By Daniel Lobato – Mar 26, 2024
It is impossible to hear any request for material, military and economic aid for the Palestinian armed resistance, or for its regional allies, from the global left.
The issue here is not a gratuitous apology for war, nor a disregard for Palestinian lives driven by feverish warmongering. It is not a fetishization of resistance or of spilled blood. Nor is the key point that, since the Palestinians cannot defeat “Israel” militarily, then it is exclusively about demanding a cease-fire. That is not the point. The Vietnamese did not defeat the US militarily and the US massacre was demanded to end, but as long as the aggression continued, there was an ethical and political obligation to support the Vietnamese liberation forces. The same case was applicable to the resistance of Algeria, Angola, or Kenya against their colonial oppressors.
It is therefore our duty to demand an end to genocide, systemic oppression, ethnic cleansing, and the Israeli colonial regime itself, but as long as this does not happen, it is also our obligation to demand material and economic support for the Palestinian resistance forces and their allies.
Omission of aid to the Palestinian resistance
Today, at most, the right of the Palestinian people to resist by all means, including armed resistance, is expressed in a more or less stammering manner.
This is not very transgressive or extremist, since it is in fact something recognized by international legality itself (UN Resolution 3070 and other provisions). It is sad that it seems very audacious to wield an outright UN statement, but in any case the audacity stops there and other more important things are omitted. What is forgotten is what it says in the following paragraph in which it urges the peoples of the world to give material and all kinds of support to the Palestinian resistance forces to help them in their inalienable right to national liberation.
What almost all Eurocentric leftists supported with Ukraine, sending military aid, is what they should be doing with the Palestinians and their regional allies, but it does not seem to cross their minds to do so.
In an act of the Spanish left a Palestinian woman defends the right to Palestinian armed resistance and the leaders of the Podemos party show hesitation in applauding, perhaps they are afraid to hear it. In other expressions of the left what we find is a passive, opportunistic, cloying or hypocritical radicalism. The parties of the Spanish government are installed there. They combine shouting “Free Palestine!” with supporting the colonial doctrine of the “two States”. They combine full relations and arms trade with “Israel”, with validating only Palestinian voices exclusively asking for human rights, notably, those who represent the Vichy Regime, called the Palestinian Authority.
In general, the Western Left has silenced the current political subjects of the resistance. Why was the blockade on Gaza breached on October 7? Because “they are terrorists”, even the European communist parties have explained this to us. Only a few pro-Palestinian groups have made it possible for the protagonists to express themselves.
Fifty and sixty years ago, the big European trade unions and left-wing parties were running fund-raising campaigns for the Sandinista and Vietnamese guerrillas. Going further back in time, during the years of resistance in Spain against the aggression of fascism and Nazism, Palestine sent fighters to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco’s troops. Today, on the contrary, during the aggression of Israeli fascism against Palestine, the Spanish government, which claims to be the heir of the Spanish Republic, sends arms and maintains all kinds of support to “Israel”.
The more it silences its material support to the Palestinian Resistance, the more the left facilitates and reinforces the criminalization by Western institutions against this natural right of the Palestinians.
In the face of international legality and its call to support the Resistance, we find EU directives contrary to that legality, criminalizing and persecuting those who materially support Palestinian resistance. Of course, in the US it is even worse.
The global South also reproduces a colonial discourse
The serious problem is that this omission of aid does not only come from the Western left.
On March 3 in Havana, a day of solidarity with Palestine and against genocide was celebrated with great attendance, with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and a large political representation. A precise and vibrant description of the genocide was made from the rostrum, but finally the demand was “cease fire, withdrawal of Israel from the illegally occupied territories, and access for humanitarian aid”.
The first and third demands were strictly humanitarian in scope, and the second demand expressed Cuba’s subordination to the recognition of the Israeli State and the fraud of the “two States”. No decolonizing approach of the entire Palestinian territory, no questioning of the existence of the Israeli artifact and no proclamation to the world inviting it to send military or economic aid to the Palestinian Resistance.
It is incomprehensible that the President of Algeria, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, said at the Arab League summit in Algiers in 2022, “We want a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders”. Algeria, which was on the verge of being split by France into two states as it neared the end of its colonization, one French and the other for the native Algerians, today with Palestine advocates the same. Although Algeria is at great risk of destructive Western interference, it seems an excess for its president to defend so explicitly a colonial discourse.
That is why it is not understandable that countries with very little to lose, some surviving under countless US sanctions, such as Cuba, South Africa, Venezuela, etc., continue to replicate the colonial discourse of the “two States” and remain silent on the demand for aid to the Palestinian forces and regional allies. It is not a question of countries of the global South in their complicated economic situations leading this sending of resources or weapons, as in the era of Cuban internationalism in the last century. It is at least a matter of changing the colonial narrative imposed by the West and “Israel”. It is about changing the discursive paradigm of the countries expected to do so. It is about expressly supporting and carrying out the necessary actions to materialize this support for Palestinian and regional Resistance.
On the contrary, what we hear from many countries under siege is a replica of the discourse of many Eurocentric parties, and even an echo of the discourse of genocide-fueled Western leaders such as Pedro Sanchez, Josep Borrell, or Emmanuel Macron, who desperately insist on “two states”.
Venezuela’s UN Ambassador: Ceasefire in Gaza is Binding for ‘Israel’
What is the meaning of the ‘two States’?
The colonialist thesis of the “two States”, officially established in 1947, is an illegitimate discourse, since the inhabitants were not consulted and is all but dead considering the past 60 years of Israeli colonial expansion. It is inconceivable that the leftists of the world continue to repeat like automatons this foundational basis of colonialism in Palestine, even in the midst of genocide.
The partitioning of a territory in two has always been an attempt to secure the colonizer at least a piece of what he conquered when he sensed that he could lose everything.
That was the origin of the partition studies in the 30s and 40s when the British had a date for withdrawal from Palestine, seeing their colony would fail, so we must understand its imposition in the Oslo Accords to crush an Intifada that destabilized the status quo, much alike the incessant Western noise today in view of their Israeli colony in intensive care.
The colonists never stop voluntarily in their invasive processes, nor do they give up unless forced to do so. That is why in the USA, Canada or Australia, they did not propose “two states” to the natives. On the contrary, they have done so as a last resort in the face of a horizon of defeat in their colonizations of Ireland, Palestine or South Africa, and that is why De Gaulle meditated it for Algeria, along with the forced displacement of the Algerians. It is nothing new, this dead scheme of the “two States” has only had the meaning of entrenching the existence of a colonized piece in Palestine against all the conditions of possibility. It remains to be seen whether the natives would have the right to survive under a Vichy Regime, Bantustans, Indian reservations, or a gigantic Guantanamo as is being built today in Gaza.
There is only one geopolitical entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that has been ruling the lives of all inhabitants for decades, and that is the Israeli colonial entity. Its whitewashing by the West fails to hide the fact that it is a colonial entity, created in crime, plunder and ethnic cleansing of the natives, and yet it is hard to hear from the Global South a plea for its disappearance and its replacement by a different political entity for the whole territory. And of course, what is by no means heard is the plea to send military and other support to the Resistance of the natives and their allied neighbors.
“Israel” must feel very calm in the face of this confluence of the discourse of the planetary lefts that is basically an appeasement. No one is demanding support for the legitimate response to Israeli violence. Very few are demanding the overthrow of the colonial entity.
The world must remember that the Palestinian people have the right to armed struggle, and that their struggle is not terrorism. This is what China’s representative at the ICJ, Ma Xinmin, said in his turn to speak during the sessions in the proceedings against “Israel”. It is an interesting step, and it remains to be seen whether China will adopt the mandate to support the Palestinian forces and their allies militarily and economically as it did in the past, and stop supporting the partition of Palestine, especially since China does not tolerate such a thing with Taiwan.
The Western left does not like the resistance forces
For the time being, material support for the Palestinian Resistance is provided by an alliance heterogeneous in its ideologies and capabilities from Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon or Syria. It is curious how this alliance resembles the one proposed a hundred years ago by Lenin in his Congress of the Peoples of the East. This meeting was attended by tribal leaders, religious sheikhs, intellectuals and revolutionaries from Turkey and Western Asia, because the Soviet leader understood that the heterogeneous anti-colonial struggle was the Achilles Heel of imperialism, and no revolution could be expected within the European colonizing metropolis.
That is where we remain: the centrality of the conflict remains between impoverished peoples across the planet and the oppressors who plunder their resources and lands. And that is where the Western left remains: it oozes a mixture of Zionist heritage and prejudices about native national liberation movements that do not fit into Eurocentric ideological corsets. Add in Arabophobia and Islamophobia and you have the explanation why these heterogeneous alliances with the Palestinian Resistance are not worthy of selective Western solidarity. Along with this, the deep imbrication of the left in the structures of the colonizing powers means that perhaps it only continues as an expectation to manage, in a progressive way, the profits provided to the West by having in Palestine a colony and some Arab minion regimes.
We are all repulsed by armed conflicts, but even more so by the oppressed peoples who are forced to engage in them and resist, precisely in order to live in dignity and peace. And the representation of these peoples is in those who resist, who must be given a voice, and not in those who submit.
If the European left is not capable of overthrowing colonialism, they should at least be bold enough to defend international legality and send arms and resources to the Palestinian Resistance and its allies.
