We at ABMN have opinions on the Palestinian issue and the ongoing struggle. Seems like everybody has opinions, both educated and stupid, racist and intersectional, all kinds. What is lacking is not opinions, is listening to our comrades directly affected, the people on the ground, who seem to be constantly in a state of being talked over by Westerners who know better and treat Israeli and Palestinian leftists and anarchists as NPC’s existing to support their own worldviews. So we say fuck that, our duty is to signal to boost our comrades, not pass judgement, so here’s a communique from a comrade on the ground. This, and potentially other communique and messages from affected comrades is what we will mostly post, you can already get enough outrage posting and spectacle from everywhere else.
A word from an anti-zionist Israeli
We do not celebrate.
Palestine was not liberated. It wasn’t decolonized. After countless deaths, injuries, kidnapped and people went missing – we didn’t win. None of us did.
Tl;dr: if you have any ability to shift global discourse at all, even a tiny bit, I beg you, we need global pressure for war prisoners to swap deal.
What we know:
The message Hamas published named a number of reasons for this attack, which was planned for a long time: talks to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi arabia while discarding the Saudi responsibility to the Palestinian people, the thousands of Jews that visited Al Aqsa during the Sukkot holiday, the political crisis in Israel that made it vulnerable and the military aided pogrom in the Palestinian town Huwara just two days before the attack.
Because of the far-right violence in the West Bank, most IDF forces were there at the time, leaving the Gaza envelope in the south vulnerable.
What local leftists talk about:
Violence.
For years anti-zionist Israelis warned the crimes of the occupation will come back to bite us in the ass. It did, and it’s not a happy moment. This is a moment of despair. For decades Palestinian people had a long history of nonviolent protest. The zionist regime crushed it with murders, arrests and harassment. This is not liberation, this is people’s last choice in unbearable reality.
The poor pay the price of war.
Many victims of the attacks aren’t Jews. They are Druze, they are Bedouins who live in the south in awful poorness and neglect, they are Palestinian citizens and residents of Israel in so-called “mixed cities” who fear both missiles and 2021-style lynches, they are undocumented work migrants in slavery conditions. While it is true that Gazans have no shelter against Israeli bombing, Israeli homeless people and even lower-class working people don’t have access to shelters as well, while the rich rest tight in their well-kept reinforced houses.
Fascism as privatization.
The vast success of this attack is to be understood with the background of decades of wild privatization that went even more berzerk in the last political crisis in Israel, completely dismantling the welfare state Israel once was. For tens of hours after the attack started official state org didn’t respond at all. It was civilians who did ALL the aid, from sheltering and feeding each other to finding people who went missing to coordinating civil militia to sieged families. No official institution responded. Military forces took more than 10 hours to respond. Mental health hotlines didn’t act too well after being cut in funds lately. This is what fascism as capitalism in crisis looks like. For decades we dreamed of the fall of the zionist apartheid state. It finally did, but not how it should have.
What we need from you now:
Israeli gov is desperate to add more violence to the equation. This move is immoral and inefficient, putting both Israeli and Palestinian lives at incredible risk. Israel already unjustly holds way too many war prisoners without trial, a prisoner swap is our best move, for both sides, before we take care of anything else. This is where international pressure could really help us. This is time-sensitive, and this is what we need from international leftists. Talk to your party about it. Talk to your union, your non-hierarchical affinity groups, to your polycule.”