Our comrades in Italy received the following contribution from a sympathiser who reflects on the so-called Palestinian resistance embodied, in this case, by the Islamist organisation Hamas which, as is well known, has anti-communism as one of its distinguishing features.

As an internationalist communist, I firmly reject the rhetoric of MARTYRDOM as the foundation of liberation.

The history of oppressed peoples is full of sacrifice, blood, and massacres. But it is not martyrdom that liberates, but rather the independent organisation of the masses, the political consciousness of the class, the revolutionary break with every form of colonial, religious, national, and capitalist domination.

Whenever the struggle of a people — and even more so of the proletariat — is reduced to a cult of sacrifice, politics dies and myth is born. And myth is always, ultimately, a construct that serves the power of the ruling class.

The glorification of the figure of Izz ad-Dīn al-Qassām⁽¹⁾, an anti-colonial fighter from the early twentieth century, is used today by Hamas to give itself a historical and moral legitimacy that obscures its real function: that of bourgeois and religious management of dominion over an oppressed society.

Hamas is not the modern face of al-Qassām, it is a reactionary Islamist organisation, which has repressed every possible socialist, secular and revolutionary perspective in Palestine.

The fact that it bears the name of a leader from the past does not erase its current role as a force that represses the Palestinian working classes, starting with the proletariat.

The praise of Yahya Sinwar, celebrated as “son of the earth”, “king of Palestine”, “martyr soldier”, is the clearest example of the mystical and authoritarian drift of this narrative.

Sinwar was not an internationalist revolutionary, he was a military and political leader who led a top down, bourgeois (!) Islamic apparatus, financed by bourgeois powers, such as Qatar and Iran, and a tool in the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East.

He was not leading a process of social emancipation, he was leading a project of population control, with religious rhetoric and military logic.

Martyrdom, in this framework, is not the extreme consequence of a conscious political choice, but a sacred destiny, an ideological commodity.

Hamas and its supporters speak of sacrifice as if it were the only form of existence possible for the Palestinian people.

But this is a deadly ideological trap, it serves to prevent the construction of an organised, mass, political and class alternative to the double oppression, the Israeli colonial one and the internal religious one.

In this vision, the militant is a martyr, the leader is a prophet, the struggle is a crusade.

But the "people" are not an army of saints, they are a collective of women, workers, youth, the poor, students, and the exploited: in short, marked by class division. And it is in them, the proletariat, not in the armed Islamist leaders, that Palestine's revolutionary potential lives.

Furthermore, this mythology serves to exonerate the Arab bourgeoisie from responsibility, which for decades has cynically exploited the “Palestinian cause” by participating in or standing by and watching the massacre of Palestinians, mostly poor, using the "Palestinian cause” as a bargaining chip, a useful symbol, and a rhetorical diversion.

The Arab states “friendly to Palestine,” from Iran to Qatar, to sectors of the Jordanian or Lebanese bourgeoisie, have never built real solidarity among the oppressed classes of the region: it would have been against their nature.

Instead, they have strengthened sectarianism, militarism, and the repression of the left and popular movements, even if they are steeped in democratic and petty-bourgeois nationalism.

For an internationalist communist, the liberation of Palestine is part of the liberation of the Arab world and the global proletariat.

It does not come through martyrdom, nor through the restoration of religious symbols, nor under the guidance of charismatic leaders in uniform.

It involves building a socialist, secular, materialist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist project that breaks with both Zionism and the Islamist bourgeoisie.

The cult of martyrdom does not liberate, it neutralises. That is why it must be broken.

The struggle for liberation does not need dead heroes, it needs the living consciousness of millions, organised and armed with an anti-capitalist political vision.

Notes:

Image: Marek Peters (GFDL), commons.wikimedia.org

(1) Izz ad-Dīn al-Qassām or in full Izz ad-Dīn ibn Abd al-Qāder ibn Mustafā ibn Yūsuf ibn Muhammad al-Qassām (1882-1935) was a proto-Salafist preacher who after moving from Syria (where he had called for a jihad against the Italian occupation of Libya in 1911) to Palestine, took up the cause of the Palestinians against the British occupation. He posed the fight as a religious and not a nationalist one. Eventually he set up a guerrilla organisation (The Black Hand) to carry out attacks on British forces and the Jewish settlements that sprang up in the 1920s and 1930s. He was cornered by the British in 1935 and chose to fight to the death rather than surrender. His name has been an inspiration to both secular and religious Palestinian nationalist organisations from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to Hamas. The latter have named their military wing the Izz ad-Dīn al-Qassām Brigades whilst a short-range rocket the group produces and uses is called the Qassām.