Armed Resistance is enshrined in international law

Decades ago, it was agreed that Resistance and armed rebellion against a settler colonial occupation and apartheid power is not just recognised under international law. It is enshrined specifically as a right for the oppressed, never to be denied.

In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf), as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.

This runs counter to what London, Washington and Tel Aviv would have you believe. Proscribing the Resistance factions as “terrorist” groups immediately distracts people from their real role in liberating Palestinian territory from the Zionist occupier and its Western backers.

Prof. Tim Anderson:

The colonial powers almost all abstained on the 1960 Declaration on Decolonisation, the lead principle of which (the right of a people to self-determination) entered the twin covenants of the International Bill of Rights. After that the hegemonic powers tried to deny (but could not block) UN declarations and conventions on the right to resist colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. The result is that today most anti-colonial resistance groups are banned as “terrorist”, but only in the hegemonic regimes.

International law clearly supports the right to resist (further, Palestine and Lebanon as recognised nations enjoy the UN chartered right to national self-defence) while the Anglo-Americans and their collaborators live in denial. This hegemonic denial of the right to resist (including the legitimacy of Palestinian insurrection) creates a culture which confuses and must itself be resisted. Proponents of resistance education should inform, encourage and build confidence in support of legitimate popular resistance.

Anderson advocates unequivocal support for the Resistance despite the threats that confront those who do:

Self-determination is not a posthumous medal for helpless victims, it is a great right that must be fought for and taken from the imperial and colonial forces which try to deny and block self-determination. This is not well recognised in colonial cultures, which embed paternal myths.

Yet it is well recognised by anti-colonial leaders, like the great 19^th century Cuban patriot Jose Marti who said in 1880, “You take your rights, you do not beg for them. You do not buy them with tears but with blood.”

While the Palestinian cause is popular in Western countries, this support begins as sympathy for the victims and is often simply an abstract call for an end to the violence. To take a further step and support the Palestinian and regional Resistance implies confronting Western regimes which have tried to ban and criminalise all Resistance groups.

Because of a natural instinct to avoid conflict and due to the avalanche of neocolonial propaganda, the resistance is poorly understood and poorly represented in colonial cultures. That calls for systematic popular education, stressing:

• The need to recognise anti-colonial liberation movements, in particular the Palestinian struggle, as a key contemporary expression of the right of self-determination;

• The inherent right to resist, by all appropriate means, denial of that basic right;

• That the right to resist invasion, occupation, and apartheid by armed struggle is recognised in international law, in the Geneva Conventions, and in UN declarations over the right to resist occupation and apartheid “by all available means”;

• The right of the Palestinian people to national Self-Defence (Article 51, UN Charter);

• While passive resistance, like the steadfastness of remaining on one’s land, is important, it cannot survive without active support;

• There is no moral equivalence in the character of armed resistance and armed occupation; one is legitimate and the other is not; suggestions that one should be “even handed” over Palestine-"Israel" are colonial deceptions.

Exposing myths around these issues is important for several reasons:

• It can blunt the ideological attacks from colonial cultures on liberation movements;

• It can inform false moral equivalence arguments, by which the resistance is urged to disarm, alongside the forces of occupation and apartheid;

• Wider international recognition of the right to resist colonialism, apartheid, and genocide can be an effective antidote to imperial propaganda;

• Clear moral argument, with evidence, may not be decisive in the propaganda wars, but it can inform honest and curious people in colonial cultures while vindicating the political will, morale, and achievements of Resistance forces.

The following is a clip of an interview with Palestinian nationalist Ghassan Kanafani. Acclaimed journalist, novelist, short story writer, and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated in 1972 by agents of the Mossad.

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Episode 76: The assassination of Ghassan Kanafani

Palestine Declassified
First aired on 08 July 2023

On July 8, 1972, a light was stolen from the world. The thinker, teacher, writer, and fighter with his pen, Ghassan Kanafani, was killed in a cowardly assassination by the Zionist intelligence agency Mossad in Beirut. The car bomb also took the life of his 17-year-old niece, Lamees.

Kanafani was born in Akka, Palestine, in 1936, the third of eight siblings. At the age of 12, he was driven from his home by Zionist racism in the Nabka of 1948. His family went on to settle in Damascus, Syria, which Kanafani wrote about in his short essay The Land of Sad Oranges. Kanafani studied Arabic Literature at the University of Damascus, only to be expelled for his involvement with the Arab Nationalist Movement of George Habash and Wadie Haddad. Kanafani then moved to Kuwait, where he worked as editor of the Arab Nationalist Movement's newspaper, "Al-Rai." The opinion. Kanafani then moved to Beirut in 1960 and edited another newspaper linked to the organization, الحرية Freedom. With the Naksa of 1967, the Arab Nationalist Movement of Haddad and Habash became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The organization would haunt Israel across the planet, carrying out some of the most original and daring operations in the history of the Palestinian freedom struggle. Kanafani worked as the PFLP spokesman and editor of their weekly newsletter, الهدف The Aim.

In his legendary short stories like Return to Haifa and Men in The Sun, Ghassan Kanafani deals with the Palestinian struggle from several different unorthodox angles. Return to Haifa deals with the taboo subject of children left behind in the Nakba and what possible fate could befall them. The complex but moving story also serves to discredit Zionism as an ideology and the biological determinism's of racism. Men in The Sun deals with the overlapping tragedies of refugees searching for sustainable lives in Arab states. The last words of the short story, which depict Palestinian refugees suffocating to death in the back of a water tank while trying to enter Kuwait for work, haunt the reader. "Why didn't they bang on the walls?" The words serve as an eternal reminder to our long-suffering people—bang on the walls. Long live Ghassan Kanafani, and long live the resistance.

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Louis Allday is a writer and historian. He has a PhD in History. He is the founding editor of Liberated Texts, a book reviewing and publishing project dedicated to reviewing and (re)publishing works that have been neglected, overlooked or suppressed in the mainstream since their publication.

In July 2022, in collaboration with Ebb Books, Liberated Texts published the first English language translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination.

Allday writes:

Given that the Palestinians’ legal and moral right to pursue armed resistance is clear, endorsement of this position should be uncontroversial and commonplace among supporters of their cause. Yet in the West, such a position is rarely expressed – even by those who loudly proclaim their solidarity with Palestine. On the contrary, acts of Palestinian armed resistance, such as the firing of missiles from Gaza, are condemned by these ostensible supporters as part of the problem, dismissed condescendingly as ‘futile’ and ‘counter-productive’, or even labelled ‘war crimes’ and ‘unthinkable atrocities’, said to be comparable to Israel’s routine collective punishment, torture, incarceration, bombardment and murder of Palestinians.

This form of solidarity, as Bikrum Gill has argued, is essentially ‘premised upon re-inscribing Palestinians as inherently non-sovereign beings who can only be recognized as disempowered dependent objects to be acted upon, either by Israeli colonial violence, or white imperial protectors’.

 

Gaza 2024

To sit in the comfort and safety of the West and condemn acts of armed resistance that the Palestinians choose to carry out – always at great risk to their lives – is a deeply chauvinistic position. It must be stated plainly: it is not the place of those who choose to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians from afar to then try and dictate how they should wage the anti-colonial struggle that, as Frantz Fanon believed, is necessary to maintain their humanity and dignity, and ultimately to achieve their liberation.

Those who are not under brutal military occupation or refugees from ethnic cleansing have no right to judge the manner in which those who are choose to confront their colonisers. Indeed, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause is ultimately meaningless if that support dissipates the moment that the Palestinians resist their oppression with anything more than rocks and can no longer be portrayed as courageous, photogenic, but ultimately powerless, victims.

‘Does the world expect us to offer ourselves up as polite, willing and well-mannered sacrifices, who are murdered without raising a single objection?’ Yahya al-Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, recently asked rhetorically. ‘This is not possible. No, we have decided to defend our people with whatever strength we have been given.’

Watch a video (selection) from Gazan journalist Bisan on the situation in northern Gaza, [and efforts by Zionists to block her from receiving an award):

I know it's bleak but there is an inescapable fact that, through my work, I have long been trying to explain: the war in the Levant has no borders, because Zionism has no borders.

So when you, in Britain or France or Germany, are having mosques shut down and Muslim homes are raided and academics are fired and journalists are arrested by 'counter-terror' police, that is being done directly on behalf of the State of Israel. And yes, as you say, it has been going on for at least 23 years.

Your state is at war with you because the State of Israel is at war with you. And the soldiers of Zion have penetrated the security establishment of your state to make its policy; penetrated the media to make you a public enemy; and penetrated political parties to create extremist footsoldiers who will execute their strategies in government.

Take Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands, whose statements have been published by the Gatestone Institute for 16 years. Wilders can be said to be a creation of the State of Israel and its foreign intelligence assets, like Gatestone. But there are hundreds like him across Europe.

So the answer is not just to be 'pro-Palestinian', whatever that means. The challenge is to be anti-Zionist, to materially contribute to the global struggle against Jewish supremacism. Your war is right where you are.

Once you recognise a war has been declared on you and has already been fought for 20 years, you will no doubt find it strange that all that's been done to resist is some mild-mannered protests. Does it make sense to protest those who are at war with you? Or do you accept that you're in an existential war and act accordingly?

What do people think schools teaching 'British values' is about? Who is it for? The purpose is to suppress, demobilise and disincentivise any political dissent, but especially that coming from Muslims, because it tends to be more coherent, universalistic and material than other varieties.

Not only are you supposed to shed your beliefs but also your values. That's the price of existence the State of Israel seeks to extract from Muslims globally, from the Gulf to Europe. 

Defeating this Zionist strategy requires a few things:

1. Waking up from the stupor of denialism to accept that there is a global, maximalist, eliminationist war being waged against Islam and Muslims (and all dissenters to Jewish supremacy) by the State of Israel.

2. Understanding that the Zionist movement, and Jewish supremacists in general, fight this war by occupying institutions, whether the state or local activist groups or your council or even your mosque. It's not just about 'the lobby' and megadonors. The war goes all the way down, street to street, everywhere in Europe. Wherever you find Jewish supremacists, you will find the war. Confront it where you find it. 

3. Evolving away from woolly liberal methods like A to B protests on weekends, which, while symbolic and raised morale in Palestine in the early days of the war, do nothing material to prevent the genocide or create accountability for its perpetrators. And again, the perpetrators of this genocide are all around you. Donors to the IDF and to other Zionist institutions may be on your street or in your workplace and certainly in your neighbourhood or your city. Zionist 'charities', which funnel cash for the purpose of Zionist terrorism, or to advance the cause of Jewish supremacism, are in all the major British cities. They cannot be allowed to operate as normal while perpetrating this genocide. We in Britain may not liberate Palestine, but Palestine may liberate us.

Finally: there's no such thing as 'foreign' policy. The British state has made a colossal miscalculation by participating so directly in this genocide, via the RAF, SAS and its intelligence agencies (including MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Homeland Security Group).

Watch Resistance valiant operations in Gaza, against all odds:

Oneindia News

Hamas intensified operations in Jabalia, with Al-Qassam and Al-Quds Brigades conducting coordinated attacks against IDF positions. Using diverse weaponry including RPGs, explosive devices, and sniper rifles, they targeted Israeli vehicles, personnel carriers, and troops. The operations, notably increased following Israel's attack on Iran, have reportedly resulted in significant IDF casualties across the Jabalia area. #Hamas #Jabalia #AlQassamAttack #AlQassamBrigades #AlQuds #IDF #IDFwar #Jabaliaattack #Warnews #Gazawar

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Miller continues:

Such direct intervention to destroy Palestine is on a par with the Balfour Declaration in historic scale, and will have effects on the future of Britain itself larger even than the invasion of Iraq, which permanently destroyed public trust in domestic institutions. 

The British people will have to repair this trajectory by taking British political and public institutions out of the grip of Zionist fanatics. This is the only way to preserve the balance of British society in the long-term. It is essential that Britain is de-Zionised, both to protect others internationally from the harms that this Zionist entryism and subversion has caused, as well as to create a viable and sovereign Britain accountable to its own citizens rather than the US Empire or the State of Israel and its assets. A de-Zionised Britain could be an example to other post-imperial states in how to confront centuries of imperial violence and chart a course away from the suicidal client relationship with the US. It's the least we can do.

It is absolutely necessary for us in the West who oppose our regimes’ endorsement, funding and apologism for genocide to support the Palestinian and Lebanese armed Resistance. This is not a struggle we can ignore or fail to advocate for. Yes, we will be pilloried, detained, discredited by our complicit ruling classes and alienated from the establishment but there is no choice, there are no two sides, there are only the right choices in a time that we are being forced to question our own humanity - we must not fail.

No child in the 21st century should be forced to face death, mutilation and starvation on a 24/7 basis:

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