Criticism of RMS Palestine Statement¶
Note
The PDF document referenced in this criticism is the Revolutionary Marxist Students official statement on the Genocide in Palestine, available on their website.
(rms-preface)=
Preface¶
The above PDF document is a copy of the Revolutionary Marxist Students[1] (RMS) official statement on the Genocide in Palestine. I recently have had some disagreements with this group regarding documents that are intended for publication, and documents intended for external use. Seeing as this document is clearly available for public viewing on their website and the document also says that their organization welcomes any and all criticisms, then there should be absolutely no miscommunication or misunderstanding of me publicly addressing this as an official statement of the RMS on my personal website. Since there have been issues in the past, I want to specifically clarify that. I now offer my criticism.
(points-of-unity)=
Points of Unity¶
The RMS states unequivocally that they “expresses solidarity with the Palestinian people’s heroic national liberation struggle against the Zionist state of Israel and its imperialist enabler the United States. We condemn the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people and the apartheid conditions enforced thereby. We denounce the U.S.‘s consistent role as the supplier and facilitator of the Israeli occupation and affirm the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, right to return, and right to wage armed struggle for their liberation.” To this, I am in absolute and firm agreement.
RMS also correctly assesses the propagandistic and false nature of the American media response. They correctly criticize US politicians for their bloodthirsty support of genocide, and also correctly lambast the milquetoast half-assed calls for “ceasefires” as the facade and charade that they are. Additionally, they rightly point out the hypocrisy of the claim that October 7th is ”the bloodiest day in Israel’s history”, echoing the point that this claim only holds true if one ignores all the crimes which have occurred since the Nakba. This assessment is undoubtedly correct, and I stand in agreement with their cadre on these matters.
My Criticism of the Document¶
(both-sides-criticism)=
Both Sides-ing¶
A minor but important criticism I do have, despite the overall unity with RMS, is that later in the paper RMS does state that “While it’s true that Hamas has killed Israeli civilians, the claims of Israel regarding Hamas’ uniquely excessive brutality should be doubted, especially compared to the sheer amount of Palestinian civilians (as of now 10,000) killed by Israel as a response to Hamas’ action.” I am in agreement here and appreciate RMS’s acknowledgment of the lop-sided and grossly inequitable casualty toll.
Overall I stand in agreement with the above mentioned parts. However I do have one minor point of criticism in this regards. On Page 2, the paper states that “While it is true that Hamas has killed Israeli civilians...” I read this as a kind of “both-sidesing” rhetorical statement which is designed to appeal to liberal sensibilities. It does so by equivocating Hamas to Israel, and trying to portray the Zionist critics as having some reasonable concern. This rhetoric is troubling, because it represents a subtle equivalence between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the colonizer.
Important
This statement furthermore collapses when we consider the reality of “civilians” in Israel. Israeli Settlers are legitimate military targets. They are active combatants in a war zone. They are not innocent civilians. The genocidal freak and National Security Minister Ben Gvir – the same Ben Gvir who was found guilty of Genocide by the International Criminal Court – issued 10,000 rifles to “Civilian” Settlers on Kibbutzim. This is an intentional policy which abuses the status of civilians, and deputizes them into becoming shock troops for their colonial militia.
When the Palestinian Resistance (not just Hamas, who is only one of eight separate factions) bravely and nobly engages in combat against these deputized settlers, Israel can go cry to the United Nations and the American State about how cruel and savage the Palestinian barbarians are because they murder civilians. But in reality, these civilians are just as valid of military targets as uniformed Israeli Occupation Forces soldiers. For this reason, I criticize the weak rhetoric of RMS which I demonstrated as unintentionally bolstering the cause of Zionism.
First-World Chauvinism¶
The first strong point of disagreement I have with the RMS begins on page 4. They open a statement by saying:
While the ultimate responsibility for such a vicious and brutal act lie with the Israeli government, it is the responsibility of liberation forces to take into account how the enemy will respond, and from that account, evaluate if a given action or campaign makes sense. Given this, the Hamas attack on October 7th should be evaluated for its strategy. It is important that such an evaluation be made, as past experiences teach us the pitfalls of not providing a deeper analysis of strategy, both from within and without the Palestinian liberation struggle. Take, for example, the revolutionary period of 1967-1977: While the PLO and its member organizations bravely and heroically resisted the brutal Zionist onslaught both in and outside of Palestine, various political errors (mainly the overemphasis on training resistance fighters and carrying out military strikes as opposed to a more diverse strategy as deployed in the Chinese, Vietnamese and Algerian national liberation struggles) stunted the movement’s overall potential in bringing an end to Zionist oppression and colonization. However, the left both within the PLO (as represented by the PFLP and the DFLP) as well as the international Communist movement largely did not seek to criticize and revise the negative political line put forward by the PLO (Fatah in particular) and instead tailed said political line, contributing to the Palestinian national liberation movement of the time meeting a political impasse.
Firstly, a survey of Palestinian history will reveal that the claims of the left-wing of the PLO tailing Fatah is demonstrably false. The PFLP Commando Leila Khaled, in her autobiography My People Shall Live criticizes Fatah stating that:
Fateh was something new in my experience. (Women’s) sole function was fundraising. (Women) were not a part of the policy-making processes, but merely spectators or ticket agents in the temple of Fateh. Periodically, nebulous lectures were given; speakers always remained within the realm of glittering generalities in dealing with the strategy, ideology, financing, and recruiting of the movement. Initially I thought it was impertinent on my part to ask too many questions since I was a novice in Fateh’s ranks. Then I decided that I, as a Palestinian, should know what we were doing to create a new Palestine. I began pressing for answers. To whom was the movement accountable? Why had it accepted funds from Saudi Arabia and other reactionary sources? What was the nature of Fateh’s socio-economic programme? Why had Fateh tried to isolate itself from the Arab masses? More importantly, I wanted to know what women could do beyond fund-raising? Most of the answers were not forthcoming and those that were were extremely inadequate.
—Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live
In fact, Khaled eventually quits Fatah in disgust when they are unable to answer her questions, and ends up seeking out the PFLP to join in their ranks due to their disavowal of gender chauvinism and their principled stances in firm opposition to the tailist and conservative politics of Fatah. For the RMS to claim that the left-faction of the PLO was tailist behind Fatah is factually incorrect, and represents a lack of understanding of the nuances of Palestinian history and politics.
Additionally, as Khaled details in her autobiography the PFLP military operations were a political success. Their airplane hijacking operations were extremely effective at freeing Palestinian political prisoners. Most importantly, the Palestinian masses loved the PFLP for their daring military feats, and this inspired the masses to follow the left flank of the PLO as the vanguard of the popular liberation movement because its right wing, embodied in Fatah, was content making schemes and bargains with the Zionist Entity. These feats were not adventuristic stunts, but rather calculated actions by a disciplined and revolutionary militant formation.
Warning
Frankly, it strikes me as a form of white settler chauvinism for the RMS to sit from the sidelines and criticize the Palestinian liberation movement with false slanders and other nebulous facts with absolutely no basis in reality.
The RMS also states that the left-wing of the PLO “over-emphasized on training resistance fighters and carrying out military strikes as opposed to a more diverse strategy as deployed in the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Algerian national liberation struggles.” I ask of the RMS Cadre: what diverse strategies? What did each of these individual struggles do differently which Palestine’s liberation movement failed to do? Be specific in your criticisms!
Trotskyist Idealism¶
The RMS next cites the 2017 Hamas charter and states “Further, even though Hamas is the largest force in Palestine fighting back against Israel, alone will not bring about Palestinian liberation. For example: in the same line of Hamas’s charter they write about both ’from the river to the sea’ but also support the 1967 borders which means a two-state solution.” Firstly they ignore Point 17 of the Hamas charter which states that:
The following are considered null and void: the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution, and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them. The establishment of “Israel” is entirely illegal and contravenes the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and goes against their will and the will of the Ummah; it is also in violation of human rights that are guaranteed by international conventions, foremost among them is the right to self-determination.
It is true that Hamas does, in their charter specifically on point 20, argue for the June 1967 borders as the RMS claims. However, the RMS does not tell the whole story. Let us cite and analyze the entirety of Point 20 of the 2017 Hamas Charter:
20. **Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.
Hamas makes multiple declarations in the section titled The position toward Occupation and political solutions affirming its principled liberation stance. It merely declares the June 1967 borders to be a “formula of national consensus”. What is meant by this claim of National Consensus? Simply put, it means that Hamas would accept a return to 1967 borders as a temporary measure in its war of liberation without compromising on the overarching goal of unapologetic Palestinian liberation, opposition to Zionism, and rejection of colonization.
Important
The fact that the RMS would willingly distort the Hamas charter and slander the Palestinian liberation movement for cheap political points from the comfort and safety of the West is ample evidence to justify my accusation of the Revolutionary Marxist Students as committing the ideological crime of Trotskyism. Their petit-bourgeois orientation is on manifest display for the world to see.
They are a cohort of students in the heart of the imperial core who arrogantly think they know better than the colonized on how best to wage their liberation struggle. And worst of all, they distort the facts and cite falsehoods in a slanderous criticism. It would be one thing if this criticism came from a principled place of understanding and truth, but a closer investigation of the evidence proves that they willfully distort the message of the colonized to further their own Trotskyist agenda.
(mystical-settler-colonizer)=
The Mystical Sympathetic Settler-Colonizer¶
The RMS then, on page 5 of their document, opens up by stating:
Historical precedent proves the need for such an alliance of both the colonized and colonizer working classes in ending Apartheid, as seen in the South African example. In South Africa, while less than 10% of the population was white, an alliance with the working class of said population was not only possible, but necessary for the ending of Apartheid regime, as shown in the organization of and critical actions performed by the cross-racial Congress of South African Trade Unions in the 1980s and 1990s. Within the bounds of pre-1948 Palestine (not including those Palestinians who reside in neighboring states), the Israeli population makes up about 60% of the population with around 47% of the total population between the river and the sea being Jewish, a great deal more than the 10% figure for white Afrikaaners in South Africa. As such, it would then follow that in order to wage any sort of successful national liberation struggle in Palestine, a significant section of the working Israeli masses would have to turn against the apartheid state and link up with the Palestinians and that such an alliance across apartheid is historically possible. This is not to say South Africa is a model example of a struggle similar to the Palestinians, but that is all the more reason to study its history, understand what went right, what went wrong, and what mistakes to avoid.
In regards to the first sentence about an alliance between colonizer and colonized, this is pure fiction. Let us disregard the comparison to South Africa, and consider the facts of Israel. It is a fact that the Zionist Entity implements universal, mandatory conscription in its occupation army for all but the most ultra-orthodox Jewish religious sects, which comprise an extremely minor portion of the population. It is safe to assume that the vast majority of the Zionist Entity working class, therefore, is subject to mandatory military service.
Warning
If the Zionist settler working class is so amenable to solidarity with the oppressed, then I ask: where is the GI resistance movement? Where are the Israeli settlers serving in the Occupation Army who are throwing fragmentation grenades into their commanding officers tents? Where are the working-class Zionist troops feeding intelligence to the resistance? At the very minimum, where the hell is the popular movement among Israeli workers to refuse conscription into their colonial army?
At the absolute bare minimum, the least that the Zionist settlers could be expected to do is refuse to serve. On average they face less than a months jail sentence for outward refusals to enlist as a conscript. If the working class of Israel truly had the capacity for solidarity, then these efforts would be organized on a widespread scale. But they are not!
While it is true that there are some decent working-class Israelis who resist the draft and publicly refuse conscription as a political statement, there are two points to be made here. One, although this is a commendable stance, it is none the less the absolute bare minimum which could be asked of the Israeli workers as an act of solidarity. No such calls have been issued by Maki, the Israeli Communist Party. What worth is a settler communist party if it cannot even call upon the settlers to resist the colonization in the most passive and milquetoast of fashions? Why are the Zionist ‘communists’ not calling for mass defections and mass resistance to conscription in the spirit of Lenin’s Revolutionary Defeatism? The fact that this is not happening, has not happened, and frankly will never happen is enough evidence in my view, to completely discredit the fantasy scenario of the RMS which they describe in their paper. It is nothing more than pure Trotskyism.
The second fact is that the number of Israeli workers who actually do this are slim to none. I do not mean to discredit their sacrifices. As a military veteran myself, I completely understand how intimidating and scary it can be to face up to angry men in uniform and risk imprisonment to stand your ground and stay true to your ideals. But if the Israeli working class as a whole – and not isolated incidences of good-willed people with a conscience – truly has some potential in it, why is this not more widespread, especially in the matter of the ongoing genocide? Where are the Israeli communists? If the Israeli working class were worth its salt, then this would be a widespread epidemic. But the matter of fact remains that Israeli military refusals are so rare as to be international news stories when they happen. And while the bravery and courage of those who do resist conscription should be applauded and praised, a couple of brave individuals is not nearly the same as a mass class movement. If ever this were going to happen, it should happen right now. But it has not. Therefore, I cannot help but deduce that the RMS line of advocating unity between Israeli settlers and Palestinian colonized is nothing more than pure Trotskyist fantasy.
Advocating for the State Department Line¶
Perhaps the most egregious claim of the RMS is at the end of Page 5, where they criticize Hamas (curiously Hamas seems to be used as a stand-in for the broader Palestinian resistance in the same racist and orientalist way that the American media does) for having “clear ties to and support from sub-imperialist forces such as Iran and Qatar … which only benefit the Zionist project.” This flies in the face of the teachings of Mao in his book On Contradiction.
In Section 4 of On Contradiction, titled The Principal Contradiction and the Principal Aspect of a Contradiction Mao states:
As we have said, one must not treat all the contradictions in a process as being equal but must distinguish between the principal and the secondary contradictions, and pay special attention to grasping the principal one. But, in any given contradiction, whether principal or secondary, should the two contradictory aspects be treated as equal? Again, no. In any contradiction the development of the contradictory aspects is uneven. Sometimes they seem to be in equilibrium, which is however only temporary and relative, while unevenness is basic. Of the two contradictory aspects, one must be principal and the other secondary. The principal aspect is the one playing the leading role in the contradiction. The nature of a thing is determined mainly by the principal aspect of a contradiction, the aspect which has gained the dominant position.
—Mao Zedong, On Contradiction
Let us analyze the admittedly valid contradiction between Qatari and Iranian bourgeois elements, and the Palestinian liberation movement. The RMS is not wrong to highlight that a contradiction indeed exists here. But, applying Mao’s idea of the Principal Aspect, it becomes abundantly clear that in the contradiction between the Iranian and Qatari bourgeoisie, and the Palestinian working-class vanguard led by the PFLP and the DFLP within the broader Resistance, that the interests of the Palestinian working class are the dominant, principal aspect in that contradiction.
Important
To argue the other way around – that it is the Iranians and the Qataris who are meddling in Palestinian affairs and manipulating the Palestinian liberation movement – is to advocate the line of the US state department and its nonsense drivel about “Iranian Foreign Influences”. Again, the RMS lives up to the accusation of Trotskyism in its adoption of the US State Department line!
Again, the RMS cadre demonstrate their sheer arrogance and white western chauvinism to denigrate the noble Palestinian resistance from the comfort of the west. I ask of the RMS: Was any attempt made to contact the DFLP, PFLP or one of their representatives for their side of the story? Was there any attempt at all to communicate with Palestinian communists and seek clarification from those actively engaged in revolutionary combat, before opening your mouths on a matter you clearly have not investigated?
I understand both of those groups are listed as foreign terrorist organizations, and thus it comes with some risk to try to communicate with them. Firstly, are we not Communists? I would remind the Cadre of RMS as well as the reader that **revolutions are illegal by definition. Why do we let bourgeois law define our methods? Secondly, one could view the myriad Palestinian news outlets such as the Resistance News Network and passively consume Palestinian Communist news from Palestinian Communist sources where such questions are answered in detail. Thirdly, the RMS could have admitted that their ideas are unclear and uninformed, so they could have done the Maoist thing of doing a thorough investigation before claiming the right to speak on the matter.
In short though, there is another option we’d be wise to consider: **shutting the hell up. Again, I say what arrogance does this group have to seriously critique the military strategies of an actively Communist-led militant formation in a colonized nation on the imperialist periphery when they have not even done the most rudimentary of studies or readings? It seems to me that this group of students simply wanted to rush out a statement in the fashion of social media, to get ahead of the curve and put out the most radical left-sounding position. To claim themselves as the Definitive Maoist Voice of the Student Movement. But in this hasty and misguided process, they ended up uttering falsehoods and slanderous lies which back the cause of Zionism. They channel not the spirit of Mao Zedong, but rather than of Leon Trotsky.
This concludes my criticism of the Revolutionary Marxist Students and their official position paper on the Palestinian movement.