Against Phony Peace
Palestinian families in East Jerusalem are being forcibly evicted by the Israeli state to make way for new settlers. Al Jazeera reports:
The same court ruled seven other families should leave their homes by August 1. In total, 58 people, including 17 children, are set to be forcibly displaced to make way for Jewish settlers.
The court rulings are a culmination of a decades-long struggle for these Palestinians to stay in their homes. In 1972, several Jewish settler organisations filed a lawsuit against the Palestinian families living in Sheikh Jarrah, alleging the land originally belonged to Jews.
These groups, mostly funded by donors from the United States, have waged a relentless battle that resulted in the displacement of 43 Palestinians in 2002, as well as the Hanoun and Ghawi families in 2008 and the Shamasneh family in 2017.
This bears remarkable similarity to the methods which the US and Canadian governments have used to dispossess Indigenous individuals and tribes of what little land they have remaining. This is not by accident. All settler colonial states are founded on the theft of land by guns, or the theft of land by pen (backed up with guns). Without stolen land, there can be no settler colonial state. This is the very definition of an antagonistic contradiction.
This makes it all the sadder when well meaning liberal/progressive activists talk about the need for “peace”, in all contexts. Peace, like all things, serves one class, or the other. When these activists talk about a vague “peace” under the current order of imperialism and genocidal settler colonialism, they are necessarily talking about a peace that is to the benefit of the colonizer and the thief. What peace is there when at any moment a colonizer judge can rip you from your home? What peace is there when jets can bomb your narrow strip of land in which you are forbidden to access the fruits of the sea and soil, and where everything worth having in life, healthcare, food, good education, is controlled and restricted by the colonizer which has surrounded the few remaining paltry acres of land that are nominally under the control of your people?
Mao taught long ago that the essence of Marxism is the maxim “It is Right to Rebel”. What does this mean? It means that it is right to oppose those who will see you dead. This is not just a Marxist maxim, it is a common sense, human maxim. The entire Western world seems shocked by the fact that the Palestinian people are not righteously lying down and accepting their prescribed fate on the list of the world’s people doomed for destruction. As a New Afrikan whose people have been on the Western world’s list of “doomed people” since chattel slavery ended, I can relate. Life is a nice thing to have, and any human being worth a damn will fight and struggle to preserve their life. Any human being who lies down and accepts abuse, murder, and torment at the hands of another will have their life, property, and land taken from them. The only reason why there is still a Palestinian people to speak of is because of their armed resistance. The only reason why there is a New Afrikan people is because of the armed struggle of my people against Yankee imperialist genocide and slavery. I am by no means a social Darwinist, but “The weak are preyed upon by the strong” is, generally, how the world works under capitalism-imperialism and settler-colonialism. This is why I am a Communist, because it promotes strength and organization which are the tools needed to upend this order. Wherever you find oppressed and exploited people, you will find Communists, because Communism is strength. Communism teaches us to take up arms and cure what ails us, not wait for the enemy to grow a conscience and give us what we are born with.
Communism teaches us that peace is secured by force of arms, and can only be won with the destruction and removal from power of the ruling class. There can be no peace won through protest marches, Facebook and Twitter posts, and solidarity demonstrations. They have their place in winning new people to the movement and securing resources, but the process of taking power is an armed process. Never in history has an unarmed, pacifist movement, successfully toppled a violent, armed one. So when you hear liberals engaging in both sides discourse on the Palestinian question, or the New Afrikan question, or any other question or struggle where the masses of people are struggling against an occupying power, they are really functioning as accomplices to the ruling class. On issues like these, there is no “two sides”. There are the people, and there are those who suppress and exploit the people, and steal their land. The Palestinian people of all faiths and backgrounds demand a one state solution, and that state is Palestine, not Israel. This is not a question of religion, or ethnicity, either. Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together on amenable terms for centuries before imperialism sowed havoc. This is a question of settler-colonialism and theft of land from the masses of people. Israel is an imposition that has done nothing but sow havoc and discord since its existence, drumming up wars, murdering and wounding children and elders, denying the Palestinian people the fruits of their labor, stealing ever more land, and evicting families from their homes. There can be no peace in this area while it exists.
All power to the rockets.
