I was interested in the article, ‘Palestine and Socialist Policy’, by our good friend Reginald Reynolds in ‘Spain and the World’ of July 29th. There is much in it with which I fully agree, but a great deal more which seems to me contradictory for a Socialist and a near-anarchist. Before I point out these inconsistencies, I wish to say that our friend’s article lends itself to the impression that he is a rabid anti-Semite. In point of truth, I have been asked by several people how it happens that ‘Spain and the World’ printed such an anti-Semitic article. Their surprise was even greater that Reginald Reynolds should be guilty of such tendency. Knowing the writer I felt quite safe in assuring my Jewish friends that Reginald Reynolds has not a particle of anti-Semitic feeling in him, although it is quite true that his article unfortunately gives such an impression.
I have no quarrel with our good friend about his charges against the Zionists. In point of fact I have for many years opposed Zionism as the dream of capitalist Jewry the world over for a Jewish State with all its trimmings, such as Government, laws, police, militarism and the rest. In other words, a Jewish State machinery to protect the privileges of the few against the many.
There is a Jewish tradition about seventy angels known as “princes” who are set in charge of the seventy nations of the world.Each of these “princes” supervises his own nation, acting as its spokesman before the throne of glory. When their respective nations are embattled, they too become involved against each other. The “princes” are the real victors and the real vanquished; and their wars, victories and defeats, their ascents and descents on the mighty ladder, are what historians characterize by the name of history. Each of them has a purpose and function of his own; and so long as the “prince” does his part, so long as he accomplishes his purpose and fulfills his function, he is entrusted with power. But he is responsible to his Master, and is required to render an accounting to him. Therefore, when he becomes so intoxicated with power as to forget who he is and what his function is, arrogantly assuming himself to be the lord and master—then the hand of his Sovereign falls upon him: falling either in the form of lightning which flings him into the abyss of nothingness, or gradually as a steady rain, which carries him little by little down to the abyss of nothingness.
“Palestine belongs to the Arabs”. The words are Mahatma Ghandi’s and they are cited by Martin Buber in a 1939 letter that he wrote to Ghandi in defence of the creation of a Jewish community in Palestine, by which time he was already living in Jerusalem, having left Nazi Germany in 1938.
To read Buber’s letter over 80 years after its composition, and, above all, after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, is to be taken back to a time when perceptions among Jews, and especially Zionist Jews, of what kind of polity the new state should be, in a world of nation-states, were intensely debated. And Buber’s Zionism reminds us of a vision of messianic utopianism, by no means exclusive to Buber, which he believed would set Israel apart from other states, teaching by example a form of non-sovereign, agrarian communalism bound to the land of Palestine, but resonating throughout the world’s nations.
It will not be easy either to save the Jews or to save Palestine in the twentieth century; that it can be done with categories and methods of the nineteenth century seems at the very most highly improbable. If Zionists persevere in retaining their sectarian ideology and continue with their short-sighted “realism,” they will have forfeited even the small chances that small peoples still have in this none too beautiful world of ours.
Hannah Arendt
It is impossible to understand the politics of the state of Israel without some understanding of Zionism. As a modern nationalist movement, with the particularity of being a Jewish nationalism, Hannah Arendt’s critical engagement remains fundamental. We share below her 1944 essay, “Zionism Reconsidered”.
As is and has so often been the case, the outbreak of yet another open armed conflict between the Israeli state/government and Palestinian authorities (The Palestinian Authority-PA and/or Hamas) leaves some anarchists and libertarian/anti-authoritarian leftists reaching for their tired and worn ideologies of “class war against national wars”.
Our interest has never been to enter into polemics. And nor would we wholly dismiss the statement quoted above. However in its simplicity, such statements both neglect the complexity and diversity of armed conflicts (to put it bluntly, not all wars can be read or diluted in a “class analysis”, as if such an analysis were itself self-evident) and overlook the differences between a nation as a historical-affective community (with all of its internal dissensions and conflicts), a nation state (as a collection of apparatuses of appropriation and control, but also as a zone of internal conflict), and the “wars” that may exist between states, and between states and nations, and within both. The failure to recognise that identities (social, cultural, political, etc.) are not reducible to “class”, and that they are not thereby false or merely ideological, renders, as it has in the past, any interpretation and any radical politics (e.g., “revolutionary defeatism”) inferred from it, hollow and helpless.
We do not have the truth about what is happening in Palestine-Israel, or what will happen – we do not know enough. Nor do we pretend to know what should be done, as anarchists, or as individuals simply concerned to imagine and create a more just world.
The violent events of the last few days in Palestine-Israel are horrifying. Yet they should not blind us to the horror of the daily life of Palestinians under Israeli colonial occupation (Human Rights Watch). This is not to justify the actions of any of the state(or state-like)-actors in the conflict: we have no political sympathies with the PA, with Hamas or the Israeli government (and other para-state actors in the conflict). And we consider the state-centred ethnic-religious politics largely pursued by each of these actors to be not only problematic, but condemnable.
When the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, after the Hamas attacks on Israel, on the 7th of October, that “We are at war”, he passed over the fact that Israel has been at war, with greater or lesser intensity, since its declared foundation in 1948 against those that it colonised to become a state, the Palestinians, not to mention its frequent wars with neighbouring states.
Hamas, along with its violence, is the “child” of this war. This does not make it innocent (as if “resistance” could justify any act of violence). And Hamas’ murder and kidnapping of hundreds of civilians in its recent incursions into the country’s territory and bombings of Israeli villages and cities are heinous. And the very many Palestinians who have died and will die with Israel’s military response are equally grotesque.
The killings of acts of resistance against violent colonialism are not the same as the murders of colonialism, we will be told. But in the name of what can such a distinction be made? In the name of an uncertain projected future of greater justice? Must liberation, revolution, always demand sacrificial victims? And can one be assured that whom or what they are sacrificed to merits the loss? And what will be nature of the “post-liberation/post-revolutionary” regime, sanctified by the sacrifice of blood?
The language of modern politics and modern revolution quickly takes on theological airs. And the language of the Israeli state/government and Hamas is steeped in a violent religious zealotry that increasingly can only see in the other that which must be extinguished. Both have corrupted religion with the claims of absolute earthly sovereignty, both seek to govern for the sake of power, and nothing more.
We do not judge or condemn those in Palestine/Israel who fall in behind their respective statist-political authorities, in the belief that it is only in and through a proper state that their security can be assured. And we do not identify the many peoples of these territories with their states. Yet we are equally horrified by the inability of seemingly many on both sides of the divide to understand the pain of loss suffered by the other. And we believe that this violent divide can only begin to be overcome when this pain, this suffering, and the desire to overcome it, cease to be defined by the borders of state authorities.
An Anarchist from Jaffa on the Violence in Palestine and Israeli Repression
On October 7, Hamas, the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, breached the siege wall surrounding them to carry out a series of attacks. The Israeli government has responded with a full military operation. While both sides have targeted civilians as well as soldiers, these events can only be understood in the context of decades of repression and ethnic cleansing.
At the time, we were just wrapping up an interview with Jonathan Pollak, an anarchist from Jaffa—a Palestinian town that was majority-Arabic until recently. A longtime participant in Anarchists Against the Wall and other anti-colonial solidarity efforts, Jonathan is currently facing a prison sentence for protest activity earlier this year. In the following interview, he describes how he sees the current escalation. He also describes how the Israeli judicial system structurally oppresses Palestinians, explains how to support Palestinian prisoners, and evaluates the effectiveness of solidarity efforts over the years.
For more background on the situation in Israel and Palestine, you could start with our history of contemporary Israeli anarchism, our report on the uprising in Haifa in 2021, and our coverage of the political conflict within Israeli society earlier this year.
We hope to share the perspectives of anti-authoritarians in Gaza as soon as we succeed in communicating with them. In offering this space to a person who grew up in Israeli society, we don’t mean to center the perspective and personhood of Israeli citizens, but rather to show that the situation cannot be reduced to a binary ethnic conflict, just as we have done in publishing the perspectives of Russian anarchists on the invasion of Ukraine. The photograph above, by Oren Ziv/ActiveStills, shows protesters burning tires in the town of Beita.
The last decade and a half has been a time of unrest. As the French political anthropologist Alain Bertho has described in his book Le temps des émeutes, the early 2010s saw a sharp increase in the number of protests.1 Strikes and demonstrations took place throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, of course, and food riots were not uncommon in the Global South. However, after 2008, there was both a quantitative and qualitative shift, with far more widespread protests, demonstrations, occupations, riots and uprisings taking place in far more places around the world. As Dilip Gaonkar writes, these protests and riots are moving north, and are now also occurring in liberal democracies.2
In this context, we sat down with long-time anarchist author and organizer Peter Gelderloos, to talk about the present moment, the path ahead for autonomous movements, and the harsh realities in front of us.
This week, a new round of violence broke out over the contested zone of Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. Anarchists from Armenia, Russia, and Azerbaijan share their analysis of the situation.
A reflection on desertion, by Amador Fernández-Savater …
It grabs your guts and won’t let go; restlessness, a background noise, a discomfort. The thing, far from disappearing, is growing. Despite distractions, narcotics, stubbornness; until you can’t stand it anymore. And it breaks us.
In breaking us, we break; with a place, a position, a space of recognition. We flee like the plague from what until very recently was perhaps what we most desired. It became suffocation, prison, breathlessness. The body is what decides: desertion.
Society (speaking through family, friends or partners) interprets betrayal and weakness. We fail, we are a walking failure. It invites us to rest and to start again, to turn and return to the course of normality.
The deserter asks his own questions. He must, if s/he does not want to fail before society. Why abandon, leave, break ranks? Is my desertion a capitulation to the challenges of my true desire or is a new desire being born that I must listen to?
Desertion asks questions of a world that always has ready to hand all the answers, the possible paths and the tranquilizers. It interrupts the automatisms that we naively call “my life.” It breaks the scripts laid out for us by the society of the spectacle.
We desert to be able to think, we think to be able to breathe.
From Beirut and the open and permanent crisis that Lebanon is undergoing, Ghassan Salhab evokes in this text the tide of homophobia and transphobia which has come to cover over, to continue and to prolong the ongoing disaster.
Our very word ‘family’ shares a root with the Latin famulus, meaning ‘house slave’, via familia, which originally referred to everyone under the domestic authority of a single paterfamilias or male head of household. Domus, the Latin word for ‘household’, in turn gives us not only ‘domestic’ and ‘domesticated’ but dominium, which was the technical term for the emperor’s sovereignty as well as a citizen’s power over private property. Through that we arrive at (literally, ‘familiar’) notions of what it means to be ‘dominant’, to possess ‘dominion’ and to ‘dominate’.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
A single light does not necessarily come from God. A wave of the hand. A simple allusion. Even if it were deceitful. So I believe it: all of this is fatigue.
Just fatigue. Man gets tired, man has gotten tired. Only that. Like conjugating the verb, or like what wears out the bodies of porters, the miners and the eternal walkers, the condemned, the smugglers’ mules, the leaders, the desperate and all the disciples on the paths of trials.
Anarchist voices on Palestine-Israel: Emma Goldman
Dear Comrade,
I was interested in the article, ‘Palestine and Socialist Policy’, by our good friend Reginald Reynolds in ‘Spain and the World’ of July 29th. There is much in it with which I fully agree, but a great deal more which seems to me contradictory for a Socialist and a near-anarchist. Before I point out these inconsistencies, I wish to say that our friend’s article lends itself to the impression that he is a rabid anti-Semite. In point of truth, I have been asked by several people how it happens that ‘Spain and the World’ printed such an anti-Semitic article. Their surprise was even greater that Reginald Reynolds should be guilty of such tendency. Knowing the writer I felt quite safe in assuring my Jewish friends that Reginald Reynolds has not a particle of anti-Semitic feeling in him, although it is quite true that his article unfortunately gives such an impression.
I have no quarrel with our good friend about his charges against the Zionists. In point of fact I have for many years opposed Zionism as the dream of capitalist Jewry the world over for a Jewish State with all its trimmings, such as Government, laws, police, militarism and the rest. In other words, a Jewish State machinery to protect the privileges of the few against the many.
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