3.3 The relationship with the bourgeois forces in the resistance
A core question of the differences in the communist movement over the Palestinian liberation struggle is what relationship communists should have with the bourgeois forces of the Palestinian resistance. On the one hand, there is the position that communists must actively distance themselves from forces that represent a reactionary ideology. Others believe that distinguishing between different forces of the Palestinian resistance and criticizing Islamic groups divides the resistance and distracts from the only relevant goal, namely the fight against Zionism.
The fact that we cannot share the second position results from our strategic orientation. The connection of the national liberation struggle with the revolutionary struggle for socialism, the rejection of a phased strategy for Palestine obviously means that bourgeois groups such as Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are competitors within the liberation movement, whose influence the communists must fight and push back . Not only will such forces not be winnable to a socialist revolution, but they will probably one day act as its mortal enemies and do everything in their power to prevent it.
Secondly, the separation of the national question from the class question, as pursued by the bourgeois resistance forces, means a weakening of the national liberation struggle. Only the communists are able to consistently link the daily struggle of the masses for bread, housing and humane living conditions with the struggle against occupation and apartheid. Only they can really tap into all the energies and all the fighting reserves of the people and mobilize them for the fight for liberation.
Thirdly, only a strategy aimed at organizing the class struggle also offers the prospect of appealing to the class interests of the proletariat on the other side of the border. In this respect, the dominance of Hamas in the Palestinian liberation movement is actually favorable from the Zionists’ point of view, at least in comparison to a scenario in which revolutionary forces would actually lead the liberation movement.
For the communists, however, the dominance of Islamic conservative forces in the liberation movement is definitely a problem for the reasons mentioned. Their influence must be pushed back and the communists must also (and above all) take the lead in this fight.
But how is it possible to get to this point? To do this, we should first become aware of how Hamas managed to become the almost undisputed leader of the Palestinian resistance. The reasons for this are different: On the one hand, the failure, even the betrayal, of the secular forces in the form of the PLO, which signed the so-called “Oslo peace agreement”. In Oslo, the PLO recognized Israel, but without receiving a clear guarantee of a Palestinian state. On the contrary, the occupation of the West Bank was codified by dividing the country into three zones, the majority of which were either under Israeli control alone or under joint administration by Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The newly founded PA was therefore anything but a step towards the liberation of Palestine – on the contrary, it is an instrument used by Israel to maintain the occupation of the West Bank and suppress Palestinian resistance with a kind of Palestinian auxiliary police force. In the eyes of many Palestinians, the Oslo Treaty was a unilateral surrender to Israel. Hamas managed to distinguish itself as a force of consistent resistance that rejected Oslo and subjugation to Israel. It benefited from the fact that the Israeli state had not bothered or supported it for years in order to weaken Israel’s main enemy at the time, the PLO, through the rise of intra-Palestinian competition 16 . The fact that Hamas has a lasting influence on the Palestinian masses in Gaza is certainly due less to its programmatic goal of establishing an Islamic state than to its actual leadership role in armed resistance. To deny Hamas this leadership, the communists have no other way than to be at the forefront of resistance against the occupation. This path does not work through criticism from outside, but only through the fight within the resistance movement, whereby care must be taken that the objective competition between different forces within the resistance movement does not weaken the resistance as a whole and thus only benefit the occupiers. If that were the case, it would discredit the communist program in the eyes of the people.
This crucial point is where part of the communist movement in Germany and the world derailed. From various quarters we hear arguments such as that Hamas is reactionary; that we have learned from the Iranian experiences; that an alliance with the Islamists will only lead to the communists being massacred in the end; that Hamas wants to either create a feudal state or a regime modeled on IS (Islamic State, Daesh) or the Taliban or even wipe out the Jews in Israel.
We don’t want to delve into all of these claims in too much detail. The problem with Hamas is not that it is “feudal” – because there can be no return to feudalism – but that it is bourgeois, that it wants to create a capitalist state and not a working class state. Equating Hamas with IS is simply a repetition of Israeli war propaganda that specifically tries to convey exactly this image. It doesn’t have much to do with reality, because not only do the methods differ significantly, Hamas also has more in common ideologically with the AKP and Erdogan than with IS. While IS systematically murdered “infidels” and publicly celebrated its acts of violence, religious minorities live relatively unmolested under Hamas. And where Hamas takes repressive action against competing political forces, this is certainly no comparison to the open state terror to which all Palestinian resistance groups are subjected by Israel. The accusation of “eliminatory anti-Semitism” is often heard, especially in Germany, and completely misses the point it is intended to describe. What drives Hamas is not the desire to destroy as many Jews as possible, but the fight against Zionism and its state. The logic of this fight means that Hamas fighters sometimes also kill Israeli civilians – not because they are Jews per se, but because they are citizens of the state with which Hamas is at war. In contrast, Hamas’s 2017 charter (unlike the outdated 1988 charter) attempts to differentiate the fight against Zionism from that against Judaism and also explicitly rejects anti-Semitism 17 . There is no plausible argument for dismissing these formulations as mere duplicity. In the past, Hamas has even clearly signaled that it would accept the state of Israel if Israel was willing to make concessions to the Palestinians. According to the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, Khaled Meshal, in 2007: “As a Palestinian, I speak today of a Palestinian and Arab demand for a state within the 1967 borders. It is true that in reality there will be an entity or state called Israel on the rest of the Palestinian land. This is a reality, but I will not deal with it by acknowledging or admitting it.”18 Ahmed Yusuf, advisor to political leader Ismail Haniya, has also made similar statements.
The actions of Hamas – its repeated offers over the years for a ceasefire with Israel, the humane treatment of prisoners, according to the statements of released hostages, etc. – do not prove the “anti-Semitic mania for extermination” that the dominant propaganda, but also the German left, has attributed to it , who are obviously under the influence of this propaganda.
In Germany, but not only there, there is a very problematic fixation on Hamas as an enemy on the “left”, even in the communist spectrum. It is problematic not because Hamas actually deserves our sympathy, but because it completely distorts the essence of the matter. What is going on in Palestine is not a war between two sides, both of which should be rejected, it is certainly not a “religious conflict” between Jews and Muslims, but it is a colonial war for land, an ethnic cleansing of the country and a genocide. However, in a genocide there are no “two sides”, there are perpetrators and victims. If communists accept the condition dictated by the ruling class that the condemnation of Hamas as “anti-Semitic” is a prerequisite for every discussion and every cautious criticism of Israel’s policies, then you are giving the capitalists an instrument of power that would have to be knocked out of their hands. If it is accepted that the root of the problem is not the colonial relationship of rule, but the alleged anti-Semitism of the Palestinians, then it becomes impossible to move any closer to a solution to the conflict.
But the problem doesn’t just start when communists buy into and repeat the class enemy’s propaganda. Rather, we recognize fundamentally problematic views of the strategy of the national liberation struggle. The comrades who recognize “distancing” from Hamas as a prerequisite for every statement ultimately do not understand what a national and anti-colonial liberation struggle is. They do not understand that the sentence “the main enemy is in one’s own country” applies to all capitalist states, but not to an actually colonized people; that Israel, or rather the Israeli monopoly bourgeoisie, is the main enemy of the Palestinian working class and the Palestinian people and that in the fight against this astronomically superior opponent, all the forces of the liberation movement are forced to direct their weak forces against this enemy; that the fact that a national liberation movement is led by forces that will fight the communists in the future is not a reason to turn one’s back on the liberation movement, but rather should spur one to push it forward all the more consistently. Regardless of how we assess the PFLP and DFLP, i.e. the two Palestinian liberation organizations with socialist claims – even a consistently communist force is forced under these conditions to cooperate selectively with other resistance organizations.
When we say that the communists in Palestine must struggle to lead the resistance (rather than distancing themselves from it because it is currently led by Hamas), then we can also talk specifically about what that means. It means not submitting to Hamas and developing your own program, your own struggles and your own demands. It means fighting for economic reforms in the interests of the working class, even where Hamas rules, fighting for concessions for the impoverished masses, thereby spreading the idea of socialism and educating the masses. In these fights, Hamas is of course an enemy. In the case of military actions against the occupying power, however, the communists would have to check whether the action serves the goal of liberating the people or not and, on this basis, decide whether to take part in them or not. Of course, different standards apply to communists than to bourgeois forces, for example insofar as one should try to avoid civilian victims. This arises not only from moral considerations, but above all from the fact that the Israeli working class is not the enemy, but should be won over as an ally. But all of this also means that a certain level of cooperation with Hamas is possible and, in certain cases, desirable – and at the same time Hamas should be denounced and exposed to the extent that its actions harm the resistance and the armed struggle. Through such a relationship with the bourgeois resistance forces, the socialist revolution is not sacrificed in the name of national liberation, but on the contrary, the prospects for the socialist revolution are strengthened precisely by directing all forces towards national liberation. A division of the resistance based on ideological differences and despite unity in the strategic goal of shaking off colonial oppression is sectarianism and only benefits those in power, who will do everything to promote and deepen such divisions.
The strategic line of the national liberation struggle outlined here is not at all new. It is fundamentally the line that communist parties have always pursued in national liberation struggles, be it in China, where the CP cooperated with the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang in certain situations and fought it in others, or Che Guevara’s cooperation with non-communist revolutionaries in the Cuban liberation struggle, the national liberation movements in Vietnam or in the Balkans in the Second World War – everywhere the communists gained the leadership in this resistance struggle by fighting together with other forces against the main enemy, gaining leadership in this struggle and, if necessary, as in the case of China or Greece, also taking up the fight against the bourgeois forces where and when it became necessary. Tactical mistakes were certainly made (some of them very serious ones), but the mistake was not to enter into alliances with non-communist forces in a national liberation struggle.
How does the case of Palestine differ from all these examples? Some respond by saying that Hamas is an Islamist, fundamentalist organization and that we as communists are defending secularism. Both are correct and both completely miss the focus at this point. The core of a conflict does not lie in its ideological superstructure, but rather in its material basis. Therefore, it makes no sense whatsoever to equate the chauvinism of Palestinian groups with Israeli chauvinism. Both may be “bad” in the abstract, but Marxism teaches us not to look for the essence of the matter in speeches, slogans and ideas, but rather to pay attention to what the ideology is an expression of. On the one hand, there is a chauvinism that justifies Israeli colonialism, the apartheid system that inevitably resulted from it and, to a large extent, genocide, and on the other hand, there is a chauvinism that is a false ideological cover for a fight against oppression that is justified in itself.
Resistance to colonization is the essence of Hamas’ nationalism, or at least the material basis of its success. And it is another tragic irony of history that the only ideology that is successful on the ground today in becoming the vehicle for the liberation desire of the Palestinian masses is Islamist, the one that Israel and the CIA financed and fomented (e.g. in Afghanistan) to combat secular resistance and communism, respectively.
That this is the case should not surprise us too much if it is true that religion is nothing but the “halo” of the “vale of tears” as Marx describes the oppressive and inhumane conditions of class societies 19 . Political Islam has given the oppressed in Palestine an ideology that not only seems compatible with their national identity and denounces, albeit in an idealistically distorted form, the “vale of tears” of earthly life under capitalism, but also seems to make bearable the martyrdom that, in view of the immense power imbalance, represents the inevitable end of their struggle for so many sons and daughters of the Palestinian people. If communists in this specific historical situation believe that the enemy is political Islam, then it means that they have confused the essence and appearance of the matter.
A strange flowering of this deviation also occurs when communists find the worst condemnations for Hamas, but treat their main rival, Fatah, with kid gloves. The reason for this is obviously again an idealistic approach that ignores what role these forces actually play: namely, in the case of Fatah, the role of acting as administrators of a bantustan for the colonial rulers 20 and, not least, of carrying out repressive functions for Israel. Despite everything that is problematic and worthy of criticism about Hamas, Fatah represents the far greater problem for the Palestinian liberation struggle.
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