As anarchists living in the belly of the United States empire, we are committed to meaningful solidarity with the resistance in Palestine. Solidarity must not just be in name but, centered in establishing an effective resistance at home; one capable of fighting to overturn the US empire and western hegemony. We are currently living through and witnessing one of the most historical moments in anti-colonial struggle.
The movement in the US is at a major crossroads- where we are seeing a split between those committed to revolutionary change and those who are invested, consciously or unconsciously, in the continuation of the US empire. We write here what constitutes a sincere position of solidarity with Palestine in the true spirit of anarchism in the hopes that our intentions can reach beyond the counter-revolutionary impulses of social democratic imperialism that we find in the movement today. We look at specific aspects of the resistance in Palestine to understand how the factions have been able to launch a successful struggle against the Zionist entity and analyze how we might learn from them in order to unite those with an anti-colonial perspective to support them in this crucial moment.
The October 7th militant attack on the Zionist colonial regime, and the fighters who continue the battle against the occupation, from Gaza to Jenin, have created an example for contemporary resistance movements. The tactical prowess, creativity, and tenacity of the Palestinian Resistance fighters has, despite all odds, been successful against a more highly equipped and technologically advanced army. The relationship of the resistance groups involved has demonstrated how to create a functional and significant revolutionary force. There is now a symbol of hope, not just for the Palestinian people, but for those around the world who struggle for freedom against the US war machine.
Not only has the Palestinian Resistance been an inspiration for people in dire circumstances, but the determination has emboldened regional actors to fight on their behalf, creating an unprecedented campaign against Zionist brutality. In the course of this struggle, the interdependence between the Zionist regime and the US has been on full display. In a historic turn, the military cards of these oppressor states have been pulled, and despite a bombastic and horrifically devastating military campaign, they appear to be floundering. The Palestinian Resistance, presuming the fragility of western domination, may have precipitated the potential downfall of the white supremacist world-system. The political target for the Resistance has remained the same throughout the decades, and amidst their cries and proclamations, some of us have purposely kept our ears open to their calls. The destruction of the Zionist regime has, and remains, their target objective and we should strive to harmonize our efforts. The regime, as the Resistance says, is as weak as a spider’s web, and we recognize that fragility within the entire US imperialist apparatus.
This is a welcomed development not just for those who have felt the wrath of western hegemony abroad, but for those subject to its brutality at home. European expansion and exploitation justified through Christianity and a lust for wealth, decimated the population of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, or Abya Yala (the so-called “Americas”) from 70-100 million people to 12 million just in the first hundred years. In a 50-year period, 27 million out of 30 million indigenous people were murdered by conquistadors. The kidnapping and mass enslavement of millions of African people is a crucial illustration of this genocidal process, and an integral part of European capitalist accumulation and domination through the settler colonial process in the northern hemisphere. While methods of domination adapt throughout time and place to meet the needs of the colonizer, the genocidal intent stays the same, as we see in Palestine and the United States today. Whether the colonizer’s tools are extermination via large scale military conflicts or industrialized exploitation, incarceration, assimilation, ecocide, and policing, these genocides have continued for more than 500 years. Yet so has the resistance.
From the earliest days of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans rebelled, freed themselves, and joined other fugitives and Indigenous tribes to resist the white planter system, and the United States project in itself. Maroons of the Dismal Swamp – as well as Black Seminoles in Florida successfully struggled against genocidal Euro-American colonial expansion for more than 150 years before the Civil War. In the Caribbean, groups of Maroon guerrillas and enslaved plantation workers overthrew the French colonial power structure in the first successful revolutionary epoch against colonialism in the hemisphere: the Haitian Revolution. The lineage from Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner to Assata Shakur and Dhoruba bin-Wahad; from Sitting Bull to Leonard Peltier; from Sandino to Carlos Fonseca; is where we look to find creative ways to address the real needs of the people and the precise ways to attack the US empire.
As anarchists, we often speak of our history in regards to Catalonia, Haymarket, or the Makhnovista movement; contemporarily the Rojava Revolution, or Zapatismo. These revolutionary projects were not as ideologically rigid, or pure, as many anarchists often assume, yet even so we too, still view these references with reverence. We aren’t looking to mirror any of these reference points, but rather learn from a diverse array of experiments.
The wealth and leisure in western societies is created through the imperial process, and our communities domestically are disciplined to ensure the settler-colonial regime in the United States enforces the same abroad. When we understand ourselves and our enemy in this way, we also look to historical and ongoing occupation and genocide by the hands of the US in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, in Hawaii, and in the entirety of the global south. We understand fighting Zionism is fighting US imperialism, which is fighting for the liberation of all colonized people. From inside the belly of the beast, our efforts align with those advanced sectors of resistance who are destroying this process of barbarism. For example, when we see the imperialists being ejected from the Sahel we recognize the importance of the conflict, and the importance of the experience of those who have been colonized. Understanding this interconnection gives us a clear picture of our power and the landscape of the enemy.
The US and the Zionist regime are the primary dominoes in the impending collapse of western civilization. To understand them better, we need more than an abstract view of them as nation-states. The state and its military operation is a complex web of relations — industrial, yes, but also social, familial, architectural. We salute the ingenuity of saboteurs against Zionist funders, the international student occupations for Palestine and the Stop Cop City struggle in demonstrating the importance of mapping the flows of power, of identifying what and who within their local situation is woven into the operation of empire. If we’re to play an active role in the demise of these monstrosities, we need to know their Achille’s heels. We believe that power-mapping the enemy is an essential tool for the insurgent.
We need to map our own power too, in each locale and in thorough detail. An assessment of our side must figure into our topography and our tactical considerations. Three committed people are capable of quite a lot. One hundred fifty people, with the element of surprise on their side, may have unfathomable success. Knowing the numbers, capacities, locations, and resources of our forces allows us to strike the enemy’s targets and strategically coordinate.
Our path towards resistance should be unequivocal as well. The principle objective of the revolutionary anarchist movement in the US should be the destruction of the United States. That fundamental target, while it seems clear, has been largely obscured by some segments of the left, who are beholden to the superficial sham of activism, and by tacitly or explicitly allying with US propaganda and/or military goals, have placed the movement on the altar of western militarism. It is beneficial to make our position utterly transparent. Our actions, literature, propaganda, and methods should be subordinated toward the end of the United States. With this task in mind, the initiatives of international resistance are signs for us to act in solidarity, and for others to act in solidarity with us. The collapse of the United States, the chief architect of barbarism, the head of snake, is the goal for revolutionaries internationally and must be ours as well.
Despite existing hierarchies, the prison break of October 7th was also the result of highly horizontalized social structures. As anarchists we need to be careful that our keen eye for hierarchy doesn’t make us useful as the lackeys of social democratic imperialism. The Resistance is demonstrating what is necessary to conduct an efficient revolutionary campaign, and we intend to learn from it and integrate some of these lessons into our practices. The concept put forth by the Resistance, “the Unity of the Fields,” is a practice in a larger process of struggle, that if adhered to should produce greater revolutionary momentum. It states that resistance factions do not need to create one overarching governance structure or a bureaucracy, but should coordinate in struggle, based on shared political objectives. This mirrors the concept of “the mosaic,” how Russell Maroon Shoatz defines as “the movement of oppressed sectors acting in concert.”
The movement in the US is currently scattered and, importantly, factions of the movement have remarkably disparate political goals. To build a capable resistance, we must flesh out these objectives to be able to coordinate from collective to collective, faction to faction. It is essential that any unity is defined by that process. So long as a shared horizon can be envisioned, we believe unity is possible.
We propose these objectives as an essential starting place:
- 1. The end of the Zionist regime, a free autonomous Palestine, and solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance.
- 2. The revolutionary end of the settler-colonialist regime of the United States.
- 3. Coordinating our efforts faction to faction to undermine the US regime and their political-military proxies internationally to weaken the entire colonial system.
In establishing this base level of shared agreement the movement can then strive towards middle and longer term plans and end the confounding cycle of reactiveness that has plagued us for so long. To be clear, we are calling for a reformation of the movement away from symbolism and spectacle, so when calls are made to intensify the struggle, or when the exploited rise, we are not trapped in the activist fog that the movement itself has created. If we truly want freedom for Palestine this should be the first step. Indigenous, Black liberation and all internationalist revolutionary movements have always known this truth: the freedom of Palestinians, which is intrinsically tied to all colonized people, will take nothing short of the dissolution of the US empire, and our efforts must dignify the rebels in Gaza and the West Bank.
When we reach our hands out in revolutionary greetings, when our colonial siblings are suffering from mass starvation, we don’t offer conditional support, with prerequisites, based on racialization or secularism. The Resistance here has varying belief systems, similarly to Palestine, and a political desire striving for unification must be derived through acceptance of those differences and the fundamental belief in the absolute destruction of the western world-system. Secularism and science is not devoid of episteme: an episteme that is usually externalized in western superiority over those who haven’t been “enlightened” yet. It’s specifically the goal of US exceptionalist media to portray all forms of Islam as being the same. Anarchist have played into this indoctrination when we foreground the most violent strains of Islam. Islam, for instance, has a foundation of zakat – essentially mutual aid and jihad – to strive towards a better self and betterment of one’s Ummah (Muslim community).
“Fight against them ˹if they persecute you˺ until there is no more persecution…” If they stop ˹persecuting you˺, let there be no hostility except against the aggressors.” ~ The Qur’an 2:193
Islam encourages Muslims to strive for a better world, to struggle against oppression, and to humbly fight back. This is a part of why many Black revolutionaries are Muslim and has become a driving episteme in the Palestinian resistance. As anarchists fighting against the entity’s imperial war machine in the belly of the beast, amongst our varying experiences and understandings of the world, there are elements that unite us. The desire to end genocidal settler-colonialism, love, care, and the belief in another world are uniting forces within our struggle that propels us forward in the long-term struggle towards the Last Intifada.
In Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, Palestinians and Resistance fighters are attacking the Zionists on all fronts to end the occupation. They are fighting at unprecedented levels of coordination towards The Last Intifada. The Resistance called upon Muslims, the Arab world, westerners, militants, workers, students, anarchists, communists, radicals, and all of “those who have been wronged” to be in material solidarity with Palestinians. We cannot expect the Resistance to fight alone. Our liberation is connected and dependent on the death of western civilization. We, as anarchists, have a duty to fight for Palestinian de-colonial struggle and the struggle to defeat capitalism and western hegemony. We must continue to hemorrhage the US empire. The beast cannot continue to claw colonized peoples across the world without being clawed back.
For The Last Intifada.
– Lenapehoking Anarchists, September 2024
“Permission ˹to fight back˺ is ˹hereby˺ granted to those being fought, for they have been wronged.” ~ The Qur’an 22:39
Further Readings
Kassem Kassir “The Phrases “Unity of Fields [of Battle]”, “Unity of Fronts” or “Axis of Resistance”: Between Slogan and Reality.”
Al Jazeera “Last set of French troops exit Niger as Sahel sheds Parisian influence.”