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.
Solidarity spaces raided, presses stolen, and homes invaded – anarchists are feeling the full force of Meloni-era repression after police went after a radical newspaper using anti-mafia and anti-terror legislation.
The below article, adapted from a translation of a piece in Alasbarricadas, looks at what happened in the Tuscany clampdown.
“The silence and censorship that power tries to impose on anarchist solidarity does not prevent it from taking place (…), throughout the world, there is a warm longing that surpasses borders and can generate the avalanche that will overwhelm what exists”
Bezmotivny #1
First released in December 2020, Bezmotivny launched as a fortnightly newspaper based in the coastal town of Carrara, around 100km southeast of Genoa. With a focus on direct action and prisoner solidarity, it took a forthright approach to taking on the forces of reaction even as much of Italy’s electorate moved to embrace the far-right. Following 2022’s election of a government led by longtime fascist fellow-traveller Giorgia Meloni, a clash seemed inevitable.
On August 8th of this year, the boot stamped, arriving at the doors of 10 comrades spread across the Italian peninsula who possessed the most dangerous weapon: a printing press. The “anti-terrorist” operation bore a grandiloquent name, “Scripta Scelera,” and the Genoa prosecutor’s office (led by Federico Manotti, a man better known for anti-mafia work), the General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS) of La Spezia and the Regional Anti-Mafia and Anti-terrorism Directorate (DNA) all participated.
In addition to raids on several private homes, the main target was an anarchist cultural centre and collective, the Gogliardo Fiaschi Anarchist Cultural Circle – a historic venue in Carrara since the 1970s. Magazines, books, pamphlets, posters and computer media were seized.
This is the seventh and last of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
The “traditional Left” of South America largely inherited a Eurocentric conception of freedom and equality as bound to economic progress. This, in effect, politically marginalised the indigenous populations of the continent, as peoples and/or communities with their own specific ways of living which could not be – and cannot be – simply reduced to the status of (“primitive”, “ignorant”, “underdeveloped”, and the like … the list is a long one) “poor peasants”.
The relationship then between the overwhelmingly European inspired “Left” and native peoples – without wishing thereby to simplify – over time and different territories would be one of encounters and misencounters, thus, often, on the part of the “Left”, perpetuating colonialist and racist ideas and practices towards the indigenous.
There were of course notable exceptions. One only has to think of the Mexican revolution (1910 (or 1906, if one includes the Partido Liberal Mexicano-PLM actions in Baja, California) -1920). Yet this same exception points to the rule, as the tensions between urban and rural, largely indigenous, workers would be instrumentalised to constitute military “Red Brigades” to be sent against the Morelos Commune and Emiliano Zapata.
The Chilean revolution would play out these same tensions, with a local colour. And the efforts of the Salvador Allende government to respond, to varying degrees, to the aspirations of the country’s indigenous peoples reveals the limits of “revolutionary thought and practice” still chained to its enlightenment-colonial past.
This is the sixth of a short series that we dedicate to the memory of Chile’s revolutionaries on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup d’état against the Chilean revolution and the government of Salvador Allende.
There is a tendency to view the revolutionary process in Chile as limited to the period of the Salvador Allende government (1970-1973). Yet, this is a mistake, a mistake of perspective that limits radical change to state-centred agency. And if anything characterised the events in Chile, it was the relative autonomy of the transformations brought about at the time, an autonomy captured in the slogan, “popular power”; an autonomy struggled for before the Allende government and that would continue after the military coup d’état in 1973.
We share below two articles by the Uruguayan journalist and essayist, Raúl Zibechi, that help to place “Allende’s” revolution in a broader perspective, a perspective that provides a distance from a revolution driven by a leader to a revolution animated, in all of its diversity, from below. And we close with video recorded interviews, with Zibechi, in English and Spanish.
”The horror!… The horror!”
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”.
“The position of revolutionaries confronted with capitalist war is always the same: to oppose social revolution to war, to struggle against ‘their own’ bourgeoisie and ‘their own’ national state.” (From Gaza to Tel-Aviv and to the whole World… No War But Class War!)
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.