Late last year, a senior Syrian general told me that before 7 October 2023, the Israeli regime stood on two legs: its military and its international sponsors. After 7 October, its military was destroyed and it was left standing on the one leg of its international sponsors. Of course, in the Western media, this remarkable military achievement has been converted into a horror story – a ‘barbaric attack involving indiscriminate murder and rape’. These two versions cannot both be true, so the matter deserves closer investigation. For the Israelis and their Western sponsors, October 7 was shocking, but affirmed their view of all Palestinian Resistance as inhuman terrorism. For the Resistance, however, the breakout began with some limited aims but went on to become the final stage of the Palestinian Revolution, a decolonizing struggle which will end the genocidal, apartheid regime.
The mythology over Palestine is not just a result of intense propaganda; it also draws on the failure of the Anglo-Americans to recognise international law over decolonisation and the right of colonised people to resist. But this failure is buried by double speak. Washington was quick to provide military support to the entirely fake “revolutions” in Libya and Syria, yet was horrified by the actual and ongoing revolutions in Yemen and Palestine, doing all it could to suppress them.
Since Gaza’s October 7 insurrection represents the start of a much greater process it should be commemorated as an important milestone of Palestinian liberation. Like the Easter 1916 uprising in Ireland, the October 7 attacks were unexpected but rapidly suppressed, causing great sacrifice on the Resistance side, and followed by horrific reprisals against civilians. However, like the Irish uprising, it stirred conscience and catalyzed a wider war of liberation. For these reasons, the entire anti-colonial world should see the day as one which belongs to the Resistance, not a bastardised distortion, created to serve the mythology of the colonisers. We should name and remember those who gave their lives for this event, which broke a long slumber anaesthetized by the Oslo Accords. The differences with the history of the Irish uprising simply point to the need for more authentic histories of this remarkable insurrection. This essay is an opening gambit, from an outsider.
One advantage such histories today have is the body of agreed post-colonial norms, which did not exist back in 1916. When we study this, in particular the development of the right to resist, we will find much reason to oppose normalization with the Anglo-American denial of that right, and a need to reject illegitimate and partisan labels such as ‘terrorism’, which serve only to cover the monstrous crimes of the colonisers and their sponsors.
1. The Uprising
The Gaza operation was called Al Aqsa Flood (AAF) – an allusion to successive Israeli invasions of the al-Aqsa Mosque in al-Quds (Jerusalem) – aimed “to liberate our land, our holy sites, our Al-Aqsa mosque [and] our prisoners”. It was conceived months before the 7 October breakout, but that attack came to define the operation. More specifically, AAF aimed to destroy the Gaza garrison and take Israeli prisoners, to be used in a prisoner exchange. Led by the Hamas’ military wing, al-Qassam, it comprised a coalition of several Palestinian Resistance groups, (notably the PIJ’s al-Quds Brigades and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades) most of which remained active in armed attacks on Israeli forces well into 2024.
In the early hours of October 7, 2023, the Hamas-led coalition launched thousands of rockets into southern occupied Palestine, as cover for a ground operation involving hundreds of fighters who breached the barriers, using bulldozers, motorboats, motorcycles and at last one motorised hang glider. The Palestinian fighters entered at least three military bases, at the Beit Hanoon border, the Zikim base, and the Gaza division headquarters at Reim. They attacked the military with light weapons and took prisoners from amongst Israeli military and civilians.
The Israelis began bombing the border areas at about 10 am, including what was later revealed as quite indiscriminate bombing, to halt the incursion and hostage taking. That response was immediately followed by a large scale bombing of the Gaza Strip, allegedly to suppress the armed groups but with the openly stated aim of punishing the entire Gaza population. It was an assault very quickly characterised as genocidal – even in some parts of the Western media.
What of the casualties on October 7? There seem to be no available public records of the Palestinian casualties that day and, on the Israeli side, we have to rely on Israeli sources. That is a problem, as the Israeli regime is notoriously mendacious and censorial. It spreads misinformation for self-serving ends, especially linked to its “security” operations. On the other hand, when we see contradictions of the official story from Israeli sources, these instances may have the credibility of ‘admissions against interest’. But we should also notice one thing about those termed ‘civilians’ in the Israeli context: virtually all adult Israelis are members of the military reserve and many settler colonists are heavily armed. Some of these settler-soldiers are even subject to personal sanctions by “Israel’s” key sponsor, the USA, for their extreme violence.
With those caveats in mind, Israeli sources have said that between 360 and 441 security forces (soldiers and police) were killed on October 7, with at least 346 more during the subsequent Israeli rampage in the Gaza Strip. By those same sources, between 700 and 800 civilians were killed, with another 251 “civilians and soldiers” taken prisoner. The Resistance wanted to exchange these POWs (“hostages”) for the many thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Altogether 1,139 Israelis were said to have been killed.
When compared to the Israeli assault on Gaza, the operation seems extraordinarily well-targeted and the “civilian” casualties very low. Such a blow against the Israeli military had not been seen since the 1973 war. Prior to 2023, the death toll from what is called the “Israeli-Gaza conflict” had been several thousand Palestinians, mostly civilians, and a few dozen Israelis, mostly military.
However the October 7 picture was beaten up by the Israeli regime, military and first responders, who claimed they had seen “40 beheaded babies”, mass rape and the random slaughter of young people at a music festival.
These three fabricated myths have been debunked by independent evidence including Israeli admissions.
- Beheaded babies – many media channels debunked the claims that Hamas beheaded Israeli babies, but President Joe Biden kept repeating the lie that he had seen photos of these babies while The Times used the headline “Israel releases pictures of mutilated babies”, with (initially) photos of Palestinian babies as “proof” of Palestinian “atrocities”. At the same time there were documented cases, well into 2024, of Israeli soldiers deliberately sniping children. The White House was forced to “walk back” Biden’s dishonest or demented claim that he had seen pictures of beheaded children.
- Mass rape – despite these claims, repeated by the BBC and The Guardian, the Israeli regime did not claim to have identified any specific rape victims, nor did they produce any videos or forensic evidence corroborating the claims – they relied instead on some military and first responder claims. The Times of Israel expressed annoyance that “debunked accounts” from Zaka first responders had “fueled skepticism” over the overall story of Hamas “mass rape”.
- Yet the rape and murder of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, and the Israeli rape of male Palestinian prisoners (which led to some charges) did come to light, but these rapes were then justified in parts of the Israeli media.
- Civilian slaughter at the music festival was a claim made against Hamas fighters, who did indeed kill and capture some such adult “civilians”. Yet the Israeli military, under the Hannibal directive (which directs the use of indiscriminate force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity) attacked all three army facilities infiltrated by the Palestinian Resistance, while Israeli aircraft destroyed 70 fleeing vehicles and Israeli tanks fired on kibbutz Be’eri. An Israeli tank commander admitted he had fired on the kibbutz, during the “hostage standoff”. Many outlets concluded that the Israeli military were responsible for much of the killing of Israeli citizens (and some Israeli soldiers) on 7 October. These deaths were said to be due to “friendly fire” under the ‘Hannibal Directive’.
In sum, allegations of child murder, rape and slaughter of civilians were quickly established as crimes committed by Israeli forces, but mostly debunked as claims against the Palestinian Resistance. The net impact of the Hamas led insurrection was then success in destroying much of the Gaza garrison, plus demoralising the entire military and intelligence apparatus and taking more than 200 prisoners.
However, despite an initial prisoner exchange of women and children in late 2023, the prospects of a wider prisoner exchange were undermined by Israeli refusal to halt their offensive in the Gaza Strip. Yet that offensive was marked by massive civilian slaughter and failure to contain Resistance attacks. A widespread consensus emerged amongst even Israeli military and pro-“Israel” sources that Hamas (and its allies) could not be defeated.
Given the extraordinary surprise impact of the events of October 7, which so audaciously disarmed the famous Israeli intelligence, a theory emerged amongst skeptics that, the regime (and Netanyahu in particular) having shown some favoritism towards Hamas in the past (to incite divisions between Islamists and secular Palestinians) might have been behind the whole thing. That is, that the October 7 attacks were part of a false flag operation. Now while it is true that Muslim Brotherhood linked groups (not least those sponsored by Qatar, which hosts a huge US air base) have a history of collaboration, Hamas had long since mended its bridges with the other Resistance groups and all the regional Axis of Resistance states. The group’s revised 2017 charter is studiously non-sectarian. Given this, and given the extraordinary damage done to the Israeli military, the weight of evidence proves October 7 to have been a brilliant military operation and not a false flag.
Behind the Israeli civilian reprisals in Gaza – a classic fascist tactic, to punish civilians for the partisan attacks – lies a deep contradiction between international law on the right to resist and the colonial, exceptionalist views of the sponsors of the Israeli regime.
2. The Right to Resist
Recognition of the right of a people (and not just a state) to self-determination in the 1960s gave immediate implicit recognition to the right to resist denial of that self-determination. Since then, international law has made that right increasingly explicit. Yet national law systems remain divided, with the right to resist usually well recognised by post-colonial and post-fascist states but, on the other hand, rejected by absolutist states (like Great Britain) and the central hegemonic power (the USA) and many of its satellites, which apply that right in a very selective way. This uneven national recognition of international law on the right to resist forms a central dilemma for self-determination struggles in the post-colonial world.
The Syrian-American academic and diplomat Fayez Sayegh, in his 1965 essay ‘Zionist Colonialism in Palestine’, argued Arab nationalist rights and the implicit right to resistance from the UN Charter, calling the period “from 1917 to 1948 the period of Arab resistance par excellence”, adding that the Palestinian people took the initiative in 1964, by forming the PLO, and observing that “rights undefended are rights surrendered”. Certainly, the incorporation of the self-determination provisions of the Declaration on Decolonization into the twin covenants on human rights (the ICCPR and ICESCR of 1966) strengthened this implicit recognition.
In 1966, the UNGA branded apartheid “a crime against humanity” (Res 2202 A (XXI), 16 December 1966), in 1982 the UNGA also affirmed (Res 37/43) “the right to self-determination and independence by peoples under colonial and foreign domination” – particularly those of South Africa, Namibia and occupied Palestine – to self-determination, and “reaffirm[ed] the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”
This 1982 resolution also considered “the denial of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, sovereignty, independence and return to Palestine and the repeated acts of aggression by Israel against the peoples of the region [as] a serious threat to international peace and security”. In 1984 the Security Council broadly endorsed these UNGA determinations “commending the massive united resistance of the oppressed people of South Africa.”
Nevertheless, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) – leading agents of the South African armed struggle against apartheid, from the early 1960s – remained on US “terrorist” lists until 2008, 14 years after Mandela had been elected President of post-apartheid South Africa and nine years after he had retired from political life. The US government collaborated with and invested in the apartheid regime all through the cold war, seeing it as a bulwark against communism, until grass roots pressure led to it passing an Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, “which imposed economic sanctions against South Africa until the government agreed to release Mandela and all political prisoners and entered into “good-faith negotiations” with the black majority”. Washington came very late to the anti-apartheid struggle.
Similarly the government of the United Kingdom, which collaborated with the South African Apartheid regime until the end, declared Mandela and the ANC as ‘terrorists’ as late as 1987, the year before Mandela was released from prison. Both Britain and the USA vetoed a motion for sanctions against the apartheid regime in 1986. That is to say, Britain and the US were seriously out of step with the international community on apartheid in South Africa, and those who resisted it from within. Consistent with their abstention over the 1960 declaration on decolonization – and its lead principle of self-determination – Britain and the USA rarely showed respect for the right to resist colonisation, occupation and apartheid.
Yet under international law, the right to resist has been repeatedly affirmed, including by UNGA Res 3314 of 1974 (on the Definition of Aggression) which affirmed “the right of these peoples [deprived of the right to self-determination, freedom and independence and subject to foreign occupation] to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter”; and by the 1977 Additional Protocol of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which affirmed the explicit rights of resistance for occupied peoples. Other relevant sources of law are the UNGA Res 2105 of 1965 (on African anti-colonial struggles), Res 2625 of 1970 (reflecting customary law on the right to resist denial of self-determination) and the ICJ ruling of 2004 (on the Israeli wall, where the ICJ rejected claims of “self-defence” by an illegal occupation entity). Further, since 1988 when Palestine self-declared and was recognised as a nation at the UN, the right to national self-defence against foreign aggression (i.e. from the Israelis) was afforded by Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Regardless, most former colonial regimes fail to recognise the right of ‘non state actors’ to resist foreign aggression, occupation and apartheid, despite this right being well embedded in international law and even reflected in about 20% of world constitutions. This has been explained as the tendency for absolutism in state rule, as in the British case, a view reflected by British theorists such as Hobbes. However, Britain long had an interest in delegitimizing rebellion in its many colonies, especially in Ireland. The USA, on the other hand, built its republic from an anti-colonial revolution, but never consistently applied its themes of liberty due to its history of slavery, internal colonisation and the constant acquisition of foreign territories. Washington was thus distinct from the European imperial powers by building its hegemonic world on obvious double standards. As the South American anti-colonial liberator Simon Bolivar said two centuries ago (in 1829) “the United States appears destined by providence to plague the Americas with misery in the name of liberty”.
On the other hand, many countries with post-colonial and post-fascist histories, indeed the majority of UN members by the 1960s, recognised resistance to denial of self-determination as fundamental. That helps explain the clarity of international law on the matter. The right to resist under international law is subject to the general rules of humanitarian law, such as the principles of distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality, and some other matters. Yet, there is no moral equivalence between the violence of the colonised and the coloniser; the character and scale are different for important historical reasons. Nevertheless, Western commentators, burdened by their own state’s traditions but faced with hard facts of colonial criminality, often take cowardly refuge in claims of ‘moral equivalence’, arguing for example that the Palestinian Resistance is as bad as the brutal Israeli military; the ‘both sides’ story.
The Palestinian right to resist is perhaps the most stark example of the dilemma of social rights in the post-colonial era. Many papers have set out the principles as regards resistance to the occupation of the territories illegally annexed by the Israelis in 1967 (mainly the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but also some parts of Lebanon and the Syrian Golan), to the system of apartheid applied by “Israel”, and more broadly to the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian nation. One paper states: “As long as the illegal occupation persists, it constitutes, according to international responsibility rules, a continuous wrongful act, thus preserving the continuous right to self-defense for the occupied state/people”. The proviso added is that “self-defense by Palestinians can only be exercised after assessing the principles of necessity, proportionality, and immanency”.
Similarly, US lawyer Stanley Cohen wrote that “the term “armed struggle” in the right to resist was implied without precise definition in that resolution, and many other early ones that upheld the right of indigenous persons to evict an occupier”. He undermines the importance of struggle for rights, quoting Frederick Douglass, former slave and emancipation activist in North America:
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground …This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”.
The Canadian group CJPME documents UN recognition of the right to resist, within regulated limits, while noting that the Canadian state (like the rest of the Anglo-American world) fails to recognise this right. Canada, a sponsor of the Israeli regime, even opposes non-violent Palestinian groups, such as the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, “and has consistently blocked any serious measures to hold Israel accountable for violations of international law”, including NGO efforts to seek redress at the International Criminal Court.
The entire Anglo-American bloc and some other sponsors of the Israeli regime like Germany and France, have banned all Palestinian Resistance groups, quite at odds with international law and the UN system. Yet none of the groups banned as “terrorist” by “Israel” and its sponsors (Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, etc) are banned by the UN Security Council. Instead, the United Nations Security Council Consolidated List includes the pseudo-Islamic terrorist groups ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra and their offshoots, which worked mainly in support of recent US proxy wars across Libya, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. None of the Palestinian or regional Resistance groups like Hezbollah appear on the UNSC list. The one exception to this rule is Yemen’s Ansar Allah, which was sanctioned (under false pretexts) by the UNSC since 2015.
Western refusals to respect the right to resist have grave consequences for public debate. The New York Times (NYT), for example – with a voice amplified by its reputation in the key online search engine Google and the ubiquitous online encyclopaedia Wikipedia – is notoriously and deeply biased against the Palestinians. The NYT regularly calls Israel a “democracy” (albeit “in jeopardy”) and Palestinian Resistance groups “terrorists”. This remains the case even when Resistance groups target the Israeli military and the latter targets Palestinian civilians. The Wikipedia logic is that readers should trust “reputable” secondary sources like the NYT and not have regard to primary sources (i.e. original research). By this logic, the world is kept ignorant and rights under international law are betrayed.
3. Concluding remarks
Properly understood, October 7 was an audacious insurrectionary initiative by Palestinian Resistance factions, led by Hamas, which was more successful than expected, as it shattered Israeli morale and drew in substantial Regional Resistance support from Lebanon, Iran, Yemen and Iraq. It thus surpassed the initial aim of destroying the Gaza garrison.
The prisoner exchange objective was mostly unsuccessful because of the military impact made the Israeli regime unwilling to negotiate a ceasefire. What began as a blow to the occupation enemy became a beginning of the final stage of the Palestinian Revolution: a decolonizing operation which cannot revert to the occupation status quo.
The international community which respects decolonisation and post-colonial norms should assist in commemorating this remarkable milestone of Palestinian liberation, most likely marking a start of the final phase of a decolonizing Revolution. Palestinian and sympathetic voices should rewrite the histories of October 7, seizing the icon from the hands of the colonists.
The operation was vilified by Western regimes and their media with false claims of terrorism aimed at civilians. This was a smokescreen aimed at hiding Israeli crimes against the civilian population of Gaza, including large scale child murder. If “Hamas” atrocities were emphasised enough, it was thought that might even justify the subsequent civilian reprisals in Gaza. That was certainly a popular view amongst Western corporate media editors. In fact, much evidence shows the claims of inhuman terrorism applied far more convincingly to the operations of the subsequent Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, now branded by the ICJ as ‘plausible’ acts of genocide. Even Pope Francis complained of the Israeli “terrorism” in Gaza.
There is a great need to oppose ‘normalised denial’ of the right to resist, which helps raise the status of the genocidal Israeli regime to that of a “democracy” while all resistance groups as branded as “terrorists”. Sponsors of the Zionist regime cannot be allowed to bury the post-colonial achievements of international law.
Further, the persistent ‘divide and rule’ operations by Washington and its collaborators must be met by greater coordination and integration of resistance groups. As I argued in Iran a few years ago, in addition to security benefits, there will be strategic and economic benefits for all members of a West Asian Alliance, a bloc which will not only shield the region, but also add leverage capacity.
source: Al Mayadeen