associations. The PKK tried to secure Russian protection when Russia was already bombing Syrian rebels. At the same time, several Free Syrian Army militias were financed, armed, and supported by the Turkish regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the PKK’s sworn enemy, who was working to isolate those he considered to be one of Turkey’s main threats, just as Bashar al-Assad did with the rebels. Today, many former Syrian revolutionaries, now paid by Turkey, are used by the Turkish regime to attack Kurdish territories and commit horrible atrocities. Considering that in 2013, the Syrian regime was close to falling, we can say that the help of organized and militarily trained fighters would surely have brought the coup de grace to Bashar.
\n\nThe explanation of many Kurds is that they thought that in the end, even if the Syrian regime fell, they would be betrayed by the Syrian opposition—they would not be able to implement their communalist project and Kurdish people would not be granted autonomy or rights. This shows that the mistakes were not only on one side. The Syrian opposition based in Istanbul—which is itself criticized by revolutionaries inside Syria—was negotiating about the future of Syria, thinking that victory was near, while refusing to include the PYD-PKK in the discussions and refusing to grant protected status to the Kurds. Nationalist elements of the Syrian opposition did not want to recognize languages other than Arabic as national languages and viewed the idea of confederalism as a means to divide Syria.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/17.jpg\")
“The revolution is here with the people, not in Antakya” [i.e., in Syria, not in Turkey, where self-styled representatives of the Syrian revolution were holding court].
\nThese tensions derive from two different visions of the revolution and the future. The PYD-PKK pursues a confederalist and pluralistic vision of Syria and the region as a whole, with a recognition of minorities and autonomy for Kurdish people. By contrast, many Syrian revolutionaries pictured the Syria of tomorrow as an indivisible republic, inspired by a republican vision in the style of the French revolution.
\n\nToday, the situation is even worse: the compromise with Bashar has intensified since 2018, because the PYD, in order to protect itself from the Turkish invasion and from being abandoned by the Russians and the USA, has asked for the help of Bashar and made many concessions to the regime in return for protection facing the invasions of Erdoğan. Consequently, for example, several agents of the regime have returned to the Kurdish territories of Rojava. In Afrin, we even see the Syrian army parading with regime flags and portraits of Bashar. In 2021, the PYD-PKK went so far as to suppress riots and kill demonstrators who were protesting against compulsory conscription in Manbij, a city they administer. For many Syrian revolutionaries, this is unforgivable.
\n\nTo conclude, I think it is important to understand that we are talking about two different revolutionary movements. On the one hand, the Syrian uprising, an unprepared popular revolution that made possible the massive politicization of a population that, until then, had little access to any form of social and political organization, but which ultimately resulted in the military hegemony of armed Islamist groups, as well as the victory of the Bashar Al-Assad regime and his allies. On the other hand, the Rojava Revolution is a case of a revolutionary struggle orchestrated by a party, the PKK, with nearly 40 years of experience. The PKK has succeeded in stimulating the popular political imagination on an international scale via its innovative experiments and its critique of the nation-state. Nevertheless, it has difficulty convincing people that Kurdishness is not at the heart of its project, and it still draws its strength from the often authoritarian and pragmatic strategies of Leninism and the liberation struggles of the 20th century. Caught between a belligerent Turkey and a Syrian regime that seeks its surrender, its future remains uncertain.
\n\nFor our part, in the Syrian cantina, we seek to make dialogue between the activists of both experiences, as long as our interlocutors do not deny the existence of a real popular revolution in Syria and respect the sacrifices of the Syrian people in their struggle against oppression. From that starting point, we can hear a critical opinion and debate regarding the attitude of the Syrian revolution towards the Kurds.
\n\nWhat perspective have your experiences given you on the importance of internationalism?
\n\nL—: After the Syrian revolution and war, we have the feeling that as Syrians we understand the world better and are more capable of debunking myths such as “the international community” or the impact of the “United Nations” and so on. We do not reject these entities on merely ideological grounds, but on the basis of our experience, as a result of what we saw happening month after month, as the world gradually turned a blind eye towards what was happening in Syria.
\n\nWe quickly learned that we cannot depend on those types of institutions. Also, although we would like to live in a world in which borders do not divide us, we are aware that for the moment, we have to think of “intermediary” propositions and solutions, via which we can collaborate and mutually support our struggles within the existing divisions imposed by states.
\n\nWe understand from our experience of the Syrian revolution that the conflict we face is transnational, so our analysis and our propositions to change the situation must not be restricted to a national framework. We wish that the Russians would have done more to oppose Putin’s military intervention in Syria, that more Lebanese people would have refused to send their children to fight with the banner of Hezbollah on the side of the regime in Syria, that direct action would have broken out throughout European capitals when Aleppo fell.
\n\nWhat is very clear today is that the people want to overthrow the system. In 2019, from Hong Kong to Iran, popular uprisings exploded everywhere in the world with more or less similar demands and methods. We need to take a step further, to go beyond similarities towards coordinated actions and the construction of transnational forces.
\n\nWe live in a globalized world in which we all suffer from the same international capitalist system, just like the ecological crisis, just like reactionary nationalists politics, just like patriarchy. We don’t suffer in the same way, depending on our skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and class—but if we decide to combat capitalism to try to create a world free of all kinds of domination and exploitation, there is no alternative but to work together. It is a vital necessity, not a utopian luxury.
\n\nThe internationalism we aspire to is combative. It is not some naïve and depoliticized version of “we are all united in our humanity.” It is an internationalism from below, rooted in local self-organizations and social movements.
\n\nWe can also explain our internationalist perspectives from our experience of exile: not being a citizen of a country, being “illegal” in a place, puts you on the same side as many other people with whom you had no previous relation. For example, when you fight alongside Ethiopian comrades in France on matters related to asylum, your perspective is no longer the same. You can’t go back to seeing the world from the point of view of your home country or that of your “host country”—you have something else, a vantage point from which you can deconstruct toxic nationalism.
\n\nO—: Personally, I really tried to understand why the Syrian revolution had received so little support in France. There are several factors involved: the complexity of the conflict, the lack of preexisting links with Syrian activists, a latent racism, the lack of common reference points, the propaganda of the Syrian regime and its surrogates in France, and so on.
\n\nAlso, in France, internationalism is very weak. Even in anarchist or autonomous circles, there is a lack of interest in international revolts (with the exception of Rojava, the Zapatistas, and Palestine). It’s not a coincidence that there are no articles in the French press about our festival, “The People Want,” or, more generally, about the Syrian Cantina, whereas there are already articles in Arabic or English for instance.
\n\nUnfortunately, those who are most vocal in expressing an internationalist and anti-imperialist position often have bad positions—for example, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who supported Putin in Syria, or groups that support counterrevolutionary and murderous regimes or groups like Hezbollah or the Iranian regime.
\n\nFor me, the Syrian revolution has been an incredible source of inspiration. What you learn there is proof that internationalism is rich in lessons for you at home too. I believe that any revolutionary who thinks about how to make a revolution in the 21st century must make an effort to try to understand the mistakes and successes of the uprisings of the last ten years as well as those to come.
\n\nAfter experiencing the lack of support from the radical left in France, I told myself that it should never happen again, that we could no longer afford to give so little support to uprisings like this. That’s why we are trying to be responsive to the situation in Ukraine, to think about how not to leave the comrades there isolated, to make their voices and their positions heard. We believe that the Syrian lessons, especially in terms of international reaction, have a lot to tell us about what will happen in Ukraine and what we can do from the outside. This is why we wrote an article about it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/8.jpg\")
Graffiti in Syria in July 2014.
\nHow can we combat false notions of “anti-imperialism” that serve to legitimize rulers like Assad? Where do these come from and what is at the root of them?
\n\nO—: In France, a certain radical left often defends the policies of Putin, the Iranian regime, the Lebanese party Hezbollah, and therefore, implicitly, the Syrian regime, even if it is harder to do so overtly.
\n\nIn addition to fighting them, I believe that it is important to understand the roots of these positions because we encounter them in regards to several different conflicts around the world—and we might encounter them even more in the years to come, especially after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
\n\nAccording to us, this kind of “anti-imperialism” has two different origins. First, it derives from a vision inherited from the “campism” of the Cold War. During the Cold War—the years of “third worldism”—there was an ideological focus on supporting actors close to socialism (the Soviets, Cuba, the Algerian FLN, the Palestinian PLO, and the like) against the expansionist interests of the “capitalist” bloc of the West led by the United States. The problem is that thirty years after the end of the Cold War, many entities of the radical left remain stuck in this vision inherited from another century.
\n\nIn a context in which these groups are no longer connected to states or organizations that are ideologically close to them, this doctrine transformed into the idea that one should support any opponent of American and Western imperialism—all the more so if one is French or American, for example. The adherents of this approach hold to it even when the adversary is itself bellicose, totalitarian, or tyrannical and massacres its own people—as the Chinese, Iranian, Syrian, and Russian regimes do.
\n\nToday, this vision answers in a simplistic and opportunistic way to the expression “the enemies of my enemies are my friends.” It totally neglects the possibility that one can espouse an anti-imperialist position (as we do) rejecting Western expansionism (as in Libya, Mali, or Iraq, for example) while also rejecting the expansionism of regimes like Russia or Iran. For example, as Iraqi revolutionaries did during the 2019 revolt, chanting “neither USA nor Iran.”
\n\nThe other origin point of this false “anti-imperialism” is the way that the Palestinian cause has been associated with the self-proclaimed “axis of resistance” to Israel, supposedly embodied by the Iranian regime, Syria, and the Lebanese Hezbollah. As a consequence, in France, several militants—many of whom are from poor neighborhoods—do a great job in local organizing but defend totally reactionary positions on an international scale. This includes supporting Bashar Al-Assad, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime under the pretext that they are the only credible opponents of the main enemy, Israel.
\n\nAll this can be explained by the progressive decline of pan-Arab, socialist, or leftist movements over the last thirty years. These have been replaced by something that is portrayed as “popular resistance” but in fact is a coalition of authoritarians, embodied by the Iranian regime, Assad’s regime, and the Lebanese party Hezbollah as the central figures in the defense of the Palestinian cause.
\n\nThree events played a crucial role in the evolution of this situation.
\n\nThe Iranian revolution in 1979 with the arrival in power of the mullahs (to the detriment, within the revolution, of the Marxist revolutionaries). They quickly positioned themselves as the great enemies of Zionism in a context in which few Arab republics really maintained their opposition to Israel. Up to today, they are a source of massive financial support to the Palestinian party Hamas.
\nThe war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990, during which the Palestinian and Lebanese left were defeated. The main winners were the Shiite parties and Hezbollah in particular (financed and armed since 1982 by the Iranian regime), because it is the only actor authorized to keep weapons in the name of its role in the “resistance” to Israel.
\nFinally, the Israeli offensive in Lebanon in 2006. During this conflict, Hezbollah managed to stand up to the Israeli army, which gave it a special aura both in Lebanon and all around the region. A Lebanese anarchist once told me that at that moment, a large number of left-wing activists and Lebanese communists who had been involved in the Palestinian cause for years rallied to Hezbollah. He had himself tried to go to the border to join up, but was refused because he was Sunni, not Shiite.
\nThis touches on a more complicated point: there are currently no actors defending our positions that are capable of standing up to Israel. This is why a similar shift has taken place in France and many activists who used to defend the Palestinian cause from the left have ended up supporting reactionary groups. In 2006, at the time of the Israeli bombings, there were large demonstrations in Paris and even riots. The Palestinian cause is arguably the issue that mobilizes the most people in the poorer districts. It is important to understand that for this generation, those events symbolized an important moment of dignity in a country as racist as France, where Muslims are constantly stigmatized and oppressed. This is why many people who became politicized in these demonstrations still see groups like Hezbollah as heroes of the Palestinian cause and even of anti-imperialism.
\n\nUnfortunately, Sulemani and Hassan Nasrallah are nothing like Che Guevara or Ben Barka. The latter did not defend a reactionary and authoritarian ideology and did not crush revolts in their own countries as Sulemani did for the Iranian regime in Syria, Iraq, or at home in Iran.
\n\nFinally, it is important to remember that the Hezbollah of 2006 is not the Hezbollah of today. Over the past sixteen years, it has sent thousands of young Lebanese to be killed in Syria in order to try to crush a democratic revolution; it has assassinated opponents of its policies; it has suppressed the uprising in Lebanon in 2019 and seems to have had a real role in the explosion in the port of Beirut in August 2020. In Lebanon itself, Hezbollah no longer has the same reputation. It has seen defections by the hundreds. Those who support the Syrian regime and Hezbollah among the Lebanese left (much less numerous) are increasingly excluded from popular gatherings.
\n\nMaintaining a fixed idea of the political regimes in the Middle East is an orientalist approach that denies the transformations that led to our present situation. It is as if we were still supporting the Algerian regime today in the face of the Hirak [the Algerian protests of 2019–2021] on the pretext that the generals are the heirs of the Algerian revolution that drove out French colonial rule. Since those days, this regime has monopolized all power, silenced its people, unleashed a civil war, and repressed dozens of revolts. In fact, nobody thinks of supporting it.
\n\nFor all these reasons, it is urgent to update our conceptions of internationalism and anti-imperialism. These regimes and parties do not embody the emancipation of the peoples of the global South or the “non-aligned.” They are authoritarian and counterrevolutionary forces that suffocate their peoples.
\n\nSupposed “anti-imperialists” never say anything regarding these questions. They do not say a word about the political violence of which the Syrians, the Iranians, the Russians themselves are victims. Worse, they spread disinformation and propaganda directly from these authoritarian regimes. In depriving the inhabitants of these countries of any political role, even those who espouse ideologically similar positions, false “anti-imperialists” embody the very essence of imperialist and racist privilege.
\n\nThe advice we would like to give to people who espouse these politics is to come back to listening carefully to the grassroots, to the voice of the inhabitants of these countries, in particular those who share ideas close to ours—egalitarianism, feminism, direct democracy, self-determination. Instead of talking about the people or the working class, go and meet them when they rise up—not only in the West, but also in Syria, Ukraine, or Iran. Especially since many exiles from these countries arrive in western countries.
\n\nIn some ways, it is more comfortable for some people to support these regimes because it enables them to have strong figures to defend—it makes things very simple. But we can’t support these groups. Supporting them would mean cutting ourselves off from comrades in exile here and from potential comrades who are fighting for their lives, freedom, and dignity there.
\n\nThat’s why the Syrian Cantina and the Peuples Veulent team has made the fight against this kind of “anti-imperialism” one of its main objectives. In our view, the most valuable points of view on the issue are often those that come directly from the Middle East—because, having long been caught between the devil (America) and the deep blue sea (the authoritarian regimes of the region), they have developed discourses that are grounded in the immediate situation there.
\n\nWe have to acknowledge that the world is no longer the same as it was, that we are orphans of emancipatory ideologies competing with capitalism. But one thing is certain: we will not succeed in building credible alternatives by throwing ourselves into the arms of authoritarian regimes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/13.jpg\")
More delicious food, courtesy of the Syrian Cantina.
\nWhat can you say to others who may become refugees about how they can continue their organizing efforts in a foreign context? And to locals who want to support refugees in doing this?
\n\nL—: To refugees we say—if for some reason, some governments are somewhat favorable or less repressive to people from your country and situation, do not ever feel that you owe them anything in return. It is always people, locals, associations, and organizations that do most of the hard work to welcome exiled persons. States are never totally on our side.
\n\nTry to inform yourself as much as possible about the different struggles and the different political communities that are active in your place of exile. In order to build links with local activists, it is important to understand what their fights are: talk to them, ask them questions, ask them to provide you with the militant literature they read, for example; identify common grounds that you can share and fight for.
\n\nDon’t expect people to come and support your cause at home just because you are a refugee or because you have escaped war or a natural disaster. If you intend to maintain consistent and durable links with local activists and to continue organizing from exile in relation to issues at home, it is important to go beyond immediate responses and relief actions, to build confidence and friendships. Sometimes, the best way to share your struggle with locals is to organize concerts and film projections, to dance and eat together. We need joy, humor, and festivity in our struggles, especially when we carry heavy traumas within us.
\n\nRemember that there are people from other nationalities in the place that you are exiled, whether they are refugees or not, who may share a situation similar to yours. Making contact with them and establishing alliances and coordination with their communities can be empowering and eye-opening.
\n\nTo locals, we say—organizing with refugees should not be restricted to humanitarian actions or solidarity work. It is a huge opportunity to learn about different tactics, political practices, and strategies that you could adapt to your local context; it is an occasion to find inspiration and compare reflections and analyses. Listen to what they have to say: not only the stories and testimonies of what they have suffered—although those are very important—but also their ideas regarding what change could like in their countries or yours.
\n\nWhat can people around the world do to provide support for refugees in the Syrian diaspora and in other diasporas? What resources and projects do we need to create?
\n\nL—: There are many things that people can do to help out diasporic communities and refugees in their countries:
\n\nWe need more translations from Arabic to other languages and vice versa. What is so great about your work at CrimethInc. is that texts are immediately translated into multiple languages, giving access and connecting activists and realities from all around the world. It is precious, especially in relation to situations like what is happening in Ukraine today, to be able to get firsthand reports from comrades on the ground there in English, French, German, and other languages. At the Cantina, we are starting to think about how we can be more active in translating texts from and to Arabic. So this is an open call: if anyone would like to give some of their time to do so, don’t hesitate to contact us at cantine.syrienne@gmail.com.
\n\nThat aside, we need a new International from below—whether that involves networks, regular meetings and encounters, organizations, platforms, or forums. We don’t know what form it could take, but we need to think more seriously about structures capable of concrete transnational solidarity, gathering strategic proposals and building a common alternative narrative in order to have an impact on the terrible nationalist and reactionary course of the world. What is happening in Ukraine makes this all the more urgent.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/14/9.jpg\")
Graffiti in Syria in 2022.
\nWhat are some sources via which readers can keep up with the situation in Syria and the Syrian diaspora? How can we support you and other related projects?
\n\nTo keep up with news and mobilizations from Syria or to support mutual aid work:
\n\n\n\nWe also try to build a beginning of internationalist media. On cantinesyrienne.fr, you can find our activities and some articles in French and Arabic about the Syrian revolution and other struggles around the world.
\n\nYou can support the Syrian Cantina financially here.
\n\nO— is the one non-Syrian member of the Cantina who participated in this interview. ↩
\nA massive uprising broke out in Lebanon on October 17, 2019, drawing people together across sectarian lines to reject the domination of warlord oligarchs. Four months later, the unrest continues—amid efforts to crush, tame, or redirect it. How can an understanding of Lebanese history help us understand the situation? What can we learn from the Lebanese uprising that could inform struggles against capitalism, sectarianism, and the state worldwide?
\n\nWith the formation of a “new” government on January 21, anti-sectarian protesters in Lebanon have been dealing with establishment parties’ efforts to derail or co-opt revolutionary momentum. These parties are employing every method from physical violence to online campaigns of harassment and disinformation; at the same time, worsening conditions on the ground have led to fear-mongering. Panic resulting from restrictive cash withdrawal limits at the banks and the fear of shortages of bread and medicine has temporarily reduced the presence of protesters on the streets. Yet the same structural problems that sparked the uprising have only worsened since it began; this suggests that we may see a return to mass mobilization in the near-future.
\n\nIn the following interview with Elia J. Ayoub, a co-organizer of previous movements in Lebanon and a participant in the current uprising from the beginning, we explore the structural factors that have limited the scope of the uprising, the similarities and differences between the events in Lebanon and those in Bosnia, Iraq, and Iran, and how people outside Lebanon can prepare for similar opportunities in their own contexts.
\n\nAsked what errors or oversights anarchists had made in relation to the Chilean uprising, one participant answered, “It was a mistake not to expect that this would happen.” Has the movement in Lebanon taken everyone by surprise? Had you known that this was coming, what would you have done to prepare, to expand the scope of possibility?
\n\nThe movement has taken everyone by surprise and, similarly to the reaction to the Chilean uprising, I think this was a mistake. In many ways, we felt extremely down prior to October 17. The rare windows of opportunity we’ve had in recent years were seen as relative failures—I refer here to the 2015 “YouStink” uprising, the 2016 municipal elections, and the 2018 general elections. But while I didn’t see this coming either, I think there were early signs that something—what, exactly, no one knew—was going to happen. I remember describing protest movements in Lebanon some years ago as tidal—they have their highs and their lows, just like tides do.
\n\nI suppose the difficulty is preparing for the highs when the lows are so difficult to bear. To have been better prepared for the uprising that began on October 17, we would have needed a more advanced understanding of the sectarian system in Lebanon and how it intersects with capitalism, racism, xenophobia/nationalism, misogyny/patriarchy, and homophobia/transphobia. We would have had to arrive at this understanding while navigating all the contradictions and manifestations of violence of the past three decades of what is called “the postwar era” in Lebanon: two separate military occupations (by Israel and Syria), deeply entrenched clientalism, actually existing neoliberalism, and multiple political assassinations that never lead to prosecutions.
\n\nThis was very difficult to do for additional reasons:
\n\nGood journalism is rare in Lebanon. The main newspapers tend to be aligned with the sectarian parties, either directly or indirectly, or have some affinity towards the status quo. There are decent adversarial journalists working in mainstream media, but even they have been struggling. To name two quick examples: Mohammad Zbeeb worked as the economics editor at the “leftist,” pro-Hezbollah newspaper Al-Akhbar but quit due to the anti-revolution stance of the paper, while Timour Azhari quit from his position at the English-language media The Daily Star in solidarity with a colleague, Benjamin Redd, who was fired for helping to organize a strike over the refusal of the (billionaire) Hariri-owned paper to pay salaries. More journalists quit Al-Akhbar for similar reasons.
\n\nAt the same time, there’s been a rise in adversarial journalism from independent outlets—and here I can point to the outlets that have popped up since 2015 or since 2019 such as Megaphone News (ميغافون), The Public Source (مصدر عام), Fawra Media (فورة) and Akhbar al-Saha (أخبارالساحة), to list a few—but these are all still very new. The hope here is that Generation Zers are growing up with a much more diverse and critical mediascape than Millennials did—not to mention older generations—and that this will influence politics in this country in one way or another (electorally, locally, regionally etc). There’s no guarantee this will happen, but it’s reasonable to expect it.
\n\nViolence is widespread in Lebanon. When we think of violence, we tend to picture the cops-are-coming-to-beat-us variety, but it’s much more all-encompassing than that. Just like everywhere else, violence in Lebanon is symbolic and structural as well as physical.
\n\nFor example, the absence of public spaces and public transportation is a form of violence that constrains us to private spheres where interaction with the Other is reduced to a minimum, which in turn encourages homogenization. This is due to rampant privatization, itself a form of violence—sometimes requiring physical violence to force or “persuade” inhabitants to leave a certain area, such as downtown Beirut—that has occurred in the postwar era following the globalized neoliberal framework. Even in mixed areas, it’s fairly common to grow up surrounded almost exclusively by those of your own sect, partly as a result of mass internal displacement during the war as well as other historical factors. The closest most of us come to seeing other people in large numbers on a daily basis is when we are stuck in traffic.
\n\nOur generation was raised on stories of the pre-war era while physically going to places that are no longer there: downtown used to be “al balad” (literally “the country,” a common way of referring to a city’s downtown in the Arabic-speaking world) but it became “Solidere,” the private company owned by the two Hariri prime ministers (Rafik, the father and Saad, the son), in the 1990s. This is why protesters graffitied the sentence “it’s called Al Balad, not Solidere” on the walls of downtown Beirut.
\n\nWasta (clientalism/bribes) is another form of violence, as it makes access to basic services depend on sectarian and class connections, creating hierarchies that are reinforced by the current sectarian-capitalist-patriarchal paradigm. As a result, local zuama (“chieftains”), whose networks were created or expanded during the 1975-1990 civil war or in the 1990s, can control people’s lives without resorting to physical violence. Those same zuama are also in government—including the speaker of parliament, the president, and the vast majority of MPs—or linked to the government in one way or another. To put it differently, the whole political-economic system in Lebanon is monopolized by sectarian-capitalist-patriarchal networks headed by former or current warlords or oligarchs. Despite their occasional differences, they have much more in common with each other than not.
\n\nLebanon’s residents are the victims of relentless, decades-long gaslighting. The families of those forcibly “disappeared” during the civil war have been told for the past three decades to move on, as their loved ones will never be accounted for. Lebanese women married to non-Lebanese men are told they are Lebanese while their partners, sons, and daughters are deprived of the nationality. LGBTQ people read stories that proclaim Lebanon to be a liberal haven in a sea of conservatism while regularly facing the bigotry of a deeply hypocritical society. Lebanese youth are praised by the sectarian upper classes while being forced to emigrate to find any semblance of stability, financial or otherwise. Even refugees were briefly told, for some time, that they are welcome in Lebanon—despite the hard, cold facts on the ground showing them otherwise and the history of violence against refugees in Lebanon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/24/1.jpg\")
“We will shake your thrones.” The hashtag reads “no confidence” [in this government]. Credit: Rabih Yassine.
\nThe lack of accountability for crimes committed during and since the civil war did not normalize violence, as is it is often said. Lebanon’s residents are not “used to” violence. No one ever really gets used to violence. Rather, what has been normalized is the anticipation of violence, to use an expression coined by Sami Hermez. Some bombs or some war—whether with Israel, within Lebanon, or Syria-related—are always expected sometime in the not-too-distant future. We are a deeply traumatized population. The lack of nationwide, regional, or local structures to address these traumas has only worsened a widespread feeling of despair and cynicism.
\n\nLike others of our generation, I was told from a young age by older Lebanese that it is pointless to protest for such things as protecting our cultural or natural heritage because they will all be destroyed anyway. I was raised with the civil war—“the events,” as they are often called—as the ultimate taboo, never to be spoken of, while others inherited some form of sectarian historiography (to use Craig Larkin’s expression) glorifying the actions of their sect’s warlord and self-appointed representative. I was raised to hate or look down upon refugees and migrant workers (Palestinians, Syrians, Ethiopians, Sri Lankans, Filipinas, Nepalis, etc.) and treat them with suspicion despite the fact that, in many ways, they have been the ones keeping this country from collapsing under its own contradictions.
\n\nThe way I picture it, growing up in postwar Lebanon with some awareness of its problems is like trying to warn about the incoming tsunami that you can see with your eyes while your parents, schoolteachers, neighbors, and country are aggressively putting you down for disturbing the peace. It’s exhausting. And the same was said about Lebanon during the war. I can only think of the Lebanese poet Nadia Tueni who put it in simple and devastating terms: J’appartiens a un pays qui chaque jour se suicide tandis qu’on l’assassine. “I belong to a country that commits suicide every day while it is being assassinated.” On a fundamental level, not much changed in the post-war era.
\n\nAll this is not well-understood in Lebanon. It is absent from our education and media systems. At best, you might get some decent classes at a few of the universities, assuming you can afford to go to the private ones or circumvent the obstacles at the only public university. We’ve had to educate ourselves about everything—and that takes a lot of time, energy, and resources in Lebanon, all of which are hard to come by if you’re constantly worried about rent, your health, and your own future in this country.
\n\nUnderstanding these factors and many more would have prepared us better for the way that the state and its representatives responded to the protests. To them, we are an existential threat. Look at what has happened in our region since 2011. The dictators are either dead, like Gaddafi, or have slaughtered their whole country to stay in power, like Assad. The Lebanese warlords and oligarchs are somewhere in between. For now, they can’t risk being too violent towards us because they understand that the whole country is on the verge of collapse and their wealth and physical safety at risk. No one is fully in control of their traditional base, not even Hezbollah. They are loathed by a significant percentage of the population, and even many of their traditional followers are finding it increasingly difficult to tolerate the current state of affairs. Many politicians are now avoiding public places because protesters are following them to protest at whatever restaurant they visit.
\n\nWe are following their every move. It’s not inconceivable to imagine that they will be physically attacked soon—and they know this. On February 11, protesters attacked an MP from the fascist and pro-Assad SSNP party, sending him to the hospital. Convoys of MPs in bulletproof cars are surrounding themselves with extra security, including the internal security forces, the army, the parliamentary police, and riot police. As if that’s not enough, they also have to be surrounded by their supporters on motorbikes. All of this just to get to parliament. We were attacked on February 11 by Amal and Hezbollah supporters because we were trying to block entrance to all MPs going to parliament, including those from parties opposed to Amal and Hezbollah. Essentially, the sectarians are defending each other to maintain this status quo.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/24/3.jpg\")
Photo and art by Roula Abdo on a “security wall” put up by the government to prevent protesters from entering Parliament’s Nejmeh Square on January 26.
\nDo you have any advice for people in parts of the world that have not seen a massive social movement like this yet?
\n\nTo my mind, the most urgent thing is to identify flaws that are likely to emerge in the eventuality of a protest movement and prepare to deal with them. What are some of the fault lines and contradictions in your society? If I had employed this exercise in the past, knowing what I know now, I would have anticipated the intersection of class and sectarianism to be among the most difficult obstacles to overcome, not to mention the double-edged sword of nationalism, which can be both a tool against sectarianism (“regardless of regions or sects, we are all Lebanese”) but also against the scapegoated racialized “Other,” especially Syrian and Palestinian refugees.
\n\nTo use a concrete example: the “boys from khandaq,” as they are unfortunately sometimes called in Arabic, are a group of mostly working class men, including some teenagers, who support the two dominant sectarian Shia parties, Hezbollah and Amal. They gather at the entrance of the Khandaq Al-Ghameek neighborhood, close to popular protest sites, to launch attacks at protesters. From a strictly simplistic economic perspective, they have more in common with protesters than they share with the leaders of Hezbollah and Amal. But this is where sectarianism comes in. Just as upper classes everywhere can rally the working class and middle class under the banner of nationalism, a very similar dynamic occurs with sectarianism. You may be poor, but you are also offered a convenient narrative that gives meaning to your life. In the case of Amal and Hezbollah, you are told that you are the son (or daughter, though sectarianism is gendered and patriarchal) of a great cause, of “the resistance,” of a world that stretches all the way to the glorious ayatollahs of Iran. You, and those who are “like you,” are part of a story that centers you in a country where nothing truly feels meaningful. This is why the television stations of Hezbollah and Amal portray the protests as influenced by foreign powers—I was recently called an Israeli agent by a member of Hezbollah who punched me—or accuse opposition sectarian parties (most notably, the Christian “Lebanese Forces”) of pulling the strings. The alternative possibility—that we have more in common with one another than with the leaders—is too dangerous to acknowledge.
\n\nThese protests have been anti-sectarian from the very start. But since the first month, when revolutionary momentum was at its peak, sectarian forces, especially those currently in power—the Christian “Free Patriotic Movement” and the Shia Amal and Hezbollah—played the sectarian card. Predictably, they especially focused on Tripoli, the Sunni-majority working-class city in the North, and to a lesser extent Akkar, further north. Social media posts are filled with smears thrown at Tripolitans who join protesters in Beirut to defend us against the state and its representatives, with sectarian partisans calling them “Dawaesh” (“Daesh members”) or accusing them of being Syrians or having Syrians with them. It is a way of telling them “go back to where you come from.” That’s exactly what happened to one protester from Tripoli recently: he was beaten by FPM supporters in the Christian-majority city of Keserwan who told him to go back to Tripoli and said “fuck your god” (an obvious reference to the man’s Sunni faith). Protesters, especially Christians, responded by denouncing the FPM and extending the usual greetings to “our brothers and sisters from Tripoli.” A protest against sectarianism took place in Keserwan and the protester was invited to take part, which he did.
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With this reality in mind, we can pose two questions:
\n\n1) How can we unite the so-called “Sunni streets” with the “Shia streets”?
\n\n2) If the “Sunni streets” are standing by protesters of all sects— including Shias—while the “Shia streets” are not, what can we do about this?
\n\nThe second question already comes with an asterisk—because it is based on a false premise. In fact, protests in Shia-majority areas of the South such as Nabatiyeh were among the first to break out; we should credit them alongside those in Tripoli as having consolidated the anti-sectarian momentum of this movement. Nonetheless, this perception survives, largely due to the hegemonic stronghold of Hezbollah and Amal over the “Shia streets,” a phenomenon that results in dissident Lebanese Shia such as the Lebanese rapper Bu Nasser Touffar being smeared and shunned as an “embassy Shia” (i.e., foreign-funded, or unwittingly doing the bidding of foreign governments) or threatened with violence. At the same time, for various reasons, the “Sunni streets” have already been moving away from the hegemonic stronghold of political Harirism (neoliberal politics dominated by the Hariri family, generally Gulf-oriented) since around 2013-2015. Therefore, we can already rephrase the second question:
\n\n2) How can we dismantle Amal and Hezbollah’s hegemony over the “Shia streets” while also dismantling all other sectarian hegemonies (Jumblatt/Arslan/Wahhab hegemony over the “Druze streets,” Geagea/Aoun/Gemayel hegemony over the “Christian streets,” etc.)?
\n\nThis is just one of many fault lines in current Lebanese society. Here’s another one: for those of us who are anti-authoritarians, our concerns are not only limited to Lebanese or would-be Lebanese citizens, but to all those currently within the borders of the Lebanese nation-state. Going back to the double-edged sword metaphor of nationalism, how should we wield that sword? Or should we just avoid it completely? Would our avoiding it benefit its victims or result in their being further victimized? Do we appeal to a liberal (and therefore limited) conception of nationhood that is more inclusive of refugees and migrant workers than the current one? There are no easy answers to these questions, but we must ask them nonetheless. And it is easier to think about them before a massive social movement breaks out in your country than in the heat of events.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/24/4.jpg\")
“I won.” From the February 11 protests against parliament in Beirut. Source: Timour Azhari
\nTrace the political situation in Lebanon from the Arab Spring through the “You Stink!” movement. Were there any precedents that set the stage for this uprising or contributed to shaping it?
\n\nThe aforementioned 2015 “You Stink” protests were arguably the first major political event of the postwar generations. The 2005 Cedar Revolution occurred before that—but most of its leaders were from the previous generations, including warlords, and they ended up breaking up into the March 14 camp, dominated by the Hariris, and the March 8 camp dominated by Hezbollah. So let’s look at 2015.
\n\nFirst of all, why did Lebanon not join the rest of the countries of the MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) region in the so-called Arab Spring? I’ll focus on the most obvious reason: there is no one dictator in Lebanon to overthrow. We have no Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Omar al-Bashir, Hosni Mubarak, or Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and no Gulf royals either. The Lebanese status quo is a network of warlords and oligarchs who have established a power-sharing agreement, however fragile, that has been able to sustain local and regional contradictions. In other words, things are bad, but “at least we’re not Syria or Iraq or Yemen or Libya.” Forged in the fires of the civil war, the postwar regime has played on these fears expertly.
\n\nStill, there were protests in Lebanon in 2011 echoing those elsewhere in the Arab-majority world; it can be argued that their “failures,” as well as those of other pre-2015 mobilizations, led to the “You Stink” movement in 2015. As a member of the organizing committee of “You Stink” in its early weeks, I can say that it failed, too. But its failures helped shape the 2016 “Beirut Madinati” independent list in the Beirut municipal elections, which in turn led to the 2018 independent lists running in the general elections, which gave rise to the anger that gave us the movement that broke out on October 17, 2019.
\n\nThe chief weakness of “You Stink” was its lack of cross-class representation. Although it ended up including more radical demands, that initial contradiction was never fully resolved. For the most part, it was (cisgender/heterosexual) male-dominated and not intersectional. To put it more directly, the “You Stink” protest was “tamed” by middle-class priorities, a sort of professionalized activism that excluded wider socio-economic demands. It was oriented towards “civil society,” broadly liberal, and ultimately collapsed beneath its own contradictions. More importantly, there just wasn’t enough momentum, as far as I could tell at the time, for a wider political movement. The reasons cited above—violence, sectarianism, and the like—still held sway over large segments of the population.
\n\nThese limitations also characterized the 2016 “Beirut Madinati” (“Beirut my city”) independent list. The list was comprised of professionals and technocrats. Granted, Beirut Madinati galvanized a cross section of Lebanese society. For the first time in the postwar era, a discernible youth movement mobilized to attempt to take control of a major center of power, the Beirut municipality. They had to contend with the entirety of the sectarian system as political parties from both March 14 and March 8 united to form the “Beirutis” list to defeat Beirut Madinati. Despite taking on the entire establishment, the Beirut Madinati list still managed to gain 40% of the votes.
\n\nTwo years later, the “my” handle was adopted by various independent lists during the 2018 general elections, including Li Baladi (for my country) and Li Haqqi (for my rights). Sociologist Rima Majed critiqued this language, arguing for “our” rather than “my.” For various reasons, most of these lists did not succeed, and the establishment parties, equipped with significantly more capital, declared victory. The latest government—or “mandate,” as the president likes to call it—has overseen the further deterioration of the Lebanese economy. That government collapsed with Hariri’s resignation less than two weeks after the protests started. As of the time of writing, the new government, inaugurated at the end of January 2020, is being actively challenged by protesters under the slogan “no trust” (لا ثقة).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/24/5.jpg\")
This protester’s sign reading “We make the decision” followed by the hashtag “no trust” [in the government] has caught a tear gas canister shot by security forces. Photo: Elia J. Ayoub, February 11.
\nBosnia was divided between three administrations as a result of the Dayton accords that concluded the civil war in the 1990s; rampant corruption and social stratification developed while neoliberal globalization resulted in the country being stripped of industries. The Bosnian uprising of 2014, in which participants burned several government headquarters, expressed an explicit rejection of nationalism with the banner “FREEDOM IS MY NATION.” Participants established plenums according to directly democratic principles. Yet once the movement shifted from disrupting the power of the reigning authorities to formulating and presenting demands, it was possible for the government to ignore these demands and return to business as usual. Arguably, the problem was that at some point, the protesters focused on presenting demands rather than bringing about change directly through their own efforts. Much of this story sounds familiar from what has happened up to this point in Lebanon. How can the movement maintain leverage on the authorities—the current authorities and any who succeed them? What changes is it possible to imagine implementing directly?
\n\nThere is an ongoing debate about this among protesters, and I can’t say that a consensus has emerged. There have already been some demands—early elections with an electoral law abolishing political sectarianism, an independent committee to tackle corruption, an independent judiciary, etc.—but no consensus about them. It might make more sense to compare our situation to the one in Iraq, where protesters are facing much more lethal force than the Lebanese. As in Lebanon, Iraqis are essentially fighting for survival, and when you’re fighting for survival you don’t necessarily have much time to debate the pros and cons of formulating demands.
\n\nThat being said, though I’m personally unsure whether presenting demands is an issue in itself or not, I believe that making them our only priority would make us vulnerable. We can agree on a list of urgent demands—elimination of political sectarianism, for example—while building the foundation for better alternatives at the same time. The way I see it, we have an opportunity to weaken the authorities that have dominated our lives for the past three decades and we owe it to the next generation at least to try. Getting rid of them all permanently will take a long time, likely several years, but we have to start somewhere. There can be no peace and no justice in Lebanon while they rule.
\n\nSo I guess this is a non-answer because I don’t think we’re at “that” stage yet. Even if we were to establish plenums on the Bosnian model, we would still have to deal with the fact that Palestinians, Syrians, and other non-Lebanese groups will likely be excluded. Regardless of what next steps we take, the intersection of capitalism and authoritarianism—all of its forms, from patriarchy to racism, including homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia—will haunt our every step. Considering this, we might as well reduce the obstacles in front of us. If targeted demands can do that, it is worth exploring that option.
\n\nOn a related note, I think it’s interesting to explore how a “freedom is my nation” framework would work in Lebanon. In many ways, this already exists in parts of the art scene in Lebanon. The rap underground in particular is aggressively anti-authoritarian. You can find opposition to Assad and Zionism, Iran and the Gulf monarchies, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Authority, racism and xenophobia, homophobia and patriarchy, and so on. Some of these artists are really comparable to the most anti-authoritarian and radical music in the African-American tradition. Listening to songs by Bu Nasser Touffar, Gaafar Touffar, Al-Darwish, Rayess Beik or El Rass, to name a few, we are transported to a world that found its anti-authoritarian voice long before the October revolution. Bu Nasser and Gaafar are from Baalbek, El Rass is from Tripoli, Rayess Beik is from Beirut, and Al-Darwish is a Syrian from Homs. Like the Nabatiyeh and Tripoli protests I discussed in my first article, the fact that many of them come from outside of Beirut and include Syrians and Palestinians speaks volumes to their ground-breaking role in pre-revolutionary Lebanon.
\n\nSituate the movement in Lebanon in reference to the recent movements in Iraq and Iran. How much have they influenced each other? Or have they simply been the result of parallel conditions?
\n\nThe recent protests in Iran were quickly and brutally crushed. Those in Iraq are still being brutally crushed but protesters there have managed to maintain their momentum in ways that Iranians, unfortunately, haven’t. I’m not well-placed to comment on these two movements in detail, but from what I can tell, it seems like we are dealing with parallel conditions. Of course, there are direct links between the three countries and Syria, due to Iran’s imperialist and sectarian politics. Iraqi protesters facing the sectarian militias of the Popular Mobilization Forces (الحشد الشعبي) are well aware of their links to Iran. Syrians have seen their whole country ravaged by Iran and its sectarian militias, most notably Hezbollah, which is also a dominant party in Lebanon. So these are some of the direct links.
\n\nBut protesters in these three countries are primarily focused on the issues in front of them, which is entirely understandable given how difficult these are to overcome. Iraqis have to deal with a government that is effectively run by militias and heavily influenced by Iran, whose power there is almost completely hegemonic—apart from Iraqi Kurdistan, which has its own dynamics. As for Iranians, they have to deal with an extremely authoritarian regime, a weak economy, and the additional threat of US warmongering.
\n\nThat being said, there have been small attempts to connect these struggles. In my opinion, the most impressive efforts thus far have come from intersectional feminists. In Lebanon, the brutal repression in Iraq and Iran, not to mention the ongoing extermination campaigns by Assad in Syria, serve as a daily reminder that things can always get worse. These examples are used by pro-government apologists—the ones whose position I’ve been referring to as “hey, at least we’re not Syria”—to blame the ongoing crisis on protesters and dissuade their followers from joining the movement. The challenge is to navigate these fears while not letting them take control.
\n\nThe discourse of protesting corruption has driven powerful social movements in many parts of the world, but these are often demobilized and pacified by the arrival of new politicians (who ultimately act similarly to the ones they replace). Likewise, the discourse of opposing corruption has been useful to populists like Donald Trump. How central is this discourse to what is happening in Lebanon? Do you see the same vulnerabilities?
\n\nYes, I think the same vulnerabilities exist in Lebanon for similar reasons. But one key difference here is that the focus on corruption is complimented by the chant “all of them means all of them” (كلن يعني كلن), which has been a key component of the protests. This is especially important due to some politicians’ attempts to ride the wave of the protests into power.
\n\nAnother key difference is that, in contrast to the US, corruption in Lebanon is associated with a whole generation of politicians, not just individuals. There are certain politicians whose reputations are worse than others on this matter, such as Amal’s Nabih Berri and the Future Movement (FM)’s Fouad Siniora, two names people have focused on since October; indeed, this can lead some to argue for the premise of “lesser evilism” when it comes to other politicians, such as the (Christian sectarian) Phalangists’ Nadim Gemayel. The latter has gained some political/sectarian capital from the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) and the Lebanese Forces (LF), the two dominant Christian sectarian parties. He has even made some gestures towards supporters of Hezbollah by appealing to a perceived common sense of nationalism, usually by supporting the Lebanese army over Hezbollah’s military dominance. But these developments are not particularly new. The Phalangists, for example, had already built links with some civil society actors over the past decade or so; in many ways, they’re just continuing what they’ve been building so far. They have even opened the doors of their Beirut headquarters to protesters fleeing the teargas.
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From the start, then, cooptation has been the chief risk. Anti-authoritarians were worried about this, as I recall from numerous conversations, when the Lebanese Forces withdrew their ministers and when the FM’s Saad Hariri resigned as prime minister in the first two weeks of the protests. There have been several instances in which protesters and supporters of these two sectarian parties stood side by side against security forces or against supporters of Amal and Hezbollah, with the LF and FM supporters forgoing their usual party flags for the occasion. This stands in stark contrast to the initial phase of the protests, which involved supporters of all sectarian parties, from Amal and Hezbollah to the LF and FM. It has been a primary concern for activists from the start.
\n\nFor the foreseeable future, I think there is less of a risk that a Trump-style populist will gain prominence, for the simple reason that Trump-style populism is already the status quo in Lebanon. It doesn’t take much to see the similarities between Jared Kuchner, Trump’s son-in-law, receiving government positions out of nepotistic considerations, and Gebran Bassil, Aoun’s son-in-law, serving until recently as the foreign minister and remaining the co-leader of Aoun’s party to this day. Likewise, the incestuous politics of the ruling class are on display in Lebanon for all to see. They predate Lebanon itself; they have defined almost the entirety of Lebanon’s existence as a nation-state. But even if, for example, Gemayel manages to gain enough political capital in the near future to be considered for the presidency, which seems unlikely, he will still have to navigate a post-October landscape of anti-sectarianism and “all of them means all of them.”
\n\nWhat organizational structures and practices have driven decision-making within the movement so far? Whether online, behind the scenes, totally decentralized, or otherwise?
\n\nFour months in, the movement is still decentralized, but protests outside of Beirut have dwindled. This is worrisome, especially as it has been cities and regions like Nabatiyeh in the south and Tripoli in the north that guaranteed the anti-sectarian nature of the protests. This was surely understood by Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, who asked his supporters to withdraw from the streets early on. To re-use the “streets” metaphor, without the participation of the “Shia streets,” for reasons explored in my first piece, it is easy for sectarians to scapegoat the “Sunni streets.”
\n\nBy and large, protests are usually called for in response to moves from the government or on specific symbolic dates (the 17th of every month, for example). They cohere organically on social media or smaller independent groups call for them. Protesters rarely know who specifically called for a protest; there have been multiple calls for protests that haven’t led anywhere. One thing we can say for certain is that while many groups can call for protests, only a few get significant responses. Most of the successful protests have been time-sensitive mobilizations (for example, when the parliament convened on February 11) or responses to violence by the state or parties (for example, when FPM supporters beat up a protester from Tripoli).
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Independent unions have also played some role in mobilizing protesters. For the most part, these are unions that have been created over the past few months as alternatives to the dominant unions, which are widely seen as co-opted by the sectarian ruling class. Recently, the Alternative Union for Journalists organized a protest to defend Mohammad Zbeeb when he was attacked by thugs affiliated with Al-Mawarid Bank. We’ve seen soup kitchens and musical performances, public lectures and impressive graffiti. Although these are not technically organizational structures, they’ve all played their part in maintaining revolutionary momentum.
\n\nIn addition, partly due to the lack of public spaces and public transportation, much of the anger against the status quo is fomented online. It is common, for example, for politicians’ Twitter accounts to elicit barrages of replies and denunciations—an activity that anti-government diaspora Lebanese can also partake in. The creative use of social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has also helped build an explicitly anti-sectarian politics for the first time in three decades.
\n\nWhat new relations to space have emerged in the process of the movement? Are these likely to remain exceptional, or could they have long-term effects on life in Lebanon?
\n\nIt’s too soon to know whether the public spaces temporarily reclaimed by protesters will be re-colonized by private capital. Every individual struggle for a specific space swiftly expands into a conflict with the authorities as a whole: “all of them means all of them.” For example, reclaiming downtown Beirut involves targeting both the Hariri business empire, which owns “Solidere,” and Berri’s, whose three-decades-long speakership of parliament has turned Nejmeh Square, where parliament is located, into his de facto private property. Similar conditions exist in the rest of the country. Taking back our coastline—which is legally designated as public land—from private interests means taking on the entire establishment. Even stopping the unpopular World Bank-funded dam project in the Bisri Valley means facing the entire establishment.
\n\nStill, what we’ve witnessed so far gives us reason to hope that these efforts will have long-term effects. We are seeing a more intersectional approach to politics. For example, the Save the Bisri Valley Campaign and associated activists have used revolutionary slogans such as “The Shouf [region where Bisri is] is rising up,” which is derived from the “Lebanon is rising up” slogan of the protests, and adopted the popular Italian protest folk song “Bella Ciao” with lyrics about Bisri.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/24/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/02/24/6.jpg\")
\nFollowing the US airstrike that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on January 3 and the Iranian missile strikes against US positions in Iraq on January 7, there has been considerable anxiety about war escalating between the US and Iran. In a media ecosystem driven chiefly by fear and outrage, bad news travels fast, and the worst interpretations of the news travel fastest of all. For our part, we expect that the war will escalate, but that it will take a more diffuse form than the sort of conventional war that most people expect. As avowed foes of war and tyranny, we believe it is important to strategize accordingly.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/against-all-wars/against-all-wars_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Please print and distribute these posters far and wide.
\nAfter the missile strikes, the Iraqi government announced that the Iranian military had fired 22 missiles, and that 17 of them hit the Al-Asad airbase, 15 of which detonated—yet without any casualties. In a subsequent statement, the Iraqi government stated that Iranian officials had warned them of the attacks in advance. If this is true, it seems likely that the Iranian government was intentionally avoiding killing US troops while demonstrating that it is capable of hitting US targets. This is a way for the Iranian government to save face and placate hardliners, while leaving the United States the option of not further escalating formal hostilities.
\n\nThe real response to the US assassination of Soleimani will likely take place outside the official theater of war, in the form of proxy violence and terror attacks. Iran backs forces throughout the Mideast, especially in Iraq and Lebanon, where its proxy Hezbollah is arguably more powerful than the official government. Iraq and Syria have already seen many years of violence; now it seems inevitable that the whole stretch of territory from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean will be torn by civil war for years to come. The Islamic State, which lost the last of its territory less than a year ago, will be succeeded by other groups that have learned from its rapid rise and fall.
\n\nSo regardless of whether the US escalation with Iran triggers a ground conflict or leads to an occupation, it represents another step towards a US foreign policy that presumes and hastens a future of global civil war. As opponents of both war and tyranny, we have to analyze what authoritarians of all stripes stand to gain from this approach.
\n\nFirst, it’s worth repeating that the US escalation of conflict with Iran confirms our thesis that when Donald Trump encouraged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to invade Syria, it was not a step towards US withdrawal from the region, but simply a reshuffling of US alliances in the Mideast towards more authoritarian players. The US had already sent 14,000 more troops to the region before giving Erdoğan the green light; thousands more troops have followed them there since. Supposed “anti-imperialists” who parroted Trump’s lie that he was pulling the US out of “endless wars” naïvely gave cover to his effort to abet Turkish and Russian imperial ambitions while setting the stage for him to escalate conflict with Iran.
\n\nDespite widespread fears from Democrats that Trump is trying to start a war to distract from the (stalemated) impeachment proceedings or to manipulate the (already polarized) public ahead of the election, it seems clear that Trump isn’t seeking a conventional war with Iran. He wants to throw US military weight around without being drawn into ground operations. Taking a cue from Israel, he hopes to be able to order surgical airstrikes against high-ranking foreign adversaries without having to occupy another country; that way, he can get credit from his Islamophobic base for being tough, while perpetuating the paper-thin deception that he is “pulling America out of endless wars.” In short, he wants escalation without entanglement.
\n\nThe truth is that 21st-century war is going to look different than the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. The conflict in Syria gives us a sense of what we can expect: a years-running civil war involving proxies representing most of the global power players, in which the distinctions between civilian and military blurred on all sides. We will probably see more cases in which official state violence is performative, like yesterday’s Iranian missile strikes, while the real fighting and dying is done by proxies, paramilitary forces, and civilians. The downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 immediately after the missile strike, in which a large number of Canadians and Ukrainians as well as Iranians were killed, illustrates this, as do the two rocket strikes that hit the “Green Zone” in Baghdad immediately after Trump announced that he would not respond to the strikes from Iran.
\n\nSo the chief victims of Trump’s escalation will be civilians—likely US citizens as well as Iranians and Iraqis. Yet it seems clear that Trump is not concerned about the likelihood that US civilians may be targeted as a consequence of his decision to target Soleimani. On the contrary, he may even welcome such attacks, counting on them to drive more fearful, ignorant Americans into his camp.
\n\nSince 2001, Republicans have only benefited from policies that have polarized whole populations, resulting in the rise of ISIS, terror attacks, and civilian deaths by the hundred thousand. They count on the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to make their own fundamentalist authoritarianism look appealing. This gives us another angle on Trump’s tweet declaring “All is well!” and “So far, so good!” immediately after the Iranian missile strike.
\n\nNo amount of brute force can hold the neoliberal global order together—and Trump is not trying to hold it together. Rather, he and his fellow nationalists aim to ensure that the conflicts that succeed the neoliberal order will play out along ethnic and national lines rather than uniting everyone against the ruling class that he represents. Case in point: the Iranian government, threatened by massive unrest scarcely two months ago, can now use the escalating conflict with the US to legitimize its authority domestically.
\n\nIn response to the machinations of the Iranian and US governments, we aim to identify and resist every effort to turn us against each other. We aim to build solidarity across national, ethnic, and religious lines while doing everything we can to topple authoritarian governments from DC to Tehran. Our hope is that revolutionary movements will break out on both sides of every border. Escalations in state violence are calculated to make this impossible—to substitute war for revolution. In a world headed towards ever more diffuse wars, goaded on by nationalist strongmen, our best chance of survival is to build ties between combative social movements like those in Lebanon, Egypt, and Iran—and not so long ago even in Russia and Turkey—and hopefully soon in the United States as well as in Hong Kong and Chile. Let us fight those who would make us die on their behalf, not each other.
\n\nThis stands in stark contrast to the strategy implied by the approach of certain authoritarian leftists in the US, who, always looking for an authority to affirm, have settled on legitimizing the Iranian government. Let’s be clear: to do so is to spit on the graves of the 1500 people the Iranian government killed to put down the recent uprising. It is is to legitimize all the prisons and police in Iran and every form of tyranny that Iranian people rose up against. We don’t have to affirm the legitimacy of the Iranian authorities to condemn Trump for attempting to goad them into targeting us. If there are any natural allies for us in this situation, it should be those who resist the authority of the Iranian government in the same way that we oppose Trump’s authority.
\n\nFor our part, our network includes refugees who were forced to flee the authoritarian government of Iran. We can’t support “the lesser of two evils,” nor can we accept the sort of binary reasoning that suggests that whomever the US government opposes must therefore be a good and legitimate government. We stand with those in the Mideast who have declared that
\n\n\n\n\nopposition to U.S. imperialism’s air strikes and war threats against Iran and Iraq can only be effective when rooted in solidarity with the progressive and revolutionary forces in the Middle East and North African region and full opposition to all the authoritarian governments and imperialist powers in the region.
\n
We’d like to see others in the United States put more energy into learning about anti-authoritarian resistance movements in Iran and elsewhere in the Mideast, and less energy into trying to rehabilitate Soleimani as an “anti-imperialist” hero. Both sides that wish to force the false binary of “Trump or Iran” on us are symmetrical in that they are counting on the threat represented by the alternative to force us to side with them. We have to make another option thinkable: a shared road to freedom.
\n\nThis is why we are against all wars, against all governments, against all oppression. We believe passionately in the potential that all human beings have for self-determination, mutual aid, and peaceful coexistence. The authorities on both sides would make us fear each other, but we know they are our chief enemy.
\n\n\n\n\n“The world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/08/1.jpg\")
You can obtain a printable poster version of this image here.
\nThe beginning of a new year offers us an opportunity to look back over our accomplishments and the things we stand to learn from the previous year. In the following report, we will review our efforts throughout 2019, set in the context of world events. This has been a year of stalemate in the US, while elsewhere, a new wave of confrontational movements has inspired some commentators to predict a global revival of anarchism on an unprecedented scale.
\n\nWhile this strikes us as optimistic, it adequately describes the stakes of the situation today. The first decade of the 21st century saw the end of the era of capitalist triumphalism; the second decade saw an explosion of uprisings followed by a wave of repression and reactionary nationalism. The decade ahead of us marks a decisive turning point in the history of our species. Increasingly polarized and nationalistic geopolitics are producing one war after another now. Desperate and oppressed people are rising up—though often without a clear analysis of the causes of their misery—while governments and corporations race to develop technology that can effectively surveil populations and suppress revolt. Meanwhile, industrially driven climate disruption is generating ecological disasters that threaten the biosphere itself.
\n\nWe will either figure out how to break down the existing mechanisms of control on a massive scale, as people have been doing in Chile over the past several months, or we will enter a period of worldwide tyranny from which humanity may never emerge.
\n\nCurrently, we are hardly prepared for the struggles this coming decade will bring. Still, it is helpful that some projects and networks persist from the struggles of the previous decades—including this particular project, the CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective. At the bare minimum, we have to pass on the lessons of past struggles, update our analyses and strategies for the current era, and form much more ambitious and wide-reaching networks and initiatives. The price of failing to do this will be unspeakable.
\n\nChilean anarchists and other rebels celebrating New Year’s Eve in Plaza de la Dignidad by driving back the police and honoring the dead.
\nEverything our collective accomplished in 2019—from writing articles and recording podcasts to programming this site and mailing out book orders—we achieved by means of 100% volunteer labor, working collectively and anonymously the way we have since the mid-1990s. We seek neither financial gain nor personal fame for what we do. We are driven solely by the desire for liberation—liberation for all, in all the different forms it takes.
\n\nAs others recently put it,
\n\n\n\n\n“For our part, we seek to live without masters or bosses, in harmony with nature and animals, in a dignified and responsible manner, respecting each other, understanding that each one has different abilities, but that each is of equal value… [we believe in] self-education, sharing in free association for the pleasure of doing so and not for the need to survive, relying on values such as solidarity, altruism, honesty, and mutual support.”
\n
If you like what we do, the best thing you can do is do it yourself—take action in your own community, develop and refine your own analyses and strategies, reach out to others and mobilize for social change. You can also contribute to our efforts in a variety of ways, or, failing that, donate to us to help us print new outreach materials. Please contact us if you want to help in some other way! Later this week, we’ll publish a more specific request for assistance with our next round of projects.
\n\nFor further reading in the vein of the following report, you could consult the 2019 overview from Anarchist Agency, a similar report from our Brazilian counterparts, and the reports we published looking back on 2018 and 2017.
\n\n\n \n\n \n
A New Year’s Eve dinner in Plaza de la Dignidad bringing together anarchists and other front-line fighters in the Chilean uprising with supporters from the older generation and the hungry and needy. Scenes like this show us how inspiring mutual aid practices can be in the midst of our ongoing struggles.
\nOver two years later, 2017 remains the high point of struggles against Trump and the repressive agenda his regime represents. For good or for ill, the airport blockades, the deplatforming of Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley, and the groundswell of anti-fascism that followed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville mark the high-water mark of contemporary direct action efforts. This is instructive: the moment of greatest possibility often occurs at the opening of a new era, when the horizon of what can happen has not yet been fixed in the popular imagination. Rather than planning to slowly build momentum, it is sometimes important to seize the window of opportunity and figure out how to build from there.
\n\nConversely, one of the reasons anarchists in the United States are experiencing a relative lull in activity is that, since 2017, we have been compelled to put more energy into mobilizing in response to emergencies than into slowly, steadily cultivating communities that can act together. The subcultures that nourished generations of rebels have largely melted away or been coopted; online networking is a poor substitute for long-term networks based in shared activities.
\n\nBut we should not hold ourselves solely responsible for the current lull. It takes place in the larger context of massive institutional efforts to substitute the spectator sport of electoral politics for the revolutionary practice of direct action.
\n\nAs we argued in “Life in ‘Mueller Time’,” the Democratic Party has intentionally introduced a series of spectacles aimed at centralizing itself in the popular imagination as the chief representative of anti-Trump sentiment and the only hope for social change. Foremost of these spectacles are the Mueller investigation, the recent impeachment proceedings, and the ongoing Democratic primaries. Neither the Mueller investigation nor the impeachment have threatened Trump’s power—and the 2020 election may not, either. But all three of them serve to focus attention on institutional processes and invest legitimacy in existing authority figures—including career politicians, judges, and the FBI.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/26/1.jpg\")
Against those who count on the authorities to resolve the problems caused by those in authority…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/hope-is-in-the-streets/hope-is-in-the-streets_front_color.jpg\")
…we know it’s up to us to deal with the situation.
\nIn this context of cooption, 2018 saw an impasse emerge in struggles between the nationalists around Trump, the centrists around the Democratic Party, and social movements, in which none of these three forces was able to definitively gain the upper hand. This impasse continued throughout 2019.
\n\nWe can see the evidence of this impasse in the desperately needed but not yet successful efforts to get a powerful new ecological movement off the ground in the US, despite the spread of Extinction Rebellion overseas; Extinction Rebellion is too legalistic and pacifist for our tastes, but its popularity speaks to a real need for ecological action. We can also see the impasse in the comparatively tame response to the Turkish invasion of Syria, at least outside the Bay Area and a couple other hotspots, and in the limits that solidarity efforts reached mobilizing against the latest wave of state attacks on the undocumented. Unfortunately, one of the more effective efforts in that struggle may have been the action Willem Van Spronsen carried out on the Northwest Detention Center, a private immigration detainment facility. Police killed Van Spronsen in response. But a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official subsequently explained to the media that the dramatic increase in anti-immigrant raids that Trump had called for had not taken place in part because of the fear Van Spronsen’s action had generated among the mercenaries serving ICE.
\n\nWe do not believe in canonizing people as heroes. Likewise, we strongly urge against people intentionally sacrificing their lives. If anti-border movements had found more effective collective means of action against ICE operations, maybe Van Spronsen would still be alive—and some of the millions of people who have been deported from the United States would still be at liberty. We honor the long-running efforts to support undocumented people that our comrades have maintained in the face of repression. The question of how to build on them remains a challenge for all of us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/the-border-is-everywhere/the-border-is-everywhere_front_color.jpg\")
Click the image to download the PDF.
\nMeanwhile, outside the United States, from France and Hong Kong to Sudan and Haiti, protracted struggles were playing out between governments and powerful social movements. This ferment reached as far as Puerto Rico, a United States territory, though denied equal status to the states proper.
\n\nIn October, conflict came to a boil on many fronts at once. Trump had been threatening to let Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan invade Rojava since December 2018; at the beginning of October, he finally did exactly that, giving Turkey carte blanche to slaughter and displace hundreds of thousands of people on the Syrian side of the border.
\n\nWe scrambled to respond, publishing a call for solidarity actions against the Turkish invasion that was endorsed by well over 100 organizations, alongside a series of articles on the situation, including “Why the Turkish Invasion Matters” and “The ‘Ceasefire’ Is a Deadly Fraud,” debunking Vice President Mike Pence’s lie that he had brokered a ceasefire in the region.
\n\nAt the same time, the wave of uprisings that had begun with Haiti, Hong Kong, and Sudan spread to Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Catalunya, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere. As our networks extend throughout many parts of the world, we went to great lengths to present on-the-ground reporting and analysis from many of these upheavals.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/10/23/3.jpg\")
Street fighters holding back the police during clashes in Catalunya, October 2019.
\nIn 2019, we published firsthand reports on struggles around the world, from Lebanon to Sudan. Here are some of the highlights.
\n\nCorresponding with anarchist participants in the powerful social movement against the Chinese-backed government of Hong Kong, we were fortunate to publish two of the most influential texts expressing the perspectives of anti-authoritarians within the movement, “Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill” and “Three Months of Insurrection.” We recommend these two interviews as some of our best and most thought-provoking work in 2019.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/20/15.jpg\")
Three Months of Insurrection: An Anarchist Collective in Hong Kong Appraises the Achievements and Limits of the Revolt.
\nThis year, Greece saw the inevitable end of the disappointing left government of Syriza, which was replaced by the aptly-named far-right New Democracy party. New Democracy immediately declared an all-out war against refugees, anarchists, squatters, students, and the world-famous Athenian neighborhood of Exarchia. In response, we worked with comrades in Athens to chronicle resistance and repression from one month to the next:
\n\nEarlier in 2019, we also published “Putting Ideas on Trial: The Greek State’s Laboratory of Repression,” an interview with Greek anarchist prisoner Nikos Romanos.
\n\nIn Ecuador, a state austerity package prompted an uprising that nearly overthrew the government. We interviewed a participant immediately before the government caved in and canceled the package, while barricades still stood in the streets of the nation’s capital: “Inside the Quito Commune.”
\n\nThe uprising in Ecuador helped to inspire a similar uprising in Chile, which continues to this day. We published two articles charting its first days, “Chile: Resisting under Martial Law” and “On the Front Lines in Chile:\nSix Accounts from the Uprising.” Since then, we have continued to publish updates and interviews from the streets of Chile via our podcast.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/08/14.jpg\")
Altered billboards in Chile: “Looting is how a university student has to pay over twenty years what a congressman makes in two months.”—”Violence is when the police burst into a high school and shoot at the students.”—”The destruction of something man-made is called ‘vandalism,’ while the destruction of nature is called ‘progress.’” From our text, “Not Falling for It: How the Uprising in Chile Has Outlasted State Repression.”
\nFollowing our critical coverage of the independence movement in Catalunya two years ago, we published a report on the clashes that broke out in Catalunya in October 2019. We followed it up shortly afterwards with a first-person account from the front lines of the fighting, one of the most exciting texts we published this past year.
\n\nThroughout the first half of 2019, we continued to publish reports from the Yellow Vest movement in France as it slowly wound down and transitioned into other movements. Continuing the analysis we began in From Democracy to Freedom, our most important text about the Gilets Jaunes in 2019 was probably “Between the Reaction and the Referendum,” a look at nationalism and “direct democracy” in the Yellow Vest movement.
\n\nAt the same time, a year after the state raids and evictions at la ZAD—the Zone à Défendre (Zone to Defend) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in western France, where occupiers had successfully blocked an unwanted airport—we published “Reflections on the ZAD: Another History.” While some activists steer away from dealing with the complex internal dynamics of inspiring projects like the ZAD, we feel that in the pursuit of liberation, it is just as important to learn from internal struggles as it is to learn from conflicts with the authorities; failing to do so will doom us to repeat the same mistakes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/04/23/header.jpg\")
La ZAD in France.
\nLike many other anarchists, we spent much of 2019 scrambling to react to emergencies rather than making progress on our own beloved projects. Especially in October and November, we put everything else on hold. One of our longer-term goals is to expand our capacity to such a point that we can continue to make progress towards our long-term projects while responding to current events.
\n\nUnexpectedly, one of our most widely read texts of 2019 was “Against the Logic of the Guillotine,” a critique of fantasies about using the institutions of the state to exact revenge. The popularity of articles like this suggests that we should be putting more energy into reflective and theoretical writing.
\n\nWe also reached many readers with “Storming the Gates,” an analysis of the importance of uncompromising anti-carceral movements, and “The Wrong ICE is Melting, The Wrong Amazon is Burning,” emphasizing the importance of direct action to ecological movements. We followed up the latter article with “What Is Burning the Amazon?”, a perspective from Brazil.
\n\nIn 2020, we aspire to step back from the constant commotion of events to publish more reflective texts like these.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/05/23/15.jpg\")
Storming the Gates: The New Wave of Frontal Attacks on Prisons, Jails, and Detention Centers.
\nBy and large, participants in CrimethInc. projects do most of our direct action organizing in other venues. However, we do occasionally coordinate mobilizations, such as our decade-running annual day of action, Steal Something from Work Day.
\n\nIn February 2019, facing another potential government shutdown over funding for Trump’s xenophobic border wall, we announced a call to action under the watchword “Block the Wall.” This campaign brought together a network of anti-border activists, giving rise to a variety of small outreach actions and longer-running solidarity efforts including a freestanding website.
\n\nAs mentioned above, our most significant mobilizing effort was our call to action against the Turkish invasion of Syria, which was endorsed by everyone from the Democratic Socialists of America and Cooperation Jackson to Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, and Debbie Bookchin.
\n\nFinally, at the end of the year, we announced a call for a day of action against the rising cost of living on November 29, 2019 under the banner #NobodyPays. This was inspired by the fare-dodging protests that had helped to catalyze the uprising in Chile. The call also appeared in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Finnish.
\n\nIn the United States, following two major demonstrations in New York City against police violence on public transit, #NobodyPays actions took place in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, and elsewhere, as chronicled here. Although the actions did not trigger a countrywide upheaval, like the evasión masiva actions in Chile, nor give rise to a fare-dodgers’ union, like planka.nu in Sweden, they did put the tactic of fare-dodging in the public consciousness as a means of taking collective direct action to counter austerity measures.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1200962321251733504\n\n\n
As we emphasized above, one of our missions is to pass on the experiences and lessons from recent anarchist efforts. Tomorrow’s rebels will be better equipped to act effectively if they are informed about the movements of the past several decades as well as classical reference points like the Paris Commune.
\n\nAt the beginning of 2019, two years after the #J20 demonstrations at Trump’s inauguration, we published a series of articles appraising the mobilization and the legal case that followed it. This included “Anarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration,” a minute-by-minute analysis of the events of January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC; “I Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant,” a narrative from one of the first defendants to go to trial in the subsequent conspiracy case; and “We’ve Got Your Back: The Story of the J20 Defense,” a full retrospective on the solidarity and legal support strategies that ultimately resulted in the dropping of charges against the vast majority of J20 defendants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/header.jpg\")
Anarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration: Understanding the Events of January 20, 2017.
\nWe published two other lengthy accounts of anarchist participation in 21st-century upheavals: “Looting Back,” chronicling the uprising that took place in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 in response to the police murder of Michael Brown, and “The Battle for Ungdomshuset,” recounting the history of Denmark’s most combative social center.
\n\nFollowing the Turkish invasion of Syria, we published “The Roots of Turkish Fascism,” charting the rise of fascism in Turkey across a century in order to explain the context of Erdoğan’s assault. For lighter reading, we observed Valentine’s Day with “Love, Anarchy, and Drama,”\nexploring several classical anarchists’ experiments with non-monogamy.
\n\nFinally, continuing our series on the Russian Counterrevolution that we began on the 100-year anniversary of the seizure of the Winter Palace in 1917, we published “When the Bolsheviks Turned on the Workers,” a retrospective on the Putilov and Astrakhan strikes of 1919.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/09/33a.jpg\")
Looting Back: An Account of the Ferguson Uprising.
\nIn 2019, we published a full audiobook version of our book No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration across North America. We hope this can set a precedent for us to release audiobook versions of future books, as well.
\n\nThe podcast crew also mobilized to respond to the Turkish invasion of Syria, releasing a four-episode series within only ten days. Then they did the same thing in response to the uprising in Chile, releasing three fully bilingual episodes from on the ground at the center of the uprising, with a fourth episode to be released shortly.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/podcast/70/ep70-1400.jpg\")
\nAt long last, we are poised to make this site fully functional in a wide range of languages in addition to English. Already, we have es.crimethinc.com and de.crimethinc.com functioning for those who access the site from Spanish-speaking and German-speaking parts of the world; already, you can peruse crimethinc.com/languages to find a list of the articles we have available in each of ten different tongues.
\n\nA considerable number of posters, zines, and book pdfs are also available on this site now in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and other languages, and we hope to add a lot more soon. In 2019, we also added a Japanese version of our anarchist primer To Change Everything to the site, bringing the total number of language options for that project to 32. Currently, it is our most translated project; soon, we hope to make much more of our material available multilingually.
\n\nIf you can help us translate texts, or simply collect and proofread existing translations, please contact us.
\n\nOne of our responsibilities in maintaining this site is to keep 25 years worth of CrimethInc. texts and projects accessible to new generations. In 2019, we added a journals page to our archive, including all the issues of our magazine Rolling Thunder, and also added scans of a much older journal we started publishing in the 1990s, the hardcore zine Inside Front.
\n\nWe also reprinted two of our classic books, Work (2011) and Expect Resistance (2007).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/06/header.jpg\")
\nWe didn’t do as much with the arts in 2019 as we hope to in 2020. Our most widely circulated creative work was probably\n“Police: An Ethnography,” a photoessay exploring the common threads that tie together police psychology all around the world. In the art-for-art’s-sake category, for Valentine’s Day we published two works of pure fiction, “Injury against Erasure/Damage against Time.”
\n\nWe also published two games this year—our acclaimed J20 Protest Simulator, a choose-your-own-adventure game enabling the player to participate in the black bloc that interrupted the spectacle of Trump’s inauguration, and Up against the Wall, Motherfucker, a simulation of the 1968 occupation of Columbia University.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/games/j20/images/header.jpg\")
\nClick here to play our J20 Protest Simulator.
\n\nThroughout 2019, CrimethInc. agents distributed literature at events across the United States, including the Asheville Anarchist Book Fair, the Olympia Zine Fest, the Boston Anarchist Book Fair, the New York City Anarchist Book Fair, the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine fest in Oakland, the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco, and the Humboldt County Anarchist Book Fair, among others.
\n\nCrimethInc. agents also conducted tours of the southern half of Brazil between June and July and the West Coast of the United States in December, promoting the English and Portuguese versions of the book From Democracy to Freedom and speaking about various forms of contemporary anarchist struggle. The report from the tour in Brazil includes an overview of anarchist projects and popular struggles throughout the country.
\n\nThis report only covers a fraction of what we did in 2019. We have a lot planned for 2020, but as usual, it’s better not to promise things—but simply to do them. We’ll see you on the front lines this year.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/01/06/1.jpg\")
Celebrants in the Plaza de la Dignidad on New Year’s Eve, 2019: “Only by fighting do we advance.”
\nSince October 17, Lebanon has experienced countrywide demonstrations that have toppled the prime minister and transformed Lebanese society. These demonstrations are part of a global wave of uprisings including Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Haiti, Sudan, Iraq, Hong Kong, and Catalunya, in which the exploited and oppressed are challenging the legitimacy of their rulers. In Lebanon, a sectarian power-sharing arrangement dating from the end of the civil war has created a permanent ruling class of warlords who use patronage networks to maintain power by winning elections—confirming our thesis that politics is war by other means. In this thorough account of the events of the past month, an on-the-ground participant describes the Lebanese uprising in detail, exploring how it has undermined patriarchal structures and transcended religious divisions to bring people together against the ruling class.
\n\nReport courtesy of Elia J. Ayoub, writer.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/13/1.jpg\")
\nFor the people of Lebanon, the week of October 17, 2019 was among the most eventful in recent memory.
\n\nOn the night of October 13-14, wildfires ravaged Lebanon and parts of Syria. We lost up to 3,000,000 trees (1200 hectares) in a country of 10,500 square kilometers (4035 square miles), nearly doubling the annual average of tree loss in just 48 hours. The government’s response was disastrous. Lebanon had only three helicopters, donated by civilians who pitched in, that were just sitting at the airport because they had fallen into disuse as the government had not maintained them. Although the government had allocated money for maintenance, it had “disappeared,” as so many funds do in Lebanon, into the hands of the sectarian upper class. The fires were eventually put out by a combination of volunteer civil servants (civil defense hasn’t been paid in decades) including people from the Palestinian refugee camps, random volunteers, aircraft sent by Jordan, Cyprus, and Greece and, luckily enough, rain. It could have turned out much, much worse.
\n\nNot satisfied with their own incompetence, Lebanese politicians started scapegoating Syrians, spreading rumors that Syrians were starting the fires and moving into abandoned Lebanese homes (Syrians are apparently fireproof). Some of them, like Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) politician Mario Aoun, complained that the fires were only affecting Christian areas, ignoring the fact that the Shouf region, where much of the fires happened, is actually a Druze-majority area. (See the Lebanese Politics podcast, episode 59.)
\n\nRather than addressing the repercussions of the fires and preventing the next ones, the state exacerbated the situation. On October 17, the state approved a bill that would tax internet-based phone calls via services like WhatsApp. They framed this as an attempt to bring in additional revenue in order to unlock over $11 billion worth of “aid” promised at the CEDRE conference in Paris:
\n\n\n\n\n“The World Bank Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa Ferid Belhaj said that if Lebanon wanted to see any CEDRE money soon, it needs to get serious about implementing reforms.”
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These “reforms” were essentially measures further punishing the bottom-tier economic majority while excepting the top minority.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/joeyayoub/status/1185086206847135744\n\n\n
Lebanon had already experienced a series of economic crises tied to corruption and national debt—the vast majority of which (approximately 90%) is owed to local banks and the central bank—resulting in several bank runs, fuel shortages, and strikes. Nearly $90 billion is concentrated in only 24,000 bank accounts in Lebanon, which is to say, something between 6000 and 8000 account holders in Lebanon have over eight times the amount of money that the government is hoping to “unlock” with CEDRE. Although many media outlets focused on the so-called “Whatsapp tax,” it was actually the combination of all of these factors and many more that inspired outrage.
\n\nOn the night of October 17, thousands took to the streets of Lebanon, including Beirut, Tyre, Baalbek, Nabatiyeh, Saida, and many other places in spontaneous protests. The protests were so overwhelming that the state cancelled the tax immediately. That night, a woman named Malak Alaywe Herz kicked the armed bodyguard of a politician; the video went viral and, as in Sudan, a woman became a revolutionary icon. By October 18, parts of downtown Beirut were on fire and large parts of the country were completely shut down by roadblocks, many of which involved burning tires.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AbouchacraRoy/status/1184939932810465281\n\n\n
I had joined the protests in Beirut by then and have been going nearly every day since. As an organizer of the 2015 protests, who grew up in Lebanon and who has been writing about it since 2012, I could see right away that these protests were going to be different. I wasn’t the only one taken over by that rarest of all feelings: hope. On the contrary, it was everywhere. In this account, I will try to explain why these protests have already created irreversible changes in the country, changes that the ruling warlord-oligarch elites are struggling to reverse.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/13/3.jpg\")
Martyrs’ Square, central Beirut. Photograph by Elia J. Ayoub.
\nIt’s useful to think of the ongoing uprising as having both reformist and revolutionary dimensions. It is an uprising against injustice and corruption and a revolution against sectarianism.
\n\nThe reformist dimension takes the form of protests against corruption. One common demand, expressed in the chant kellon yaani kellon (“all of them means all of them”), is for the government to resign. On October 20, four ministers associated with the Lebanese Forces (LF), a party led by former warlord Samir Geagea, resigned; since then, the LF has been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to ride the wave of the protests. The first major victory was Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s resignation on Tuesday, October 29, effectively collapsing the government as we had known it—although, as of this writing, he is still caretaker prime minister.
\n\nThere are no unified demands coming from the streets; in many ways, there is resistance to formulating a list of demands. That said, there are several popular demands, mostly calling for the end of corruption and sectarian politics, which are rightly seen as intertwined. We see these in the street interviews conducted by TV stations, on social media, and between protesters themselves. As Kareem Chehayeb and Abby Sewell wrote, in addition to the government’s resignation, two common demands have been for “early parliamentary elections with a new electoral law for elections that are not based on sectarian proportionality” and “for an independent investigation into stolen and misappropriated public funds.” That last one was succinctly summarized by a man from Arsal: “There is no war. This is about money. You stole the money, return the money.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/JadChaaban/status/1185962175011180550\n\n\n
The protests are anti-sectarian in many different ways. They transcend what we might think of as left/right divides and even include traditional supporters of sectarian political parties. This anger is nearly three decades in the making; the inter-generational traumas are even older. Since the end of the civil war, Lebanon’s transnational warlord-oligarch class has perfected the rules of the game. The state serves as a vessel through which this class can do business with itself and with primarily Gulf, Iranian, and Western elites; clientalist networks maintain structures of power benefitting this class, keeping segments of the population dependent on them; public infrastructures have been left to rot while rapid privatization limits freedom of movement between regions and regularly paralyzes the whole country; and, more recently, the fear of violence spilling over from Syria have been regularly evoked, three decades after the country’s own civil war, to impose helplessness on the people of Lebanon.
\n\nLong story short: while trying to recover from 15 years of civil war, residents of Lebanon have spent the past three decades navigating life in a country whose affairs they have had very little say over. An implosion was inevitable, but the way it has happened is challenging the more cynical interpretations of Lebanese political life, including those of the Lebanese themselves.
\n\nWhen the civil war ended under the “tutelage” (read: occupation) of the Syrian regime, the powers that be scrambled to create a semblance of politics in order to promote the message that the 1990s would be the decade of reconstruction. In Beirut, this involved privatizating virtually everything. The historical downtown, which Arabs throughout the region refer to as Al-Balad (literally “the country”) was transformed into Solidere, the private company founded by the Hariri family. This \n“actually existing neoliberalism” was sugarcoated in a language of hope: the narrative was that only through business ties could the menace of the civil war be kept at bay. This was the time that our generation was born—the postwar generation that I like to refer to as the “afterthought generation.” We grew up hearing stories of “the good old days” prior to the war, when Beirut had a tramway and people could sell merchandise in public spaces. Needless to say, that rosy picture of the pre-war years glossed over many crises at the regional and national levels, crises that ultimately led to the civil war in 1975.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/13/6.jpg\")
“It’s called Al-Balad, not Solidere.”
\nBut the 1990s also saw other developments. The parliament passed an amnesty law in 1991 forgiving most of the crimes committed during the war, enabling those with established power to get into government. Most of the current political heavyweights were warlords or related to warlords, or else became active in the postwar era either in its first days or after the 2005 Cedar Revolution that expelled the Syrian army.
\n\nThese political figures include Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal movement since the 1980s and speaker of parliament since 1992; Michel Aoun, president of the republic, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) who returned from exile in 2005, and father-in-law of Gebran Bassil, who is also a leader of the FPM as well as the foreign minister; Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces (LF) since the 1980s, freed from prison in 2005 and historical rival of Aoun; Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah since 1992; Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive “Socialist” Party (PSP) since 1977; and Samy Gemayel, leader of the Kataeb party and nephew of Bachir Gemayel, a warlord who was assassinated in 1982 while president-elect. In addition, we can count Future Movement (FM) leader Saad Hariri, repeat prime minister and son of assassinated prime minister Rafik Hariri, as one the most prominent oligarchs of the postwar era, alongside Tammam Salam, former prime minister and the son of Saeb Salam, six-time prime minister before the civil war, and Najib Mikati, also former prime minister and usually cited as the richest man in Lebanon.
\n\nIn short, Lebanon is ruled by political dynasties that were forged in the fire of the civil war or during its postwar “reconstruction.” This is who protesters in the northern city of Tripoli addressed on November 2 with the chant “we are the popular revolution, you are the civil war.”
\n\nTripoli, Northern Lebanon’s biggest city, has been at the forefront of the uprising. Nearly every day since October 17, thousands of protesters in Tripoli have taken to the streets to demand the fall of the sectarian regime. To quote one 84-year-old participant, “There is so much poverty and deprivation here that, no matter how this turns out, things will be better.” In addition to the spectacular displays of popular mobilization, kellon yaani kellon and “the people want the downfall of the regime” ring out on a daily basis.
\n\nTripoli, a Sunni-majority city, has been openly defying the sectarian narrative by declaring that they stand with Nabatiyeh, Tyre, and Dahieh—all Shia-majority. When Hezbollah and Amal shabbiha (government thugs) attacked protesters in Nabatiyeh on October 23, Tripoli responded “Nabatiyeh, Tripoli is with you until death.” The “popular revolution vs. civil war” chant, quickly adopted in the rest of Lebanon, presents a narrative in which those who still cling to their sectarian identities as relics of the civil war oppose those who are trying to build a future that is inclusive of all regardless of religious sects. Tripoli’s protests indicated early on that this uprising would be different.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/joeyayoub/status/1188204854730252289\n\n\n
Tripoli has maintained a distinct momentum because of the organizational structures that have emerged. As in Beirut, protesters in Tripoli have set up people’s hospitals and discussion forums in addition to occupying the municipal building. The mobilizations have been so inclusive that, for the first time I know of, protesters from elsewhere in Lebanon have gone to Tripoli to participate in the protests there, in response to an open invitation. On October 22, just before protesters started chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime,” a man with a megaphone declared “if they [the government] shut down all the squares, you are all welcome in Nour Square [the main square].” For the first time, Tripoli became the center of national Lebanese outrage. Nour means “light” in Arabic; the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury named Tripoli the light of the revolution.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/joeyayoub/status/1186747341660917762\n\n\n
To grasp the significance of this, it is necessary to understand that parts of Tripoli and the Akkar district north of it have historically born the brunt of state violence while being demonized by the public and media as hubs of Sunni extremism. Both the Lebanese state and Hezbollah have adopted their own versions of the post-9/11 “War on Terror” narrative, and the Sunni-majority areas of northern Lebanon, among the poorest of Lebanon and close to Syria, have become scapegoats. Yet despite these attempts by the sectarian parties, the scapegoating of the North has failed to hinder this movement. One can find sectarian comments online, usually mingled with anti-refugee comments, but they have not significantly impacted the momentum on the streets.
\n\nThis is why the status of Tripoli as the de facto capital of the revolution has made political actors like the FPM very uncomfortable. The FPM television station, OTV, has regularly demonized protesters in Tripoli and Akkar, engaging in a disinformation campaign from the start. One headline claimed that Tripoli was “copying” the Syrian city of Homs (brutally crushed by the Assad regime in 2014), suggesting that militants from Idlib were making their way there. Another pundit on OTV proclaimed “just as we went to Syria and buried their revolution, we will bury this revolution in Lebanon.” (The FPM never militarily participated in Syria, but its ally Hezbollah obviously did). When an activist in Beirut responded to anti-Syrian refugee sentiments by chanting “Bassil out, refugees in,” OTV took that footage and added the headline “American training, Saudi incitement, Syrian infiltration.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/joeyayoub/status/1188204813827411970\n\n\n
The Syria connection runs deep. Protesters in Tripoli have chanted “Idlib we are with you until death,” in reference to the Syrian city that continues to be bombed by the Russian and Syrian air forces; Syrian chants have been adopted and re-purposed throughout Lebanon. As one Syrian activist wrote, “Lebanon’s political establishment, particularly the part of it that is still in power, is increasingly annoyed by Tripoli and going to lengths to paint in a bad light the city and its inhabitants.” The scapegoating of Tripoli could be seen as an extension of the Lebanese government’s response to the Syrian revolution, especially on the part of Hezbollah, Amal, and the FPM. Although officially unaffiliated, the Lebanese government has taken a hardline turn against refugees since Aoun’s election in 2016—not that the government was pro-refugee before. Bassil especially has associated himself with this rhetoric, hence the anti-Bassil pro-refugee chant.
\n\nThe district of Akkar has arguably been scapegoated by politicians and media outlets even more than Tripoli. Although protests there began alongside the rest of Lebanon, media coverage remains minimal. On October 30, protesters in Akkar, as elsewhere in the country, echoed the famous Syrian chant “yalla erhal ya Bashar” (hurry up, leave Bashar [Assad]), adjusting it to “yalla erhal Michel Aoun,” as first heard in Beirut. That same night, security forces attacked a march in Akkar as protesters tried to block the roads. The violent response by security forces led protesters to contrast the relatively mild response by security forces in Beirut to their response in Akkar.
\n\nThe other part of the story here is set in the South, especially in Nabatiyeh and Tyre (known as Sour in Arabic), as well as the Bekaa Valley in the East.
\n\nProtesters in Nabatiyeh were among the first to demonstrate on the night of October 17. By October 18, some were already challenging long-standing taboos. The very suggestion one protester made on live television—that Nabih Berri, whose Amal movement dominates the region politically alongside Hezbollah, has been Speaker of Parliament for too long—terrified the journalist interviewing him; the tweet documenting this has since been deleted. To understand why this occurred and why what is happening in the South and East is so important, we need to discuss the shabbiha.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/joeyayoub/status/1186550209607852032\n\n\n
The shabbiha have historically been a Syrian phenomenon. The word itself comes from “ghost” or “shadow”; it is often associated with black Mercedes S600 cars (called al-shabah) which have been used for kidnapping Syrian dissidents and protesters. Later on, the term took on a more general connotation, describing men willing to be violent on behalf of their zu’ama (singular: za’im)—local warlords or chieftains—who often receive orders from above. This can be anything from beating up protesters to kidnapping, torturing, even killing them. The latter isn’t as common in Lebanon anymore, which is why the term shabbiha now means any pro-government actor willing to inflict violence on protesters.
\n\nThis image, for example, shows armed pro-Amal shabbiha in Tyre on October 19; a video from that same morning shows these shabbiha attacking protesters. Due to their nature, it is often very difficult to identify shabbiha, and almost impossible to “prove” a chain of command. But for both historical and contemporary reasons, they have become associated with the Amal Movement and Hezbollah (although armed FPM shabbiha have also attacked protesters on at least one occasion).
\n\nAlthough Beirut also experienced two major attacks by shabbiha, it is worth noting here that even the events of October 29, when hundreds of Amal/Hezbollah men went to downtown Beirut to beat protesters and journalists and destroy tents set up by protesters, pale in comparison to what they have been getting away with in the South. On October 23, Amal/Hezbollah shabbiha attacked protesters in Nabatiyeh, injuring over 20 of them. This so shocked protesters that half a dozen municipal council members resigned the next day under pressure. In response to the October 23 attack, October 24 was called “the day of solidarity with Nabatiyeh” and a meme was passed around with the words “Nabatiyeh doesn’t kneel, ask the Zionists.” On the “Sunday of Unity” (November 3), protesters in Kfar Remen, historically known for its communist resistance to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, met with protesters from Nabatiyeh. Some protesters fleeing Nabatiyeh’s Hezbollah-affiliated police went to Kfar Remen to join the protests there.
\n\nThis is an extraordinary turn of events for a region of Lebanon that is often considered Hezbollah and Amal’s unchallenged territory; the same goes for the Bekaa valley. But the challenges to the dominant powers have continued. We’ve heard chants such as “We don’t want an army in Lebanon except the Lebanese army” (a challenge to the actual dominant military power, Hezbollah) as well as in solidarity with Tripoli and the rest of Lebanon. We saw violence by shabbiha in Bint Jbeil, a town on the southern border which suffered greatly under Israeli occupation and then during the 2006 war. Tyre also joined on the first evening, chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime”; by October 19, shabbiha were violently attacking protesters. Journalists were forced to flee the scene as shabbiha were indiscriminately beating anyone in their way. One witness described how the mukhabarat (secret police) were following protesters alongside the shabbiha.
\n\nAs for the Bekaa valley, media coverage has been relatively low. There have been protests in Zahleh, Baalbek, Taalbaya, Bar Elias, Saadnayel, Chtoura, Majdal Anjar, Al-Fakeha, Hasbaya, Rashaya, and Al-Khyara, among other places.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/joeyayoub/status/1188209150800596992\n\n\n
The reactions to these shabbiha attacks were an early sign of the proverbial barrier of fear being broken. Protesters in Beirut chanted “Tyre, Tyre, for you we will rise” (which rhymes in Arabic), a chant that rapidly became common throughout the country.
\n\nSince then, we’ve seen a now-familiar pattern repeat itself: repression is followed by resistance, which is sometimes followed by sectarian supporters turning out in large numbers, but other times results in protesters gaining the upper hand. This is an important part of the uprising; there is also a very clear attempt by protesters to “convert” sectarian party supporters under the unified banner of anti-sectarian politics. Up to now, this has proven relatively successful: while we can never assess who officially supports sectarian parties and who does not, anecdotal evidence and direct testimony suggest that a majority of the population would at least agree with the broader discontent motivating the protesters.
\n\nThese attacks could be described as the stick part of the government’s carrot and stick strategy. As for the carrot part, it’s been rather confused. The main actors have been struggling to offer a coherent response to the protests, largely because they disagree among themselves and are trying, as usual, to navigate their own politics on a daily basis. The decentralized and horizontal nature of the protests has hampered the state’s attempts to demonize or co-opt them.
\n\nHassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, gave a speech on October 19. As of this writing, Nasrallah has spoken four times since the beginning of the uprising already, an unusual phenomenon in itself. Although Nasrallah holds no official position in the Lebanese government, he is seen as a de facto kingmaker due to Hezbollah’s military power. But despite having a reputation among his followers of being relatively sober in his speeches, his first speech was characterized by unadulterated rage, arrogance, and condescension. He directly told protesters that they are wasting their time and that this “mandate” (his choice of words could also be translated as “era” or “covenant”) will not fall, in reference to the 2016 deal that led to Michel Aoun becoming president and Saad Hariri becoming Prime Minister (Remember, Nabih Berri has not left his position of Speaker of Parliament since 1992.) He even accused protesters of being funded by foreign embassies, leading protesters to respond by saying “I am funding the revolution,” which has since become a meme and appeared on street signs as well. One Lebanese videographer responded by posting a video of Nasrallah himself saying that Hezbollah is 100% funded and armed by Iran.
\n\nBy maintaining support for the government, Nasrallah threw his weight behind two of the most unpopular men in Lebanese politics: the FPM’s Gebran Bassil and the FM’s Saad Hariri. This exposed the establishment as opportunistic and corrupt. Just as the sectarian political parties united in 2016 to defeat Beirut Madinati in the municipal elections, they were now once again uniting to defeat the popular uprising. But Nasrallah made a grave error. By saying that this government will not fall, he added pressure on Hariri to resign. Hariri was already the weakest link in this coalition, as he had to appeal to his rivals the FPM and Hezbollah to stay in power against his own supporters’ wishes. On October 29, Hariri finally resigned, apparently surprising Hezbollah. In thirteen days, protesters had forced the collapse of a government that had taken months and months to be formed.1 In the weeks since the revolution started, the warlord-oligarch class has been scrambling to address a crisis they never anticipated.
\n\nBut as mentioned above, other political parties have been trying to ride the wave of the revolution. This has been especially obvious with Geagea and the LF, the FPM’s historical rival—a rivalry that dates back to the bloody Geagea-Aoun battles during the civil war and was rekindled after 2005. The LF saw a golden opportunity when the revolution started: by quitting and leaving an unpopular government, the LF believed it could weaken its rivals, as both groups appeal to the same sectarian votes. There have been LF supporters blocking the roads as well; this has posed a conundrum for anti-government protesters. Following Hariri’s resignation, some protesters prefer to focus on the big players currently in government—Aoun and Berri, respectively president and speaker of parliament—yet the slogan kellon yaani kellon continues to dominate protests. Despite what supporters of the FPM/Amal/Hezbollah want to believe, the LF is not popular among protesters; it has negligible support in most places that have seen protests. There is a strong consensus that no sectarian political party will be supported, no matter how hard they try.
\n\nIt is still too early to know what the government’s next steps will be. As of this writing, the caretaker government has yet to appoint new ministers and the parliament is planning to discuss a law that would grant a general amnesty covering crimes such as abuse of authority, negligence, and environmental crimes. The situation is developing very quickly.
\n\nThe protests in Lebanon have been incredibly creative. Students in Tripoli have used cranes to get other students out of class; sandwiches were handed out in Beirut labeled “funded by Saudi Arabia/France/US” to mock those alleging that the protesters are funded by foreign powers; one of the many roadblocks was turned into a public salon with couches, a refrigerator, and people playing football, and featured on AirBnB (for free); protesters occupied Zaitunay Bay, a private waterfront built on top of Beirut’s stolen coast, and screened the film V for Vendetta (on November 5, obviously); images of sectarian leaders have been taken down and burned; people have banged pots, echoing Chile’s cacerolazos, on the streets and from their homes; volunteers have established soup kitchens in Beirut and Tripoli; a historic abandoned cinema was reclaimed and repurposed as a cinema, classroom, and gathering spot for artists; people formed a human chain from the north to the south; protesters blocking roads sang “baby shark” to a child stuck in traffic; protesters regularly wear masks of Guy Fawkes, Dali, and the Joker; organizers have arranged open forums to bring together protesters from Tripoli, Saida, Nabatieh, Zouk, Aley, and Beirut. Protesters “blocked” a railway station as a joke, to make a point: Lebanon’s railways were destroyed during the civil war and never rebuilt. The privatization of the 1990s came at the expense of public spaces and services, which is why a big part of the protests have sought to reclaim them, engaging in guerilla planting and the like.
\n\nThe general idea here is that protesters have to re-invent their tactics constantly in order to make it difficult for the state to keep up. For example, there is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of roadblocks. The chief objection is that politicians are not as affected by them as everyday people trying to go to work or send their kids to school. As of now, this tactic is still being used, but it’s no longer the main one. In recent days, protesters have moved to occupy or protest in front of government buildings and other symbols of power: everything from politicians’ houses to national power stations (most of Lebanon still does not have 24/7 electricity), passing the main telecommunications and data operators, banks, municipalities, and so on. There are now dozens of different actions on a daily basis, with most actions announced only a day before. As of this writing, high school and university students—and some even younger students—have been protesting for three days in Saida, Beirut, Jounieh, Tripoli, Koura, Bar Elias/Zahleh, Mansourieh, Hadath, Baalbek, Nabatiyeh, Al-Khyara, Al-Eyn, Mazraat Yachouh, Furn El Chebbak, Akkar, Tannourine, Batroun, and Byblos/Jbeil, among other places.
\n\nThere has also been an online effort to counter fake news spread by supporters of the government and the political parties themselves, as well as to help protesters stay informed more generally: el3asas (“the city watch”) is verifying news spread on social media and by official news outlets; a directory called Daleel Thawra (“directory of the revolution”) is keeping track of the various actions, activities and initiatives; TeleThawra (“revolution TV”) offers an alternative to Lebanon’s government-owned Télé Liban; Fawra Media (“Outburst Media”) aims to document “the individuals and groups that are sustaining the Lebanese Revolution”; Sawt Alniswa (“Voice of Women”) is a women-run magazine published weekly; and Megaphone News has been a leading independent media outlet since 2017.
\n\nThese developments have opened up a space for people and narratives that are usually suppressed at the national or party level.
\n\nIn addition to the aforementioned, Palestinian and Syrian activists have actively participated in the protests, particularly in the two biggest cities, Beirut and Tripoli. Elements of the sectarian media took advantage of this to reiterate their allegations that the protests are “infiltrated by foreigners.” Aware of this, many Palestinians and Syrians have since learned how to navigate Lebanese politics, chiefly by keeping a low profile. Besides a protest in Ain El Helweh Refugee Camp, where Palestinians directly expressed solidarity with the Lebanese protests, the Palestinians in Saida, Beirut, Tripoli, and elsewhere who have participated so far have been careful to “keep to the sidelines in the Lebanese demonstrations to avoid being accused of instigating or usurping the protest movement.” This, notably, has made it more difficult for the xenophobes to play their usual game, given that it is impossible to differentiate between Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian people unless they wave their respective national flags. (This text offers some background on the scapegoating tactics.)
\n\nWe’ve also seen, to a lesser extent, chants from protesters in solidarity with Egyptians, Sudanese, and other Arab parts of the Middle East and North Africa region, and there is some awareness, mostly expressed on social media, of ongoing protests and violence in Iraq, Hong Kong, Rojava, and Chile. Although quickly forgotten at the national level, we also saw riots on the first day in Zahle and Roumieh Prisons in solidarity with the protesters, as well as to bring attention to Lebanon’s horrific prison conditions and to repeat calls for a general amnesty law, as many people are arrested for supposed links to jihadi groups, drug possession, and so on.
\n\nAs of now, there’s been no major participation by migrant domestic workers, who are generally confined to Lebanese family houses or else are languishing in horrific underground prisons with little to no political rights under the country’s notorious Kafala (sponsorship) system. That is unlikely to change in the near future, given the restraints imposed on them, but if the momentum of the protests continues, it could open up enough political space for new political connections to form.
\n\nUp to now, the protests have focused on tackling widespread corruption and the sectarian system. But the role of feminists, including LGBTQ+ and/or non-Lebanese activists, suggests an attempt by segments of the protesters to create a more progressive and inclusive movement. Feminists have held separate marches to highlight the patriarchal structures that disproportionately oppress women and LGBTQ+ people—notably, the fact that Lebanese women still cannot pass on their nationality to their spouses and children and the fact that the country’s sectarian laws governing such affairs as marriage, divorce, custody and so on discriminate against women. Both women and men have marched for the right to pass on nationality, in Tyre and Tripoli, and elsewhere.
\n\nWomen have also used their bodies to protect other protesters from the police and prevent violence from escalating. As Leya Awadat, one participant in these “feminist walls,” put it, “In this chauvinistic society, it is badly seen for men to publicly beat women” (emphasis on publicly)—so they have been using that to their advantage.
\n\nLGBTQ+ people have also been the target of homophobic insults. One shabbiha attacking protesters on October 29 was heard on live television yelling, “Men are fucking men!” A guest on OTV claimed that protesters want to destroy sectarianism in the name of some kind of “gay agenda.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/timourazhari/status/1185662379864051713\n\n\n
The feminist marches always meet up with the main marches. The idea is not to create separate movements but rather to make their presence known within the wider demands for justice and equality. Feminists have led many of the roadblocks and many chants as well as maintaining an active presence in day-to-day activities that help maintain the momentum of this uprising. One way they have accomplished this is by reclaiming chants and songs—both traditional and recent—and removing their sexist connotations. The popular “hela hela” song against Gebran Bassil insulted his mother—it is very common in the Arabic-speaking world to use women or their genitals as insults—so feminists changed it to insult both Gebran and “his uncle” (the president, Michel Aoun) instead, creating a chant that has since caught on. They also reclaimed a traditional song used to send women off to marriage, changing the lyrics to “she went to protest, she went to close the roads, she went to bring down the government.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/joeyayoub/status/1192149611957424128\n\n\n
Contrary to what some have assumed, the elephant in the room is not sectarianism as of now. While the risk of sectarian tensions will likely remain for the foreseeable future, the more immediate risk is the looming economic crisis. In my opinion, this is why more radical forms of politics are only timidly surfacing. The fear that things will get much worse is both real and realistic; it is very difficult to speak of alternative ways of organizing ourselves, even transcending the petty (and dangerous) Lebanese/non-Lebanese distinctions, when most people’s primary concern is the likelihood of medicine and fuel shortages and possibly even food shortages. While more radical politics may organically develop if the economic situation gets worse, it is also possible that the more nationalistic and sectarian elements of Lebanese politics will be strengthened instead. The latter tendencies have decades of experience in power, whereas the kinder forms of politics are relatively new, just being built on the streets and online.
\n\nConsequently, a dominant perception among protesters is that we need to be both angry and careful.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/13/5.jpg\")
Banner reading “Economic justice is a feminist cause” with Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque in the background—Martyrs’ Square, Beirut. Photo by Elia J. Ayoub.
\nThat being said, the soup kitchens, the free healthcare tents, and the reclaiming of privatized historical sites and coastal areas are all initiatives that implicitly affirm what we can call the commons. This is crucial to understand in a country that has had no commons in recent memory, where they dominant “pro-market” ideology predates the establishment of the nation state of Lebanon.
\n\nAlthough the main actors could be argued to be roughly a dozen or so public figures, the reason the clientalist networks have so far worked also has to do with the existence of a subset of the population which benefits from these networks. They place themselves as intermediaries between the oligarchs and those seeking wasta (bribes, nepotism, “who you know”) to receive services not provided by the state. In other words, some people have financial incentives to maintain clientalist networks against the establishment of anything that might be called public institutions. Overhauling and then overthrowing such a system will be difficult. Overthrowing such a system while confronting the state’s brutal potential will be even more difficult.
\n\nBut if the loose coalition of anti-sectarian progressives doesn’t tackle this issue, it is likely that the state will scapegoat those it has already been targeting: Syrian and Palestinian refugees and workers, migrant domestic workers (mostly from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, and overwhelmingly women), LGBTQ+ people (citizens and non-citizens), sex workers, and the like. Any individual who doesn’t fit the dominant patriarchal-capitalist-sectarian paradigm is at risk of physical, psychological, and symbolic violence.
\n\nFinally, and this is related to the previous point, defeating political sectarianism and “the sectarian way of doing things” is seen as an immediate priority. This system, which dates back to the 1860s in one manifestation or another, has been losing its aura of being untouchable with the postwar generations, both Millennials and, especially, Generation Zs—those who have lived their entire lives hearing their parents complain “Where is the government?” when they have to pay two separate bills for electricity (private and public) and three separate bills for water (private and public running water, private bottled drinking water). As the warlords get older—two of the most powerful ones, Aoun and Berri, are 84 and 81 respectively—we will see the inevitable decline of the sectarianism of the civil war era.
\n\nBut while this might be inevitable, the question is whether anti-sectarian progressives will succeed in building sustainable alternatives that can challenge the old order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/11/13/4.jpg\")
Protesters in a mock hanging holding signs proclaiming “1975” (the beginning of the civil war) and “Sectarianism”—Riad El Solh street, Beirut. Photograph by Elia J. Ayoub.
\nWe have many reasons to hope, as Bassel F. Salloukh wrote, because “the October 17 revolution marks the definitive end of the civil war, and a genuine bottom-up reconciliation between one-time warring communities.”
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