{"id":12684,"date":"2024-03-28T20:39:03","date_gmt":"2024-03-29T00:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=12684"},"modified":"2024-04-02T01:01:21","modified_gmt":"2024-04-02T05:01:21","slug":"criticisms-and-conditions-in-support-for-palestinian-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/03\/criticisms-and-conditions-in-support-for-palestinian-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Criticisms and conditions in support for Palestinian resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span> recent Tempest <\/em>editorial<\/a> summmarizes the publication\u2019s position on several matters arising from the present Israel-Gaza war. In doing so, it gives central place to a specific theoretical construct: \u201cunconditional but critical support.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe method of unconditional but not uncritical support for national liberation struggles is not just old leftist language to be lightly discarded but is foundational to a Marxist method,\u201d the editors write.<\/p>\n

The phrase seems to have been first used in 1972 by the International Socialists (IS), forerunner to the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), as part of its position on the use of \u201cterrorist\u201d tactics by the Provisional and Official Irish Republican Army organizations (IRAs). Since then, it has been used from time to time by various splinters of the IS tradition, but rarely elsewhere. What does it mean? Often, that meaning has been unclear, and it has appeared to change over time.<\/p>\n

It is worth distinguishing three possible senses of the phrase, which distinguish different attitudes to causes, organizations, and tactics.<\/p>\n

1. Socialists support national liberation causes, even though we might oppose particular organizations that fight for those causes and certain tactics used in those struggles. We criticize those organizations and tactics when we oppose them.<\/p>\n

2. Socialists support national liberation causes and the organizations that fight for those causes, even though we might oppose particular tactics used in those struggles. We criticize not only the tactics we oppose, but also the national liberation organizations, on grounds both of their tactics and broad political approach, including their ideas on matters not directly related to the struggle.<\/p>\n

3. Socialists support national liberation causes, the organizations that fight for those causes, and the tactics employed in the course of those struggles. We criticize the organizations on the grounds of their broad political approach and the tactics on grounds of their strategic or tactical efficacy, even as we support both.<\/p>\n

More permutations are possible. It would be possible to formulate a version of each in which tactics were criticized on grounds additional to, or other than, their efficacy. It would be possible to distinguish, after Hal Draper, between military and political support<\/a> for certain organizations, though, as Draper acknowledged, in practice the boundary between the two is often permeable. It is possible to substitute a \u201cneither support nor oppose\u201d position for any given case of opposition or support. What exactly is criticized or opposed, and in what terms, also matters. But these three positions give us the basic structure from which those variations depart. (There are some fringe circumstances in which socialists might not support movements for national independence, but let\u2019s leave those cases aside for now.)<\/p>\n

A brief history of unconditional but critical support<\/h4>\n

Position 1 would be the least controversial in mass society in the West. Depending on its specific content, it could open up general opposition to Hamas and, for instance, the wilful attacks on civilians on October 7 last year, while holding on to steadfast support for the Palestinian national struggle as such. It does not seem to have been advanced theoretically by the IS or its successors, but justifications of the formulation are sometimes offered in terms that, in their content, justify only this position, perhaps because it is the most obviously appealing.<\/p>\n

For instance, looking back in 2020 on The Troubles connected with the British occupation of Northern Ireland, Pat Stack of RS21 wrote<\/a> that \u201cour stance was unconditional, we did not weigh up every statement, every bombing, every tactical disaster to decide which side we were on. Yes, we reserved the right to be highly critical of republicanism, its strategy, its all-class nationalism, and at times its ill-judged, disastrous and heart-breaking military actions, but between the oppressor and the oppressed, we knew where we stood.\u201d In this formulation, it is as if the question was merely one of whether to oppose British oppression in Northern Ireland and support the general idea of opposition to it. \u201c[I]t was about saying I will stand against injustice, legal repression, and cover-ups of army atrocities,\u201d Stack concludes.<\/p>\n

But, as initially formulated in 1972<\/a>, the IS position was 2. Duncan Hallas and Jim Higgins, for the majority of the organization\u2019s Executive Committee, defended a line in a Socialist Worker editorial holding that the \u201ckilling of individual politicians and the bombing of buildings cannot be supported by socialists.\u201d Hallas and Higgins went further than merely withholding support, however. \u201cIt is the clear duty of Marxists to oppose such tactics,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n

(Part of their position was that Northern Ireland was not in a state of civil war. One could better argue that in Israel and Palestine there is such a war. But for Hallas and Higgins the point of the distinction was that in a civil war, \u201cattacks on individuals, destruction of buildings and so on would be part of attempts to defeat the army by military means.\u201d On October 7, to the extent that we have evidence from footage, the killing of civilians that took place was largely not collateral to some strategic military objective. So, whatever the truth of the civil war question, it has no relevance to us here.)<\/p>\n

They concluded with lines from the Socialist Worker editorial: \u201cUnconditional but critical support for all those, including both IRAs, fighting imperialism in Ireland. By unconditional we mean support regardless of our criticism of the leadership and tactics. By critical we mean opposing the sowing of illusions that the struggle can finally be won except by the victory of the working class fighting on a programme of social as well as national liberation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Large
Mural of Bloody Sunday in Derry. On January 30, 1972, British troops shot 26 unarmed demonstrators in occupied Derry, Northern Ireland. The mural, photographed in 2010, is based on a photo. Image<\/a> by Nina St\u00f6ssinger.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even during the 1970s, however, the formulation was confusing enough that many members of the IS and its sister organization in Ireland, the Socialist Worker Movement, had different and incompatible interpretations of its meaning. One Irish socialist recalled<\/a> that \u201cmost members weren\u2019t entirely sure\u201d what it meant, and had a variety of clashing ideas subsumed under the same slogan. Meanwhile<\/a>, \u201cin the British SWP \u2018unconditional but critical\u2019 ranged from meaning uncritical support for the IRA, to not supporting them at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the account<\/a> of a Trotskyist from an opposing tendency, in practice the IS tended not to make much use of the formulation in its public propaganda or to respond to the events of the Troubles through a consistent theoretical lens of any sort. Rather, IS modulated their tone based on the mood of their audience. Hence, an October 1974 Socialist Worker editorial advised readers to respond to those \u201chysterical\u201d about IRA bombings by arguing for troops to be withdrawn from Northern Ireland. Until then, the most deadly attacks on civilians had been in Northern Ireland itself. But when, the next month, 21 people were killed in attacks on two Birmingham pubs, the paper ran the headline \u201cStop the Bombings,\u201d a demand presumably directed at the armed republican movement. Nonetheless, as late as 2006, the SWP still seemed to theoretically take the second position.<\/p>\n

In an essay<\/a> for the International Socialism <\/em>journal, Gareth Jenkins defended Hallas\u2019s and Higgins\u2019s analysis, describing Al-Qaeda, absurdly, as fundamentally \u201cno different from other national liberation movements\u201d (in reality it has never been a national liberation movement of any sort), but opposed terrorist tactics as representing \u201cthe politics of despair.\u201dAccording to Trotskyists of an opposing<\/a> tendency, however, the SWP members had refused to condemn the 9\/11 attack itself for several months. Four years later, after the 2005 London tube bombings, and in an echo of their 1974 tonal shift, the slogan \u201cStop the Bombings\u201d was deployed<\/a> immediately, albeit less prominently than before. Across 30 years the tendency appeared to have retained the idea that while terrorism against civilians overseas was neither to be endorsed nor criticized too sharply, attacks on the British mainland demanded urgent opposition. Still a more fundamental political shift was gestating.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade the SWP seems to have moved toward the third position. In 2014, they republished<\/a> a blog<\/a> by Mostafa Omar, a member of their Egyptian sister organization, The Revolutionary Socialists. Omar, writing in the context of an ongoing Israeli war on Gaza<\/a> that ultimately killed more than 2,250 people, of whom two-thirds were civilians, stated that<\/p>\n

[W]e unconditionally support Hamas when it is engaged in military or non-military struggles against Israel, because it weakens the Zionist state and terrifies the Arab regimes and the United States, and therefore strengthens the potential for class struggle in the Arab states against this imperialist system.<\/p>\n

Our unconditional support for Hamas is not uncritical, however, because we believe that the movement\u2019s strategies in the struggle to liberate Palestine\u2014like the strategies adopted by Fatah and the Palestinian left before it\u2014have failed and will fail in the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Omar has two specific criticisms of Hamas\u2019s strategy: that it ties itself to \u201creactionary\u201d regimes in the region that repress both their own people and the Palestinian struggle, and \u201cdespite the extraordinary heroism of Hamas\u2019 fighters \u2026 Hamas adopts an elitist approach to dealing with the Palestinian masses.\u201d He does not criticize any tactics Hamas deployed against Israel or Israelis.<\/p>\n

On the contrary, Omar proposed support for Hamas \u201cwhen it is engaged in military or non-military struggles\u201d because they \u201cweaken the Zionist state,\u201d a formulation that could be read to imply\u2014if it does not unambiguously state\u2014support for tactics such as deliberate attacks on civilians. Although Hamas had abandoned suicide bombings at that point, the group had never disavowed the tactic in principle. Such attacks were its defining tactical motif between 1993 and 2008. Indeed, in 2016, the organization praised such an attack<\/a>. For Hallas and Higgins, writing in 1972, terrorist tactics should be opposed as counterproductive. But by 2014, that perspective seems to have vanished. On the contrary, the implication was that they might be broadly helpful, though other, separate criticisms of Hamas\u2019s strategy could be made. For all that Hamas\u2019s approach is \u201celitist,\u201d Omar does not suggest that elitism is a necessary corollary of any particular sorts of military or terrorist tactics as such.<\/p>\n

Nearly a decade later, the ambiguity that marked Omar\u2019s intervention has evaporated. On October 9, 2023, Socialist Worker called on readers to \u201crejoice\u201d<\/a> at the attacks inside Israel launched two days earlier, a word that betrayed a total failure to empathize not only with Israeli civilians, but with the Palestinians of Gaza who had already been pushed into a new kind of hell. A week on from the war\u2019s beginning, the paper expressly supported \u201cany means necessary<\/a>\u201d as part of their \u201cunconditional but not uncritical\u201d position. The bulk of that article is concerned with an argument by analogy: that violence against white civilians by the Mau Mau in Kenya and National Liberation Front in Algeria was \u201cjustified,\u201d and therefore so was violence against civilians on October 7. These analogies are dubious, although there is no room to set out that critique here. For now, the important thing to recognize is that the SWP has adopted a version of position 3, albeit under the rubric of the same phrase that they previously used to defend position 2.<\/p>\n

But theirs is a particularly extreme version of position 3. In principle, the third position allows for the criticism of tactics such as the purposeful killing of civilians, but while they describe their position as \u201cnot uncritical\u201d\u2014an awkward double negative that hints at discomfort even with mere criticism\u2014the SWP offers no criticisms whatsoever of deliberate attacks on civilians. The only criticisms are of Hamas\u2019s broad political program as it pertains to class, gender, and LGBT+ questions. The tactics deployed were \u201cwholly justified,\u201d the SWP asserted, even when that meant the murder of migrant workers.<\/p>\n