{"id":12457,"date":"2024-02-07T00:30:20","date_gmt":"2024-02-07T05:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=12457"},"modified":"2024-02-24T00:08:28","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T05:08:28","slug":"toward-a-free-palestine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/02\/toward-a-free-palestine\/","title":{"rendered":"Toward a free Palestine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe\u2019re not freeing Palestine, Palestine is freeing us.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

–Fatima Said<\/a><\/p>\n

The Palestinian resistance to Israel\u2019s genocidal war has brought us to a turning point in world politics. Most critically, it is a heroic struggle of a people facing annihilation in a fight that will determine the future of Palestinians in the short, medium, and long term. Our first task is to provide unconditional solidarity and engaged activity to fight for an immediate end to the brutal violence of the Zionist state.<\/p>\n

October 7 has radicalized and activated an entire generation globally to join Palestinians in resisting the apartheid state and U.S. imperialism\u2019s support for it. As such, it is also a turning point for the revolutionary Left. It provides us an opportunity to put forth our ideas for how best to organize and win liberation for Palestine as we join in the collective effort to build and strengthen the movement.<\/p>\n

And as the aftermath of October 7 threatens to isolate Washington and its key ally in the region and accelerate the relative decline of U.S. imperialism, it has become clear that the events of the last four months are intimately tied up with the crises of the late neoliberal world order and the imperialist state system. This raises the stakes for the Left.<\/p>\n

The place of the Palestinian struggle<\/h4>\n

For decades, the struggle for Palestinian liberation has played a singular and critical role in efforts to build an anti-imperialist movement internationally. Arguably, for the Left in the U.S., the Palestinian struggle is analogous to the anti-racist movement and the fight for Black liberation insofar as both are key to understanding U.S. capitalism, its hegemony, and therefore its defeat. This grows out of Israel\u2019s position as a unique linchpin in U.S. imperial strategy and ambitions beginning from at least 1967.<\/p>\n

Particularly in the last two decades, because of the increasingly naked brutality and racism of the Zionist project\u2014especially as the failures of the Oslo process<\/a> have become undeniable\u2014the Palestinian movement has had an outsized impact in radicalizing people and opening them to anti-imperialist politics. We see this unmistakably in the U.S. where polls show not only that there is overwhelming support for a ceasefire but also that half of Americans under 35<\/a> found the actions of Hamas on October 7 \u201cjustified by Palestinians grievances.\u201d The response by the youth<\/a> (not to mention the Arab community) to \u201cGenocide Joe [Biden]\u201d has shaken the Democratic Party and its 2024 electoral calculations.<\/p>\n

Since the end of the Cold War, a new imperial order has been in formation. In this century, the end of the period of virtually unchallenged U.S. world dominance was highlighted by the serial, slow-motion defeats of the United States in southwest Asia. In this process, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the struggle with China over hegemony in the Asia-Pacific have thus far represented the clearest, albeit asymmetrical, challenges<\/a> to U.S. imperial dominance.<\/p>\n

\"President
President Donald J. Trump, joined by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bahrain Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the United Arab Emirates Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, waving to the crowd after the Abraham Accords signing Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020, on the South Lawn of the White House. Official White House Photo<\/a> by Andrea Hanks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The strategy<\/a> pursued by the U.S. state in the interests of its capitalist class has been to secure the \u201cmiddle east\u201d as the geopolitical key, an integrated economic zone under its hegemony. The treachery of Oslo was a crucial step in that process. The emergence of this new imperial order, and in particular the role of competition with China has underscored the region\u2019s importance for U.S. capital. The escalation of the normalization process with the Arab states through the Abraham Accords<\/a> in 2020 has been pursued consistently by the Trump\/Biden administrations and is driven by this imperial competition.<\/p>\n

But the completion of that process has been consistently stymied by Palestinian resistance<\/a>. It is one of<\/a> the last<\/a> anti-colonial struggles in a post- (or neo-)colonial world, and the question of Palestine continues to pose a barrier to U.S. strategy. This is a core, material basis for the centrality of the Palestinian struggle in the fight against U.S. imperialism.<\/p>\n

October 7 and the new imperial order<\/h4>\n

In this light, Israel\u2019s genocidal war in Gaza represents an acute turning point. As the war has begun to explode regionally, the aftermath of October 7 has shaken the decades-long \u201cnormalization\u201d efforts by the U.S. and Israel and eroded Western hegemony.<\/p>\n

As the various regional powers maneuver for leverage, the military actions directly in support of Palestine\u2014for example, the border skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah\u2014have been modest and minimal. And a newly quiescent Saudi regime seems paralyzed by the contradictions between their allegiance to the U.S. order and the deep-seated support for the Palestinian struggle amongst its population. Even the attacks of Ansar Allah<\/a> (commonly referred to as the \u201cHouthis\u201d) on Red Sea shipping have more complex roots<\/a> in domestic Yemeni politics, the war with the Saudi regime(currently under a truce), and, to some extent<\/a>\u2014however it may be weaponized by the Pentagon\u2014Iranian aspirations.<\/p>\n