CVO TALK -- for a revolutionary workers movement!

This is a partial survey of Western leftist positions regarding Hamas. They fall roughly into groupings:

First, among certain trends, it is taken as an article of absolute faith, that one must support Hamas uncritically, and they even paint up the October 7th attack as something heroic. This intentionally overlooks, and sometimes even directly denies, the reality that Hamas is an oppressive theocratic bourgeois state, ruling over working and poor Gazans, and even has a role in helping the right-wing factions within Israel maintain ascendency. These directly pro-Hamas arguments are surprisingly weak, dominated by unsupported assertions, distortions of fact, and straw-man argumentation. No one should be surprised by the Israeli response to the October 7th attack, and the rulers of Gaza, in planning and carrying out the attack did so knowing full well that it would exact a heavy price on ordinary Gazan people. For supposed leftists to take the position that the attack was justified by Israel's actions dirties the name of leftism.

Then there is another section of the left which, while it does not directly support Hamas, is sparing in its criticism. This line tends to emphasize the horrors which Israel has rained down on the Palestinians, and without saying it directly, is in fact allergic to any serious criticism of Hamas. This position is weak and vague, and tends to have nothing to say about a way out of the current situation.

And third, there is a line put forward by some that is relatively unsparing in criticism of both Hamas and its policies and actions, as well as of Israel – even giving a more or less correct weight to the relative horrors rained down by Israel since its inception, and the far smaller casualties caused by Hamas' actions. However, in this third category, the weakness is a failure to address the class nature behind events. Their accounting of history there doesn't address the fact that the events are not simply a matter of bad actors fighting each other, but ruling class forces in contention.

In late April 2024, I handed copy of this Seattle Workers' Voice leaflet to a supporter at the University of Washington encampment, who read it and returned it with markups. These marks reflect arguments commonly made by those on the left who support Hamas and the October 7th attack.

Briefly going over a few of the minor objections she raised, they tend to be based in a distorted rendering of facts, or misreading of the leaftet: we say Hamas is led by fundamentalist reactionaries, she disputes this fact; we say the civilians killed on October were Jewish, she corrects this to Israeli (they may not have all been Jewish, but to say they were all Israelis is worse, many were migrant workers etc.); we say hundreds of civilians were killed in Hamas' attack, she responds as though we said all of those killed were killed by Hamas; etc.

But the more substantive disagreements are what are interesting. Her main objections are to this passage: “Hamas' actions killing civilians damage the Palestinian movement in a way which Israel's wars alone cannot, i.e., they drive a wedge between the Palestinian cause and the mass of working people around the world, including inside Israel. All this doesn't negate that Israeli apartheid is the vicious oppressor of the Palestinians, and the just struggle of the Palestinian people deserves the utmost support. But Hamas' actions can't be ignored without harming the interests of the working people, Palestinian, Jewish, and others.”

While the passage is clearly regarding the overall interests of all working people, Palestinian, Jewish and others, including those inside Israel, she asserts that by saying this we make the “opinion of settlers … the headline” –- that is, she ignores our call to proletarian internationalism, she can only see this question in terms of nationalities whose interests are at odds. And she completely ignores that when we talk of the opinion of “working people … inside Israel”, that there are many nationalities, including Arabs, as well as migrant workers (Thai, Romanian, Filipino, and West African etc.), and others that comprise the working class there.

The other main argument she makes, e.g. in response to the argument that Hamas' killing civilians “damage[s] the Palestinian movement in a way that Israel's wars alone cannot”, is to say that we should not “tell Palestinians how they should resist, esp. after we have tried every other type of peaceful resistance” and “stop condemning the resistance”. This is to set up a false dichotomy: either peaceful methods, or killing civilians. It also strangely interprets our criticism of the *efficacy* of killing civilians as “telling” Palestinians how they should resist.

During the period November 2023 to January 2024, Tempest magazine carried a polemic re the position the left should take toward Hamas. The first and third entries are pro-Hamas, and are answered in the second and fourth clearly, and citing facts. However, these responses are not based on class analysis.

November 2023, Support Palestinians when they fight by ben Avraham, asserts that the left must uncritically support Hamas, and the attack it carried out October 7th. All left opposition to the attack must be “knee-jerk”, the attack was a pure expression of the Palestinian resistance. The article makes no mention of the class division between the theocratic bourgeois state and the ordinary toiling people of Gaza, and doesn't ask what the effect of the October 7th attack was for the Gazan toilers.

Again in November 2023 a response: A response to Jonah ben Avraham’s 'Support Palestinians when they fight…' by Dan LaBotz and Stephen R. Shalom, a rebuttal to ben Avraham. In it La Botz and Shalom oppose many reasons ben Avraham gives for why leftists must support Hamas and the October 7th attack uncritically: in planning and carrying out the attack Hamas disregarded the cost to Palestinians of Israel's certain brutal response; pre-October 7th Hamas was unpopular and there were protests against its religious policies; the long history of Israel killing civilians doesn't justify Hamas doing the same; US socialists are not obliged to support oppressive forces which oppose US imperialism – all correct points.

But, La Botz and Shalom take these positions from a non-class stance. They fail to raise any idea that the Palestinians toilers as a class must develop their own independent political trend to fight for their own interests. They raise that “when a leftist dismisses the humanity of Israeli civilians … it does a disservice to both the left and the Palestinian cause”, but missing in this is the recognition that it is not just “the left” in general, but specifically that October 7th furthered the rift between Palestinian and Israeli workers and toilers, a rift which may now take decades to heal, when the only solution is through the recognition of their common cause, common struggle against their common oppressors. Unconditional support for Hamas by “leftists” only furthers this rift.

Then December of 2023, Against colonial narcissism: A response to Dan La Botz and Stephen R. Shalom by Sean Larson. Straw man argumentation, and assertions that leftists from “the Global North” have no standing to criticize anything those in the “Global South” do, ie, if you're not from an oppressed country, shut up and follow those who are.

January 2024, Once More on Hamas: A Reply to Sean Larson (Dan LaBotz and Stephen R. Shalom). This article doesn't break a lot of new ground. They affirm the need for leftists to use critical thinking and not follow any force blindly. They argue that criticism of Hamas' actions wins the greatest support for the Palestinian cause: “We will not win popular support for a ceasefire, let alone for our more long-term aspirations for justice in the Middle East, by betraying the humane values that have always inspired the Left.” Again, they are speaking from the perspective of “the left”, rather than the working class.

Hamas: A Marxist appraisal by Omar Hassan, published June 13, 2024

Omar Hassan is editor of Marxist Left Review, the theoretical journal of Socialist Alternative Australia, a Trotskyist trend. While Hassan is pretty unsparing in his criticism of Hamas (also Fatah, though his focus is Hamas), it is ultimately sterile because he gives minimal analysis of where the interests of the ordinary Palestinian people lie when he is describing the twists and turns of different organizations forming and breaking with each other, or the changing tactics taken up by the leadership.

Throughout the article, Hassan makes strong points regarding Hamas: opposes both the line that Hamas is nothing but a terrorist organization, as well as the line that it is to be supported because it is the only group willing to oppose Israel. He labels Hamas a conservative bourgeois organization. He also denounces the leadership for being ultra-wealthy and living abroad. He outlines the Hamas' history of anti-democratic rule: killing people for being gay, suppressing attempted organization of a general strike by workers and poor, beating and arresting protesters, journalists and human rights observers, claiming they were agents of Israel.

In the section titled “Hamas: repackaged bourgeois nationalism”, he argues that Hamas' election in 2006 reflected the anti-corruption and pro-resistance desires of the Palestinians, but, he says, Hamas slid “from a resistance organization to an authoritarian regime”: 1) charting a change in Hamas' line, step-wise shifting from more uncompromising rhetoric to more concessionary terms; and 2) changing military tactics from targeting the Israeli military and illegal settlements to targeting civilians in bus and cafe suicide bombings after the massacre of Palestinian worshippers in 1994 by fascist Israeli settler. But Hamas was a fundamentalist Islamic organization associated with the Muslim Brotherhood from the start, arising out of the energy of the First Intifada, and it would be more incisive to ask what it was about Hamas that it would make these two shifts, a question Hassan does not ask, only blaming it on the leadership gaining more wealth and power, and seeking to improve the leadership's negotiating hand.

Instead his criticism of Hamas' adoption of terrorist tactics against civilian targets rests solely on the grounds that they were ineffective in weakening the Israeli occupation. Entirely missing in Hassan's analysis is the idea that attacks against civilian targets drives a wedge between the masses of Palestinians and Israelis, particularly downtrodden Israelis. Once an Israeli fascist attacked Palestinian civilians, it is as though for Hassan this opened the door to Hamas legitimately attacking civilians, if only it weakened Israel.

In talking about the First Intifada, Hassan argues “The mass nature of this resistance made it harder for the Israelis to unleash overwhelming violence, and gained the movement access to international support”. But regarding the current debate among leftists after October 7th, re Hamas' attack in particular, and the place of violent tactics in general, Hassan doesn't draw lessons from this earlier experience, but instead retreats into musing about what tactics Hamas could or should take, with minimal consideration of mass initiative.

What is needed is a Palestinian democratic force that is connected to the working masses in a way neither Hamas nor Palestinian Authority are, and that unite the mass of Palestinians in resistance to Israeli apartheid and oppression. There is a deep, longstanding political and social crisis among the Palestinians, exacerbated by the ongoing massacre by the Israelis. But there is also resistance, and Hassan has no idea what could help lead to a more effective struggle for their liberation. So instead he denigrates struggles against oppression anywhere because they are not for socialism. But struggles against oppression can and must continue even though socialist revolution is not imminent in the Middle East.