Quotations of Basil Araj

Here, I will translate some selected quotations of the Martyr Basil Araj, the Militant Intellectual, and comment on them as far as I can.

(For a fuller introduction of Basil’s life and works, see my previous article)

All page references are to I Have Found My Answers: Thus Spoke the Martyr Basil Araj, 1st Edition, published in 2018 by Bissan Bookshop.

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They say: a funeral procession passed in front of Qaraqush¹, and inside the casket a man was screaming: “People, I’m alive, don’t bury me!” And when he saw Qaraqush, he appealed to him for help: “Here I am, I am obviously alive, Your Majesty! Don’t let them bury me!” Qaraqush took one glance at him and said: “Why, do you want me to believe that you’re telling the truth and all those good people are lying? Everyone, bury this corpse and get it over with!”

The point of this story is that this man’s remonstrances were in vain because he was talking to himself. if he had jumped out of the casket and beat his pallbearers upside their heads, he would have had a much easier time getting his point across.²

Basil here was making a forceful point against those Palestinians who believed in the Oslo path; in throwing down the weapon, sanitizing Palestinian symbols, and appealing to the Qaraqushes of the United States and the United Nations for help. You can cry “I’m a human, I’m alive, I deserve human rights” all you want, they will still bury you unless your weapon speaks, forcing them to listen. You must resist to exist: your very existence will be denied and ignored if you don’t. This reminds me of a stanza in the Algerian national anthem, also written during an anti-colonial struggle:

Our voices were disregarded when we spoke,
And so we made our voices loud with the ringing of the bullet!

The next quote is a continuation of his point about sanitized symbols:

The kufiyya lost its value and symbolism when Arafat wore it in Washington while standing next to Clinton and Rabin.³

Here’s the thing: Basil and people like him returned meaning to the kufiyya⁴ when they wore it while fighting the occupation. Now, when a Resistance spokesman appears wearing it, millions around the Arab World understand the renewed symbolism, and the entire world does too.

I can count dozens of villages and towns that were flashpoints of the First and Second Intifadas, but are now classified as “tranquilized areas” by the Occupation. Thankfully, my village was reclassified from “tranquilized” to “hostile” around three years ago.⁵

Basil was concerned with rekindling the resistance in the West Bank, which remains Israel’s soft underbelly. Under current conditions, a Third Intifada in the West Bank might very well spell the beginning of the actual collapse of the Zionist project. This is why the Oslo Authority (with Jordanian support) is cracking down hard on any displays of solidarity with Gaza: everything must be done to prevent the escalation of the West Bank front. If one were to take the uninformed view that the “State of Palestine” actually represents the interests of Palestinians, then they would find it inexplicable that demonstrating in support of Gaza is easier to do in Washington than in Ramallah.

In Hazma and Husan, they used another tactic. Since these towns are close to clusters of settlements and checkpoints, they made it so these towns are financially reliant on providing goods and services to the settlements, mainly through car repair workshops and construction material dealerships. We can never induce these Area C towns to change their status [from “tranquilized” to “hostile”] except by seriously working on disengaging their financial interests from those of the enemy. In short, we have to put them in a financial bind. I recommend watching the French-Algerian film Outside the Law.

This is a very refreshing material analysis, in contrast to some of today’s analysts who seem to think that inducing popular uprisings is exclusively the domain of fiery speeches, popular sentiment, “courage”, and “gallantry”. Just encourage the people with your words and they’ll arise, some think. Some even directly attack other Arabs for “failing to rise to the occasion”, giving no account to the decades-long systematic decimation of any sort of political organization in Jordan and Egypt for example, which makes these populations incapable of organizing a mass popular response against their American puppet governments, much less against Israel itself. The crackdown against Gaza solidarity in Jordan and Egypt, Israel’s most valuable assets in the region who guard the largest portion of Israel’s borders, has been incredibly harsh. (See here, here, and here for example). And so, instead of providing critical analysis that would help these populations overcome these difficulties and failures, built on material realities and historical analysis, all they provide is moral admonishments and cheap insults.

In the early 80s, electricity entered my village for the first time. The PLO had secretly funded this project as a reward for the villagers because they were the first to publicly—and unanimously—reject cooperating with a Village Associations⁶ infrastructure plan. Another such village was Ain Jweiza, to whom electricity would take 5 more years to arrive. The reason for this delay was that, when the utility company found that the most cost-effective way to connect the village was to tie it to the village of Malha in the valley below, someone in the village somehow convinced everyone that it would be better to tie into the village of Beit Jala up the hill because the electricity would flow downhill, and would thus be stronger. The people of Ain Jweiza became convinced of this, and no amount of explaining by electric engineers and learned men would cause them to budge. They kept it up until the company relented and connected them to Beit Jala.

I visited the person who started this idea and he told me: “Do you think I’m so ignorant as not to know the difference between electricity and water? The reason I started this was because I didn’t want us to rely on the Municipality of Jerusalem’s electric grid, which might have caused our village to be annexed.”

I must say that this man had unbelievable foresight: during the Intifada, the Municipality of Jerusalem declared that the village fell under its jurisdiction, but the Municipality ended up losing the case before the courts because the villagers were able to prove that they had never used its utilities at any point.⁷

What I see here is the story of a man who used the language of ordinary people to serve a greater purpose. He might not have explained every technicality of the plan, but he organized admirably to the benefit of the people. We cannot take his white lie as a definitive model to be followed, but it would behoove us to properly and systematically explain our concepts for the consumption of the average person who lies outside the academic tradition.

Here’s the difference between what we must communicate and what the villager did: his plan involved a single action in a single village at a single point in time, while our theory is universal and is the only path towards the final liberation of all mankind. It’s a philosophy and a method of analysis that guides all practice, and a proper understanding of how to apply it to different situations is crucial.

I especially love Stephen Jay Gould’s articulation of the writing style he follows in his popular science articles. Despite this being written about biology and the natural sciences, we should find no problem applying it to the our own Marxist science of society:

I deeply deplore the equation of popular writing with pap and distortion for two main reasons. First, such a designation imposes a crushing professional burden on scientists (particularly young scientists without tenure) who might like to try their hand at this expansive style. Second, it denigrates the intelligence of millions of Americans eager for intellectual stimulation without patronization. If we writers assume a crushing mean of mediocrity and incomprehension, then not only do we have contempt for our neighbors, but we also extinguish the light of excellence. The perceptive and intelligent layperson is no myth … The rules are simple: no compromises with conceptual richness; no bypassing of ambiguity or ignorance; removal of jargon, of course, but no dumbing down of ideas (any conceptual complexity can be conveyed in ordinary English).⁸

This, as far as I’m concerned, is what makes Gould a joy to read, unlike the simplistic, condescending garbage pumped out by the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson (if you plan to waste your time reading Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, don’t.) I think this also serves as a rebuttal against those who—inexplicably—argue against the reading of theory under the false pretense that the average person is incapable of ever understanding it.

The moment is ripe for another Ayyash⁹ in West Bank … I have always been puzzled by the process by which legends are created. Why do the oppressed create legends¹⁰? Is it a way to justify their incapability?

Ayyash, by military standards, was not an exceptional man. The Second Intifada saw harder, more experienced fighters. Ayyash was not a chemistry genius, or even especially good at bomb-making. The average holder of a bachelors degree in chemical engineering has the sufficient knowledge to achieve Ayyash’s feats. Ayyash did not posses superhuman intelligence.

I only knew Ayyash through my mother’s tears when he was assassinated, through my father’s prayers for him, through my grandfather’s weeping. Our entire extended family gathered around the TV and cried silently. I was used to seeing this scene only when a family member passed away. I asked: are we related to him?

I knew Ayyash when the middle school of our forgotten village took a day off to mourn him. The students whispered among each other: “Ayyash isn’t really dead, you know!”

The genius of Ayyash and the legend that grew around him was due to one thing: In the moment that the whole world was settling down to acclimate to the new “reality”¹¹, he was setting the stage for a new world whose features he would continue to define twenty years later.¹²

Many like Ayyash have arisen since, not the least of which is Basil Araj himself. Bona fide legends have indeed arisen around his life, and many of his close friends have gained large social media followings by the mere virtue of having been friends with him. I was speaking to one of my own friends recently, and he expressed frustration: “I feel like 3/4 of the stories we hear about Basil’s life are made up! Apparently everyone was a friend of his!” The effect of men like Basil Araj and Nizar Banat on the status quo in the West Bank is yet to be fully realized.

The enemy has long used mothers as a weapon against their own sons, whether by using them as bait for arresting wanted men or by using them to shatter the mental resilience of prisoners during interrogations. I feel that I should tell the story of Nasser Abu Hmeid’s mother. She is the mother of a martyr¹³ and of four life prisoners, and her house was demolished.¹⁴

My friend always tells this story and it always draws the same gasps of surprise and “God bless her!” When her sons were imprisoned, the jailers let her son talk to her during the interrogation in a bid to break him. Logically, they thought, this would devolve into the weeping of a devastated mother, complete with “how are they treating you?” and “oh, woe to me” etc, but this didn’t happen.

This is what the mother said: “Son, this is where you prove yourself. If you say a word to them, don’t bother coming back. You left my house a man, and I expect you to return a man.”¹⁵

God bless her!

There are two rules I believe in. The first is Mao Zedong’s “no investigation, no right to speak,” which is not a call to suppress opinion or to impose authority on people, but a call to actually investigate and educate yourself. The second is Caliph Umar’s “every Muslim is a guard on a gate of the fortress of Islam, and so let not the fortress be breached from your gate.” We say: “every Palestinian is a guard on a gate of the fortress of Palestine, and so let not the fortress be breached from your gate.” Do not allow yourself to be the weak link.

Every day, I evaluate myself: am I the weak link? If I’m not, what can I do to strengthen the weak links? What harmful ideas are circulating among Palestinians (and among international Palestine supporters)? How can I remedy this? It is quite unfortunate that there are some Palestinian liberals, speaking under the mask of “lived experience”, who unwittingly reinforce Zionist talking points by making unnecessary concessions to them. Needless to say, the Palestinians who collaborate with the enemy and those who make excuses for them are worse than weak links, especially when they claim to speak for Palestine (e.g. Husam Zomlot, who is an official under the Oslo Authority who gained a large following recently by posting about Gaza).

I see him wearing an Armani suit still stained with blood of the Indian child’s fingers, a fancy necktie of Thai silk, a leather shoe made out of animal that an African had to chase for a week in the wilderness to feed his children, Brazilian coffee picked by 8-year-old kids, a Jeep parked outside, a premium Visa card obtrusively poking out of his pocket. He tells me about social justice and capitalism and globalization, and I tell him to eat shit.¹⁶

Fatah sported a “left wing faction” for much of its existence. In fact, Fatah is a member of the “Socialist international”. This “Fatah Left”, which rejected Marxism and eventually the armed struggle, assimilated into the Oslo Authority, and its intellectuals turned into officials who oversaw extreme neoliberal policy and collaboration with Israel. However, they never stopped espousing the usual “left” rhetoric.

A female friend told me: “Women’s lives are always violated; when we’re small girls, in our families, when we love, when we enter into relationships, when we choose how to enter into relationships, in the street, in the university and in the clinic, when we become mothers, we’re always violated!”

Yes, I agree, and I must say that I now believe that the violator has one face: whether it be the face of the father, society, Israel, tradition, norms, or Wahhabi Islam. I am even convinced that armed struggle should be waged against the family in some cases!¹⁷

I suppose there are people more suited to speak about the position of women in Palestinian society than Basil or I. It really is infuriating to no end: beyond having to live under all these layers of oppression, the struggle of women in Palestine is often exploited by Zionists in their propaganda, in an extremely flimsy and ludicrous pretense of “defending women’s rights” while massacring women and children. If anyone knows any good resources on the struggle of Palestinian women, I would be most obliged.

During my visit to Jordan, I met one of its most hardened and notorious gangsters. I talked to one of his relatives in Palestine and organized a meeting with him. I gifted him a 10-pack of cigarettes and talked to him for 3 hours, and I cannot hide from you that the meeting was terrific and that the man possessed a very intelligent mind and a satisfactory degree of knowledge. When I told my friends that I had met him, they looked at me askance. “Whatever would you want from him?” they asked. I answered that a revolutionary is, in effect, a highwayman with a political project and a popular incubator¹⁸. There is no difference between guerrilla warfare and robber gangs except the political project and the popular incubator. In studying the experience of revolutionary movements around the world, you will find that the revolutions that failed are the ones that became isolated from the popular incubator, such as the revolutions in Greece and the Philippines. I learned much from this man, more than I learned from Guevara’s book on guerrilla warfare. I talked to dozens of criminals during my life and learned from their stories and experiences.¹⁹

I must say, I would spill my entire life story if bribed with that many cigarettes. A wonderful investigation on the part of Basil, but I don’t believe he wrote it down into a full report. Perhaps someone with the requisite skills can pursue the same line of inquiry and share the results.

Specifically in the United States, the Palestine solidarity movement is mostly conditioned on the requirement of recognizing “Israel’s right to exist”. An American who supports our cause and opposes the existence of Israel entirely must, by definition, be someone who also opposes the existence of the United States itself. Israel is a carbon copy of the United States, with the exception that Israel was absolutely self-aware from the moment of its birth.

It is impossible to gain an American into our camp unless he also opposes the very idea of the United States, and so do not bother stirring the emotions of Americans and trying to jerk their tears over us. What’s more useful is to dismantle the idea of the United States in their minds as a prelude to making them understand our cause and our rights. Any effort that doesn’t include this will be washed away as easily as sea foam.²⁰

I am quite glad to see the transformation of the Palestine Movement during the past year. Speaking from personal experience, as recently as 2021, we had quite a difficult time reaching people. During the 2021 Gaza War, I actually staggered my sleeping schedule to be able to post in American timezones, many times to no avail. Many people were not aware a war was happening at all (a contributing factor to the moronic belief that it all started on October 7th, 2023). However, nowadays, I see that left-wingers and progressives in America are doing the work on our behalf, no sleep deprivation necessary. It became a normal occurrence to see some guy from New Jersey posting a thread on a topic in Palestinian history that would have been considered hopelessly obscure outside of Palestine only last year. Israel has quickly lost the narrative web that it has constructed over decades, and has not made its frustrations secret. Many more people are now aware of the colonial analysis that Basil also espoused, and many know what settler-colonialism is, and know the true nature of the United States. I’m optimistic. Keep up the work.

Zionists are not being ignorant when they refuse the tell the difference between ethnicity and religion, when they claim that Christian Arabs are not Arabs, and that only Muslims are. Simply, they’re actively trying to recreate us and form our identity for us. Do you remember how Paul Bremer redefined what it means to be an Iraqi? By the way, I know of ten Palestinian villages whose inhabitants are Muslim descendants of the European crusaders, while some Christian Arab families in Beit Jala can trace their lineage back to the pre-Islamic Lakhmid Kings.²⁰

Palestinians are a diverse people, having lived and interwoven in this land for thousands of years. This comes as a huge inconvenience for the Zionist, whose ideology is based on a pathological obsession with 19th century race pseudoscience and blood quantum, and whose entire claim to the land of Palestine is built on a shaky esoteric mix of Biblical myths and racist ideology. In trying to redefine Arabs in several contradicting ways (depending on the speaker’s own peculiar brand of racism), Zionists try to apply their alien European ideology to an entirely irrelevant context where such phrenological analysis is impossible. Of course, the monstrous similarity of Herzl’s Judenstaat idea to Lebensraum and Manifest Destiny follows logically and is no coincidence at all.

I leave you here. I will translate more quotes from Basil in the future∎