By Hasan Abu Ali – Jun 29, 2024
Until we, as a people, are seen as more than mere barbarians, our merits will not be understood, our successes will not be replicated, and our achievements will not be topped.
There is a wonderful talk hosted by the Masar Badil with a spokesman from the Ansarallah movement, and I urge you to watch it if you can. It is crucial in times like this to hear directly from the Resistance.
There is this one phrase he said that is stuck in my head: We are in a battle against Western arrogance.
Although everything he said was poignant and incredibly useful, this phrase in particular made the unity between political work in the homeland [Palestine] and in the diaspora incredibly clear.
In the homeland, the operative tool of this arrogance is the military and its mouthpieces. Netanyahu and his underlings spout off incoherent nonsense every two days about how they are this close to winning the war, destroying Hamas, and freeing the hostages. The Resistance counters, firmly grounded in the reality on the ground, and with a confidence recognized worldwide, that Netanyahu has barely managed to free a few hostages. That its command and control remain robust, and with each passing day, Netanyahu’s pride and legitimacy suffer irreparable blows. The Resistance, of course, suffers greatly in all this, but as martyr Basil Al Araj puts it “we are far more capable of bearing the costs”.
The Resistance’s confidence is built on a sturdy foundation of the promises it has kept. They give us footage of conflagrated tanks, fighters literally jumping for joy, and, in general, the triumph of indigenous ingenuity over imperialist hubris. This is the difference between arrogance and confidence: Evidence. The supposed evidence of Zionist greatness is blasted on Western TV channels 24/7, yet it is convincing to no one. The English language news of the Resistance is concentrated in a single Telegram channel, and a few prominent Twitter accounts, all of which are constantly suppressed and even outright banned, and yet, millions are tuning in.
In a more just world, this tuning in, and the support that flows from it, would be the primary political activity of the world’s progressive masses. In the Middle East and among some of its diaspora, this is what political work looks like. But “the colonial world is a world cut in two”, so for much of the “developed world”, this is not the case. The colonial world, including its progressives, cannot possibly accept the leadership of an Islamic or Arab Resistance.
The Arabic word for arrogance is ‘istikbar’. The root, k-b-r, means big or bigger, so the word literally means “to make yourself bigger”. The Western left, despite having had virtually no successes since the fall of the Soviet Union, thinks of itself so highly that it can choose to ignore and minimize the anti-imperialist Resistance in the Middle East.
Abdaljawad Omar’s wonderful essay, The Question of Hamas and the Left, addresses this issue directly. The piece’s core concept is that the global Left, but especially those in the West, refuse to engage with the reality of Palestine and, especially with Hamas as a leading force. He says, “One cannot claim solidarity with Palestine and dismiss, overlook, or exclude Hamas.”
In the West, especially in America, this dismissal has a singular and underappreciated root: the deep-seated anti-Arab anti-Muslim sentiment implanted in people’s hearts and minds over the past few decades.
Most on the Left have at least a cursory understanding of Cold War propaganda: The constant deluge of anti-communist demonization that Americans, especially but the West tout court, were exposed to for decades. The media campaign against Arabs and Muslims over the past 3 decades is like that, but with modern media and military might, and directed at a mass of people rather than, as with the Soviet Union, a coherent political force capable of rebuffing cultural or physical annihilation.
This is unsurprising, as both the military and media machinery that make this possible both find their origin in post-Cold War surplus. A full discussion of that phenomenon is beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say this was prefigured since the fall of the USSR. Take for instance this 1990 quote by the feminist and pacifist philosopher Ursula Franklin:
It will be very interesting to see what’s going to happen now in the current situation with the Soviet Union and the USA. And I would venture that the social and political needs for an enemy are so deeply entrenched in the real world of technology as we know it today that a new enemy will quickly appear.
And appear we did! The new enemy of the 21st century was just as amorphous as the communist but markedly more ‘backward’, dispersed and unpredictable. At the turn of the century, the US had carte blanche to change to this new, more inscrutable enemy, and has ridden that wave through the last 20 years, spreading destruction around the world from Iraq to Libya, Syria, Yemen and, continually, with increasing barbarity, Palestine.
Endless examples elucidate the omnipresence of this destruction and dehumanization. The worst prisons in the world are for our people (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Gilboa). In the US military, to this day, GIs love to coat their bullets in pork in an absurd attempt to trick God into sending their Muslim victims to hell.
The most advanced and carefully designed weaponry is tested and perfected on our people. Multiple countries populated almost exclusively with Arabs and Muslims have their skies patrolled by drones to the degree that children there “fear blue skies”. Even in the diaspora, from France to Germany to the US, official ruling parties issue decrees that specifically target and violate our fundamental rights.
This is the backdrop for every opinion on Arabs and Muslims and their Resistance. It is in this context, of oppression, destruction, and near-universal hatred that responses to our independent political maneuvers are generated. Regardless of the West’s unshakable faith in its “rationality” it needs to be said that you cannot properly understand someone you do not see as fully human.
Case in point, after October 7th, I and other Arabs were subjected to a slew of otherwise rational people asking about mass rape and baby beheadings. Even before delving into the facts of the matter, I stood stunned at the credulity of these people. Why do you believe Shani Louk was raped? Simply because she was scantily clad and near Arab men? Is that all it takes? Why do you believe in baby beheading, even conceptually? Why would you believe that such an act, which serves no political or military purpose would be carried out by what are obviously trained and disciplined fighters?
This was either extreme naivety or abject racism. In any case, even in otherwise well-meaning people, it drew a line of demarcation. A line that was not between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ but between those who understand that every word said about an Arab in the Western media is a lie, and those who don’t.
Proletarian Internationalism: The Disconnect of the Western Left
I naively expected better of the Western left, even though my entire life in America has given me evidence to the contrary. In truth, I shouldn’t be surprised that this same dehumanization is at play. The American political spectrum, divided between reactionaries, liberals, and leftists, is united in not recognizing us as full political agents with a strategy and history that rivals, and sometimes even surpasses, their own. While this is expected from others, one would hope for a markedly better position from the left.
This position has echoes in the French left’s abandonment of the FLN in Algeria and its slavish loyalty to the colonial regime, but its fundamental character is different. To understand it we have to go to one of Omar’s most oft-repeated points:
Ultimately, the Western left’s quixotic search for a secular progressive alternative to Hamas overlooks a simple fact: at this particular historical juncture, the political forces that are still holding onto and leading a resistance agenda are not of the secular left.
I would expand on this to say: the Left’s search for a non-Arab, non-Muslim resistance movement belies the fact that the center of the world revolution has been far from the West for a very long time. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, resistance has shifted from being interwoven into the fabric of Western society to something that predominantly comes from outside. The Western left, in its colonial arrogance, refuses to accept this fact, and even less the notion that, if there is a revolutionary center, it would be the Middle East.
Even among those who appreciate this revolutionary center, we are often treated as a kind of raging beast. We have an appreciable power to be sure but lack meaningful insights. These are the people who will watch our military exploits with great excitement but yawn at the impressive feats of coalition building, the slow rise to strategic equilibrium over decades, and the steady accumulation of resistance infrastructure in the world’s most besieged and bombarded region. Only an arrogant Left that refuses to learn from those it sees as “lesser” could miss these monumental feats.
The fact is while we have precious few examples of a counter-hegemonic trend cohering into a political force, most are in the Middle East and none are in the West.
A humble Left would realize that the most active political student organization on nearly every campus in the US is not a socialist club or an autonomous group but an SJP (Student of Justice in Palestine). But our arrogant Left is committed to an unwillingness to learn from and, God forbid, to take seriously and be led by the subjects of the colonial empire.
Omar ends his essay with this description of Hamas as an energetic political entity that has astutely learned from the mistakes of its predecessor, the PLO, both in warfare and negotiations. It has meticulously invested its intellectual, political, and military resources into understanding “Israel” and its psychic center of gravity. And that Whether we like it or not, Hamas is now the primary force leading the Palestinian struggle.
No one in the West likes this. This description is matched in its accuracy only by its absolute incompatibility with the West’s view of “The Arab” in our entirety. The battle against Western arrogance has been an open-ended, multi-fronted war for at least 30 years. The most successful and sophisticated forces in this battle have been Arab and Muslim. Any effort to change that, to supersede this force for one that is more secular or international must begin with this realization.
Until this happens, until we, as a people, are seen as more than mere barbarians, our merits will not be understood, our successes will not be replicated, and our achievements will not be topped.
