We Do Not Trail Behind Hamas, and Neither Should You

A Response to Red Star’s statement We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You

By Ramy Khalil, Philip Locker, Stephan Kimmerle, Brandon Madsen, and Bryan Watson – representing a minority viewpoint within the Steering Committee of DSA’s Reform & Revolution caucus

Red Star’s statement “We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You” invites comrades to engage in a much-needed discussion in DSA about anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. While we do not agree with Red Star, the debate over how to relate to Hamas has been an ongoing controversy that would benefit from an open discussion so DSA can consciously work out the most effective approach.

In contrast with Red Star’s uncritical approach toward Hamas, we think socialists should adopt the position outlined in the Reform & Revolution statement shortly after October 7, 2023:

Reform & Revolution stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people resisting apartheid and occupation. We call for mass protests in the US and around the world against the bombardment and brutal siege of Gaza, and the horrific danger of an Israeli ground invasion…

We reject establishment framing of this conflict as being between two equal parties. We stand with oppressed Palestinians in their struggle against Israeli oppression. We support a mass armed uprising against the Israeli military, democratically organized, like the First Intifada.

We oppose the right-wing, pro-capitalist, religious politics of Hamas. Their targeting of civilians is wrong and counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. We reject the weaponization of people’s grief by the Israeli state to launch a horrific assault on Gaza.

Despite disagreements, we are committed to fighting together alongside Red Star and all our comrades in DSA to end the Israeli war on Gaza. R&R comrades have been active participants along with many other DSA members in mobilizing against this war. As anti-imperialists based in the US we are focused on ending US military aid for Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and all other reactionary regimes, closing the over 750 US military bases abroad, and bringing all US troops home. 

Red Star deserves credit for attempting to end the unhealthy state of affairs that has so far prevailed in DSA by finally clearly putting this question up for open debate.

While highlighting the call for a ceasefire as an immediate demand to mobilize the greatest support, we do not agree with limiting ourselves to this, as DSA often does. We openly stand for the victory of the Palestinian people and the defeat of the Israel state, and call for an immediate and total withdrawal of all Israeli military forces from Gaza and the West Bank. 

Unlike liberals and many progressives, we recognize that a mass struggle against foreign rule can require armed resistance, a right of all oppressed peoples. We openly support the right, and acknowledge the necessity, of the Palestinian people defending themselves with arms against the brutal Israel military. 

We have also continually explained that “the starting point of any just solution is to end the siege of Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, end discrimination against Palestinians in Israel, and secure the right of return for the Palestinian diaspora. This requires a democratic socialist framework that can utilize the resources of the region to provide everyone with high-quality housing, good jobs, education, and healthcare, and can begin to end the myriad forms of exploitation and oppression that torment the Middle East.”

Some moderate forces in DSA have expressed anger at Red Star supporting Hamasʼs armed resistance because this is an unpopular stance in the US that the establishment will attack us for. We disagree with this popularity-based argument, which we consider an example of the opportunism that is unfortunately common on the US Left. Instead, DSA needs an internationalist program for Palestinian liberation that is based on the needs of the oppressed and the international working class, whether it happens to be currently popular or not. Only after developing such a principled political program, without regard to popularity, should we then look for the best tactics to build support for our policies within the US working class.

Red Star deserves credit for attempting to end the unhealthy state of affairs that has so far prevailed in DSA. DSA comrades often echo support for Hamas or the Yemen-based group Ansarallah (usually referred to as the “Houthi rebels” by the mass media) in meetings or at rallies but are then silent about this support in official statements or in the labor movement to avoid alienating people. Now Red Star has explicitly laid out an argument that articulates the feelings of many left-wing activists in DSA. This outlook has shaped the actual practice of much of the left wing of DSA around this war, but prior to this it had been largely implicit, not openly spelled out.

Socialists should distance themselves from conservative, pro-capitalist, religious fundamentalist, and repressive forces like Hamas, Ansarallah, and the Iranian government.

We share at least one common starting point with Red Star – socialists must support the Palestinian struggle and fight to defeat the Israeli state. The question is, does politically supporting Hamas further these objectives? On this we fundamentally disagree with our Red Star comrades.  

Red Star asserts:

[…] all forces fighting alongside Palestine and against Israel and its allies are at least temporarily, and at least in this context, our allies. That includes the Palestinian resistance, the larger Axis of Resistance in the region, and all popular movements rising up to support Palestine … Hamas is at the center of the popular front for resistance, all major parties in the resistance are aligned with it, and all of our enemies (the US and Israel) are against it. There is no way to oppose Hamas – or any other element of the popular front – without standing in stark opposition to the entire resistance movement.

We fully support the Palestinians’ fight for self-determination, including the right to armed resistance. Yet this does not require us to celebrate whatever Palestinian organization rises to the fore at a particular time (such as Fatah when they signed the Oslo accords), and certainly not to defend any tactic employed. That is third worldism, not revolutionary Marxism.

In our view, socialists should politically distance themselves from “Axis of Resistance” forces like Hamas, Ansarallah, and the Iranian government because their core politics – conservative, pro-capitalist, religious fundamentalist, and repressive – are opposed to the interests of the Palestinian masses and the working class of the Middle East. Further, their tactics are often counterproductive to the cause of Palestinian liberation.

DSA should prioritize supporting working-class and left-wing Palestinian groups that recognize the democratic rights and material needs of workers and the oppressed within Palestine and throughout the region. Supporting Hamas, however, with its authoritarian rule in Gaza and repression of trade unions, left-wing critics, women, and the LGBTQ+ community, ultimately weakens the resistance of working-class, progressive, and socialist Palestinians.

We recognize that Hamas has gained support in Palestine and the wider Muslim world by breaking down the prison walls around Gaza on October 7, and because it is currently fighting the IDF, in contrast to the collaborationist Fatah. But Hamas still remains a populist, pro-capitalist, conservative religious force.

Furthermore, Hamas’s killing of civilians has the effect of assisting the Israeli ruling class in winning to its side the working class and oppressed within Israel (as well as many workers in imperialist countries who oppose antisemitism). 

Although Hamas was formed amid brutal Israeli apartheid and is very different politically and religiously from Al-Qaeda, the impact of Hamas’s targeting of civilians on 10/7 is similar to how the 9/11 terrorist attacks led to an increase in US working-class support for military interventions for a period.

Hamas’s 1988 founding charter was full of antisemitism and set the aim of establishing an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine. Recognizing that this was politically damaging, the Hamas leadership has tried to distance itself from this legacy by adopting a new charter in 2017 that opens the door to a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders (as a first step toward a future Islamic state in all of historic Palestine). Yet it is their killing hundreds of civilians on 10/7 (and many prior outrages) which has left a lasting impression in the minds of Israeli Jews and many workers in the US, not the fine print in their 2017 charter.

Class Interests in Palestine

Red Star argues “although some might find a different and more idealized resistance easier to support, when a movement for liberation arises, it arises from the conditions that surround it.” But our comrades seem to forget that the conditions “that surround” this struggle are shaped by class contradictions. 

Ruling elites in the Middle East and even Israel and the US have heavily influenced the Palestinian struggle. For example, the Palestinian Authority – dominated by Fatah – is deeply corrupt and collaborates with Israel, acting as an arm of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the West Bank. Labor unions in the occupied territories have a dual character of being funded by Arab capitalist states while also being influenced by the workers from below.  

Hamas is no exception. As a right-wing populist formation, it is shaped by the class contradictions within Palestine and the influence of regional powers such as the right-wing theocratic Iranian government, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the reactionary Qatari monarchy, and the conservative Turkish government.

The Israeli regime itself supported Hamas and its predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s as a right-wing counterweight to left-wing Palestinian communist and secular nationalists who they believed were a greater threat.

Our Red Star comrades gloss over the deep political, social, and class divisions within Palestine to conflate supporting Palestinian resistance with supporting Hamas.

More recently, the Israeli government actively encouraged the Qatari dictatorship to send billions of dollars to Hamas for years. Netanyahu explained his government’s calculation when he stated in 2019 that “anyone who wants to foil the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of funds to Hamas” (Haaretz). 

Our Red Star comrades gloss over the deep political, social, and class divisions within Palestine to conflate supporting Palestinian resistance with supporting Hamas. In reality, the comrades are making a political choice to support Hamas (and groups in alliance with them) rather than other Palestinian political forces. They are making a common mistake of flattening and simplifying Palestinian resistance to one resistance led by Hamas. Instead, we must recognize that there are multiple Palestinian resistance forces with conflicting politics.

The Red Star statement itself contains an implicit acknowledgement of the sharp political divisions within the Palestinian resistance. When they write “our comrades in Gaza have condemned calls to avoid supporting Palestinian resistance,” they are supporting the position of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) against the BDS National Committee in a recent controversy over advocacy of armed resistance. Both the PFLP and the BDS National Committee are fully part of the struggle. The difference is not whether to support the Palestinian resistance against Israel – the difference is over the politics and strategy that best advances this resistance. 

We have no objection to Red Star taking a political side in this dispute between two active Palestinian resistance groups. But this example shows how incorrect Red Star is to argue that supporting “the” Palestinian resistance necessarily means siding with Hamas. If Red Star is capable of politically agreeing with the criticisms of the BDS National Committee by the PFLP, we are also capable of supporting left-wing Palestinians’ opposition to the pro-capitalist, conservative, religious politics of Hamas.

Majority of Palestinians Do Not Support Hamas

Red Star also completely ignores the widespread opposition to Hamas among Palestinians in the occupied territories. Palestinian Pollster Khalil Shikaki said “support for Hamas typically spikes during periods of armed conflict before leveling out, and that even now most Palestinians do not back the militant group.” 

The overwhelming majority of Palestinians support struggling to end Israel’s occupation, and yet most of them don’t support Hamas.

The Financial Times reports “Polls in November by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed Hamas’s popularity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank had increased from three months earlier. In Gaza, support increased from 38 per cent to 43 per cent and in the West Bank from 12 per cent to 44 per cent. But by March that support had dipped again because of the ferocity of Israel’s retaliation and the scale of destruction and loss of life in Gaza, according to a survey by the same research group. Khalil Shikaki, director of the center, said support for Hamas fell by almost a quarter to 34 per cent, according to a poll taken during the first week of March. The movement also lost popularity in the West Bank, where support fell from 44 per cent to 35 per cent.”

Another poll of Gazans shortly before October 7 found that Hamas was seen as corrupt and opposed by most Gazans. Only 27% selected Hamas as their preferred party. An overwhelming 72% said there was a large (34%) or medium (38%) amount of governmental corruption. Sixty-eight percent believed that the right to peaceful protest was not protected, or was protected only to a limited extent, under Hamas.

To be clear, Hamas’s lack of majority support is not on its own a reason to politically oppose them; if they represented the interests of the working class, it would be necessary for socialists to support them, no matter how popular they might be at any given moment. But these polls make it clear that supporting Hamas is not a prerequisite for supporting resistance against the Israeli occupation in general; the overwhelming majority of Palestinians support struggling to end Israel’s occupation, and yet most of them don’t support Hamas.

We Reject the Ruling Class’s Binary Framing

Socialists in the US have a political responsibility to build the largest popular support for ending US military aid to Israel and US support for the Israeli war on Gaza. This is, first and foremost, how we can provide actual practical assistance to the Palestinian people. We are failing in this duty if we fall into traps set for us by the ruling class designed to limit support for our demands in the US working class.

One of the primary political weapons the establishment uses against the Palestinian solidarity movement is its insistence that any opposition to the Israeli state is tantamount to supporting Hamas. The mass media regularly echoes this by smearing antiwar protestors as “pro-Hamas.” 

This framing is not accidental. It is a very conscious choice by the ruling class, based on their understanding that Hamas is deeply unpopular among a supermajority of ordinary people. They calculate that identifying our movement with Hamas is the best way to drive a wedge between us and the mass of US society – the very forces that we need to win over to have the power to bring real pressure to bear on the government.

Our comrades in Red Star are mistakenly promoting the same binary logic of the ruling class. Opposing the Israeli state does not mean DSA and its public representatives should support Hamas. Solidarity with an oppressed people against imperialism does not mean that we must support the official leaders who happen to be leading the struggle at this point in time.

Anti-imperialism is not as simple as assigning a plus wherever imperialism places a minus. The experience of the struggle against the imperialist invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan contradicts this binary thinking. The most effective socialist organizing against these wars opposed US imperialism without falling into the trap of politically supporting the right-wing governments the US was fighting against.

Anti-imperialism is not as simple as assigning a plus wherever imperialism places a minus.

If DSA were to accept the logic of Red Star’s position, it would set itself up to be seriously disoriented in the face of international conflicts. If DSA opposes the US intervention in the Ukraine war, should it support the “actual existing” military fighting the US (the Russian army)? Or if DSA opposes the Russian invasion of Ukraine, does the inverse logic apply – DSA should support the “actual existing” Zelensky-led military resistance to the Russian occupation?

If the US was to enter into a hot war with Iran, DSA would need to organize in total opposition to US imperialism and in solidarity with the Iranian people. But it would be a major mistake for DSA to politically support the right-wing, pro-capitalist, theocratic Iranian government. Our support as socialists for the Iranian people means we support the struggle of Iranian women, workers, and leftists fighting against their local oppressors, without losing sight of our primary task of opposing our own ruling class. 

Red Star argues that “to support a resistance without Hamas is to support something which does not exist. It is to support no resistance at all.” But Marxists do not have to limit ourselves to supporting existing political forces. If this were the case, we would not be able to argue for building the socialist movement anywhere where it did not already exist. 

If we were to apply Red Star’s logic here to US politics, it would lead us to argue “a materialist approach requires supporting the actually existing resistance to the Republicans; therefore, we must support the corporate Democrats. We cannot simply wish a mass socialist party into existence.” We do not agree with this logic and neither does Red Star, despite it being the outcome if they were to consistently apply their international policies.

Red Star’s position is an expression of the “campist” politics that significant sections of the radical left currently favor. Campism assumes that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This means aligning oneself with whatever camp is fighting western imperialism, even if that camp oppresses the working class or marginalized groups within their own country.

Campism is based on a profound pessimism about the potential of the international working class to be the decisive social agent in fighting imperialism.

Campism is based on a profound pessimism about the potential of the international working class to be the decisive social agent in fighting imperialism. Campists therefore look instead to align with the most prominent “actually existing” forces opposing US imperialism (even other capitalist states like Iran or China), regardless of their reactionary politics.

A clear example of the problem with this logic can be seen in the cheerleading of Ansarallah in Yemen (commonly referred to as the Houthi rebels) for its Red Sea blockade. This political organization is an extremely conservative, sectarian, religious force. Their official slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Those uncritically supporting Ansarallah significantly undermine their credibility in claiming to be fighting to replace the Zionist state with a democratic, secular Palestine where Jewish people will have equal rights.

Building a Mass Movement in the US

The number of US unions calling for an immediate ceasefire and expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people is unprecedented. This is enormously significant and points to our strategic task – mobilizing the power of the US working class against imperialism.

In the context of this debate it is noteworthy that almost all the union resolutions calling for a ceasefire explicitly oppose Hamas’s killing of civilians, call for the release of Israeli hostages, and oppose both Islamophobia and antisemitism.

While these resolutions represent a very important step forward in challenging US support for Israel, they also have significant political shortcomings that reflect a progressive-liberal politics, rather than a socialist approach.

These weaknesses include many of the resolutions calling for the release of Israeli hostages but not Palestinian political prisoners; not calling for an end to all US military aid to Israel and all reactionary regimes in the region like Egypt or Saudi Arabia; not calling for an immediate withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian self-determination, and the Palestinian right of return; finally, they usually promote a solution of top-down diplomacy brokered by reactionary powers rather than a mass uprising of the Palestinian people and the workers of Israel and the wider region as the only basis for transforming the Middle East on democratic, secular, and anti-capitalist lines.

But the lack of support for Hamas in these resolutions is a strength, not a weakness. In fact, the experience of debating these resolutions demonstrates that in order to have a chance of winning majority support among workers for a ceasefire or ending US military aid for Israel requires distancing ourselves from Hamas.

This reflects the reality that most unions feel pressure from their members to overcome religious sectarianism and unite the working class. To build an effective Palestinian solidarity movement in the US, we need to win the support of more unions and the wider working class. We ask our Red Star comrades: Do we advance this more effectively by politically supporting Hamas, or do we advance it better by clearly dissociating ourselves from Hamas? Should DSA Congressmembers and other DSA electeds publicly adopt the same position as Red Star?

We believe this would be a major mistake that would seriously undermine the support for socialist electeds and the antiwar movement in unions. 

Again, we are against basing our positions on popularity. However, we believe that it is rightfully unpopular to support antisemitic forces like Ansarallah in Yemen or right-wing religious groups like Hamas. Therefore, it is wrong in principle and tactically damaging to ask our unions or our elected officials to take that stance.

But Red Star argues:

to spend our time on criticism of Hamas as an organization validates the widespread opinion that Hamas is an existential danger (too extreme for even the communists!) and lends credence to Israel’s justification of its onslaught. When we hear every anti-Palestinian group call for the destruction of Hamas, do we lend our voices to those calls, or stand with Palestine and its resistance?

They also state:

What concrete outcome do we hope to gain by writing critiques of Hamas? If the goal is to isolate ourselves from Palestinian resistance and solidarity movements, then the action is precisely aligned with the goal. In all other cases, perhaps one should have the wisdom not to do so.

We criticize Hamas not to justify Israel’s assault on Gaza nor to isolate ourselves from the Palestinian struggle, but to win more US workers to oppose Israel’s war. If we were to remain silent on Hamas, or even worse to support them, we empower the right-wing of the labor movement to block our efforts to mobilize unions against this war.

It is true that too often DSA electeds criticize Hamas from a progressive-liberal standpoint that opposes all violence and seeks a solution based on international diplomacy. But that is not our position as Marxists. 

While we welcome their outspoken opposition to the war, we have criticized AOC, Cori Bush, and Rashida Tlaib’s political approach. In contrast, the DSA national leadership, which includes three Red Star members, has been totally silent about their failure to advance a clear socialist position. 

We have advocated that DSA electeds should clearly explain that this is not a conflict between two equal parties, and that we are on the side of the oppressed Palestinians in their struggle against Israeli subjugation. Within that principled framework, they should make clear that they oppose Hamas — not to isolate themselves from the Palestinian struggle, but to help bring wider layers of the working class into active participation in the struggle.

Perhaps the Red Star position is not intended to be used for addressing the mass of the working class, or even its vanguard, but is solely directed at the radical left? If so, we entirely reject that approach and consider it fundamentally opportunist. We believe DSA needs a principled program that our elected representatives should systematically champion. DSA members should also campaign for this principled program in our unions.

Popular Frontism

Red Star describes the Palestinian resistance as a “popular front” made up of many groups. They explain that Hamas is

the largest organization in the group, but many other groups also participate. The most important ones are Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Hamas and PIJ are Islamist groups, and the PFLP and DFLP are secular communist groups, but they fight together as a common popular front. They all understand that allowing their disagreements to divide them would only serve Israel’s interests. They work with each other and with external groups like Iran, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah.

Popular frontism is a class-collaborationist strategy that directly contradicts the theory of class struggle, a central premise of Marxism. In the Palestinian context it is based on the idea of “national unity,” uniting parties that represent the Palestinian capitalists and middle classes with parties that seek to represent the interests of the Palestinian workers and poor. 

Revolutionary Marxists advocate using a united front as opposed to a popular front. A united front is where socialists form an alliance with others around a common demand or action, while making sure not to downplay their own socialist message, demands, and recruitment efforts for the sake of appeasing the pro-capitalist trends within the alliance.

It is true that there is a cross-class basis for the struggle for national liberation against Israel, but within that struggle the question is: who leads? Is the struggle united around the program and interests of the Palestinian capitalists? Or is it united around the program and interests of the Palestinian workers and poor? 

On this central question the Red Star statement is silent. But in politics, silence is acceptance of the existing balance of forces. The “actually existing” popular front is being led by Hamas, not the Palestinian left. Refusal to wage a political struggle against Hamas means the PFLP and DFLP are accepting Hamas’s (mis)leadership and abdicating their responsibility to offer a Marxist leadership to the Palestinian masses.

Red Star goes on to explicitly support the policy of the PFLP and DFLP:

Palestinian communists’ choice to participate in this alliance is a good thing, and we’re grateful for the good judgment our socialist siblings in the PFLP and DFLP have shown by participating in it. If they had instead chosen not to participate because of ideological disagreements with the Islamist factions, it would have doomed the cause of socialism to irrelevance in Palestine. 

We agree that socialists on the ground in Palestine can enter into temporary and limited alliances with pro-capitalist forces like Hamas around specific actions or demands (like the March of Return and the Unity Intifada). But this must be on the condition that they maintain their own independent political program and strategy, and openly raise their criticisms of the politics and strategy of Hamas (the non-negotiable requirement of any united front as understood by Lenin and Trotsky). But that is entirely different from a general political position of open-ended support and celebration of Hamas. 

Throughout the Middle East mass left-wing and socialist movements were destroyed by decades of popular front policies.

Contrary to Red Star’s embrace of the popular front as the salvation of the socialist movement, the previously powerful Palestinian left actually saw its influence severely damaged by pursuing this strategy which subordinated the working class to pro-capitalist forces. Throughout the Middle East mass left-wing and socialist movements were destroyed by decades of popular front policies of Stalinist Communist parties and the historic failures of bourgeois nationalism (Nasserism). 

Again and again the failure of working-class leaders to break with pro-capitalist forces resulted in revolutionary opportunities being squandered, ending in counter-revolutionary defeats. This was most starkly shown in the 1979 Iranian revolution, but also in many other countries including Iraq in 1958-1963, Sudan in 1971, Jordan 1969-1971, and Lebanon in 1975. Experience in other parts of the former colonial world further underlines the bankruptcy of popular frontism.

In all these revolutions mass communist parties, under the influence of Stalinism, tied the working class to “progressive, democratic” capitalist forces. These bourgeois secular nationalists were incapable of overthrowing capitalism and imperialism, preparing the ground for counter-revolution and the rise of right-wing political Islam. Red Star argues to repeat this tragedy, but this time in a farcical manner by hailing popular fronts led by right-wing religious parties.

Leninist Policy Needed

The job of revolutionary socialists is to center the interests of the Palestinian workers and poor in the struggle against Israeli domination. In this, we base ourselves on the advice of Lenin in his Theses on National and Colonial Questions for the Communist International, which explains the revolutionary Marxist, anti-imperialist policy that we believe DSA should follow.

Lenin stressed the need for socialists to intransigently oppose national oppression, colonialism, and imperialism. At the same time he insisted that socialists must fight for their own distinct politics within the liberation struggle. Lenin ferociously opposed tail-ending bourgeois or petty bourgeois nationalist forces:

The Communist Party, as the avowed champion of the proletarian struggle to overthrow the bourgeois yoke, must base its policy, in the national question too, not on abstract and formal principles but, first, on a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions; second, on a clear distinction between the interests of the oppressed classes, of working and exploited people, and the general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests of the ruling class; third, on an equally clear distinction between the oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations. 

In direct contradiction to the popular front conception of the PFLP and DFLP which trails the (mis)leadership of Hamas in a common national struggle, Lenin is crystal clear that socialists must make “a clear distinction between the interests of the oppressed classes, of working and exploited people, and the general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests of the ruling class.”

Lenin’s Theses also states that communists “need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.”

Rather than preparing Palestinian working people for a struggle against the pro-capitalist Hamas leaders, PFLP and DFLP celebrate Hamas and for all practical purposes have subordinated themselves to Hamas’s leadership.

Despite using some now-outdated terminology (but which was common at the time), Lenin argued that socialists must be at the forefront of the struggle for colonial and national liberation while totally opposing “attempts to give a communist coloring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries.” He explained that communists should support 

bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties… are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.

Does Red Star believe PFLP and DFLP are carrying out this Leninist policy? In our view it is clear that they are doing the exact opposite. Rather than preparing Palestinian working people for a struggle against the pro-capitalist Hamas leaders, they celebrate Hamas and for all practical purposes have subordinated themselves to Hamas’s leadership.

The Key Role of the Palestinian Working Class

We wholeheartedly agree with Red Star that DSA must support the struggle for Palestinian self-determination and fight to bring down the Zionist state. But the question Red Star fails to consider is: Do the Palestinian capitalists and middle classes who Hamas represents have the social power to actually win these objectives? 

History shows that winning national liberation will require the mobilization of the power of the Palestinian masses, in alliance with the working class of the region and internationally. The working class uses tactics that work to their advantage – mass rallies, marches, occupations, strikes, general strikes, and mass armed uprisings. Once these mass tactics are used and grow into a mass movement, they come into conflict with the whole social order and point toward anti-capitalism. However, Hamas’s pro-capitalist leadership totally opposes such an anti-capitalist program and perspective.

The extreme squalor facing the Palestinian people means their struggle for national liberation is closely intertwined with their aspirations for a decent standard of living. Our socialist demands follow from the reality of what would inevitably be entailed if Palestinian statehood left in place the underlying social relations in the region. 

The redistribution of wealth and the reorganization of social production along democratic socialist lines is the only way to secure decent housing, jobs, education, healthcare, and basic infrastructure for all. Only on that basis will it be possible to realize peaceful co-existence between the working-class people of different ethnic and religious communities in the region. Without this – in other words, on the basis of scarcity – there is no way to avoid a continual drift towards brutal ethnic and national conflicts.

To realize the national and democratic needs of the Palestinian people requires building a working-class movement to fight for housing, jobs, democracy, and the ability to live in peace and dignity — in short, a socialist confederation of the Middle East that utilizes the region’s huge wealth to meet the needs of the masses rather than enriching corrupt elites and foreign imperialists. It is true that today this appears far off, given the low levels of class consciousness and the extreme weakness of socialist and working-class organizations in the Middle East, but there are no other realistic solutions.

The Palestinian and wider Arab masses have a rich socialist and revolutionary history that stands in stark contrast to the regressive politics of Hamas, and which offers far more effective methods of struggle. A great example is the First Intifada (uprising) in the 1980s, which involved tens of thousands of popular committees of Palestinian resistance. The First Intifada was not a small group of self-selected militants like Hamas claiming to act on behalf of the oppressed masses; it was a democratic mass uprising by the masses themselves. The Great March of Return and the Unity Intifada are also examples of mass struggle that pointed in the right direction.

Winning the liberation of the Palestinian people, which Red Star and Reform & Revolution are both committed to, requires a fundamentally different strategy than Hamas’s. This must be based on building mass struggle with democratic structures, led by the Palestinian working class. It will also need to spread to the working people of the surrounding region and ultimately around the globe, in a powerful movement against Israeli apartheid, US imperialism, and all the right-wing capitalist regimes throughout the Middle East.

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For more on our views on how DSA could play the most effective role in the Palestinian solidarity movement, see Reform & Revolution’s December 1st statement, The Struggle for Palestinian Liberation.  

Below is a particularly relevant excerpt which draws on historical experiences of different liberation struggles to explain how the Israeli military can be defeated.

How can the IDF be defeated?

How can the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) — with its massive military superiority over the Palestinians, including nuclear weapons — be overcome? 

The history of resistance to imperialism, such as the Vietnam War and the defeat of South African apartheid, shows it is not simply a military question, but that politics is decisive. The US was defeated in Vietnam because of the political determination of the Vietnamese people to fight to the death for their national and social liberation, along with the political collapse of support for the war within US society. 

The vicious apartheid system in South Africa was brought down primarily due to the mass revolutionary struggle of the Black working class in the 1980s and early 1990s, in which the building of mass unions was key. While the movement did engage in armed struggle, the apartheid regime was not militarily defeated, but moved to reach an agreement with the ANC leadership to end apartheid while protecting their capitalist interests.

As revolutionary Marxists, we argue the most effective strategy for winning liberation will come from the building of a mass movement from below of the Palestinian people. 

The First Intifada (“uprising”) in the 1980s saw tens of thousands of bottom-up committees of Palestinian resistance, constituting a democratic mass uprising against Israeli oppression. We stand for a new mass uprising of the Palestinian people, supported by the international working class, along the lines of the First Intifada…

Marxists are not pacifists. A mass uprising against the brutal IDF requires taking up arms, which is the right of all occupied peoples. 

The reality of armed struggle, however, means it is essential to have a strategy that does not lead to new purges, new mass displacements, or deepened divisions along national, religious, or ethnic lines. Any democratic or socialist future of the region will have to be one based on cooperation between diverse communities. The idea of ethnically, religiously, or nationally “pure” territories is completely antithetical to such a project.

This is why it’s vital to emphasize support for democratic rights for all, especially minorities. This means unambiguously defending the rights of both the Palestinian and Jewish people living in the region, and openly opposing Jewish supremacism and Zionism, as well as anti-semitism and right-wing political Islam. 

Such a struggle can defeat the Israeli state by making clear to the Israeli working class, on the one hand, that there will be no peace until Israeli oppression of Palestinians ends. On the other hand, it would need to drive a wedge between the Israeli ruling class and the largest possible sections of its working class and oppressed ethnic groups. This requires extending an offer of a peaceful future together on the basis of defending the democratic rights of both peoples, Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Class appeals have an essential role to play in splintering working-class support for the far-right Zionist government and undermining the social base of the IDF. 

Zionism was and is based on the brutal displacement of Palestinians, Bedouins, and other Arab peoples from the land they lived on for generations. There is a deeply rooted colonial and racist consciousness within Israeli society which is used to support the IDF and to organize racist oppression on a daily basis. 

At the same time, Israel is a capitalist society deeply divided along class lines. Israel has a history of strikes, including general strikes, and an Occupy-like movement of hundreds of thousands in 2011. There are also major ethnic divisions between Jews from Western, Middle Eastern, African, and former Soviet bloc countries. In the months before October 7, Israel was divided like never before over the efforts of the far-right Netanyahu government to move toward a more authoritarian version of the Zionist project.

Movements within Israel for peace and against the occupation (as has happened on a number of occasions) can undermine morale within the IDF. Such a development would be a significant change in the balance of forces in favor of Palestinian liberation.

Photo Credit: Stephan Kimmerle