By Michael Pröbsting, RCIT, 20 October 2023, www.thecommunists.net
A wave of anti-Palestinian hysteria is currently sweeping North America and Western Europe. At the centre of it is the denunciation of Hamas as a “terrorist organisation”. Netanyahu, Israel’s war criminal-in-chief, compared Hamas with ISIS and his senile master from the White House even claimed that Hamas is “worse than ISIS“! Consequently, the fanatic friends of Israel in Western governments and media characterise the supporters of the Palestinian liberation struggle as “supporters of terrorism”.
Let us ignore for a moment the hypocrisy of such accusations and discuss this issue in a rational way. What is “terrorism”? Well-known Western sources define terrorism as “the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective” (Britannica) or “the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims.” (Wikipedia).
If one takes such criteria, one could say that Hamas carried out terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in the 1990s but later largely refrained from such methods. Its missiles, fired in response to Israels blockade and wars against Gaza since 2008, killed only a relatively small number of Israelis.
Compare this with the policy of the Israeli state. According to statistics published by the UN, 6,407 Palestinians were killed and 152,560 injured in the period between 2008 and the 31 August 2023. In the same period, only 308 Israelis were killed and 6,307 injured. In other words, Israel killed more than 20 times as many Palestinians than the other way round!
One could object that Hamas killed a substantial number of civilians on 7 October. (The exact number is not known because we don’t know how many of these were armed settlers or were shot by the Israeli forces itself, as an Israeli woman who survived the shooting reported in an interview with an Israeli radio station.) But even here, it is widely known that Israel again has killed many more Palestinians since the 7 October – 2/3 of them are children and women. Just think about the horrendous massacre which Israel carried out recently in the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City!
There is also no need to limit oneself to Israel. Look what the U.S. has done. While there exist different calculations, it is widely accepted that Washington killed hundreds of thousands of civilians during the Vietnam War. The prestigious The Lancet medical journal estimated in 2006 study that about 600,000 Iraqis were killed in the first 40 months of war and occupation in Iraq. An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment of Mosul by the U.S. and its allies in 2016-17.
To give another historical example. It is well-known that during World War II, it was not only Nazi-Germany, Italy and Japan which deployed terrorist method against the civilian population but also the Allies. For example, the U.S. and the British Air Force destroyed some 60 cities and killed more than half a million German citizens. This was no “collateral damage” but an intentional policy in order to terrorise and demoralise the civilian population.
In other words, if Hamas is a terrorist organisation, Israel and the U.S. are terrorist mega monsters!
Finally, it should also be noted that terrorist attacks against civilians have taken place in most anti-colonial liberation movements. To take only a few examples we refer to the resistance of the indigenous population in North America against the white settlers, attacks of the FLN against the French settlers in Algeria, the Mau Mau rebellion against the white settlers in Kenya, or of the PLO against Israel in 1970s and 1980s.
As revolutionary socialists and internationalist anti-imperialists, we in the RCIT do not share the ideology of petty-bourgeois nationalists or Islamists. Neither do we condone all methods deployed by such forces (like Hamas).
Nevertheless, only blinded cheerleaders of Western colonialism can ignore the fact that all these forces have played an important role in anti-colonial and national liberation movements. This also applies to Hamas. It is a legitimate and leading force of the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli Apartheid state. It became the strongest party in the last free election in the West Bank and Gaza.
While we do not lend political support to Hamas and while we do not approve all its methods, we clearly stand on their side in their resistance struggle against Israeli state terrorism. Hence, we demand the immediate removal of the designation of Hamas as a “terrorist organisation” by the U.S., the UK and the European Union.