Contradiction: Combating Resistance

14. October 2024 Matthias Winter 6 min read

Contradiction: Combating Resistance

This war cannot serve to eradicate Hamas because it makes Hamas more popular than ever.
Every dead father raises his son as a fighter; for every Palestinian:in killed, two new fighters are born.
Why resistance* behaves like a Hydra, and what contradictions it reveals about Israel’s warfare.

Reminder: The words marked in red are links that lead to corresponding critique articles.
*Note: Our designation of Hamas as “resistance,” among other terms, does not justify any of their actions; this neutral terminology does not praise or condemn them. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and we recognize it as such according to §140 StGB.

Regardless of how the groups fighting the occupation in Gaza are characterized, if one understands the state of Israel as the aggressor, they can all be understood as “resistance groups“.
“Resistance” is a neutral description, not meant to glorify or vilify the character of individual groups.
Of course, simply classifying a group as “resistance group” does not make it progressive, as this classification alone says nothing about their internal character (ideology).

The inner character of a group, however, is closely linked to its external character, because the internal character justifies the external (methods, modus operandi) – and vice versa.
For example, the founding or success of Hamas in Gaza was a reaction to the inability of the PLO or Fatah to protect Gaza from Israeli settler occupation.
The perception of the PLO as too “diplomatic,” i.e., submissive, toward Israeli aggression, led to a more radical, aggressive, and inwardly reactionary faction—the Hamas.
Its success lies and has always lied in that its attributes are essentially opposite to those of the PLO; the PLO (post-2004, under Mahmoud Abbas) relies on purely diplomatic resistance, while Hamas on armed resistance; the PLO sees itself as secular, Hamas was born as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The internal attributes of Hamas, e.g., strict hierarchies, religious influence, military significance, were direct reactions to the environment in which they operated and continue to operate.
Support for religious influence, including much of the antisemitic character of some facets of Hamas, arises because Hamas uses this as a means to instrumentalize the fundamental aversion to the Israeli state (post-1948 or 1880) within the Palestinian population, which they can frame as a religious-reactionary enemy image through the religious character of the organization.

The radicalization of Palestinian resistance is a logical consequence that can be well traced historically.
The development of Hamas from a Muslim welfare organization to an armed, highly organized political and military group is directly linked to the first Intifada and the resulting differences in resistance methods between the PLO and Hamas and others.
The religious support for Hamas, according to the Marxist understanding of “Religion as the opium of the people,” is a materialist logical conclusion from the suffering of the people in Gaza, who were “fed up” with secularism and the slow diplomacy of the PLO, seeking salvation in religious-fundamentalist references.

Thus, the radicalization of resistance in Palestine, after the Palestinian Authority, especially under Mahmoud Abbas, proved to be incapable of mediating or fighting Israeli aggression, is a frequently recurring historical phenomenon.
The resistance, which is perceived as justified by the population (more or less independently of its inner character), cannot be defeated through counterattacks in the sense of conventional warfare or repression.

Example: Ireland

For example, in Ireland, the suppression of the Easter Rising of 1916, in which Irish independence fighters fought against British occupation, led to increased support for the independence movement.
Originally, the leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) planned the uprising to achieve Ireland’s independence from Britain, which was distracted by World War I.
The rebellion itself was brutal — British troops crushed the insurgents within a week, killing around 450 people, mainly Irish civilians, and parts of Dublin were heavily devastated.
Although many Irish initially viewed the uprising critically, the subsequent repression by the British, including the execution of 15 leaders and the arrest of thousands of suspects, generated a wave of sympathy and solidarity for the independence movement.

The executions and harsh British response were seen as disproportionate and contributed to increased sympathy and solidarity with the cause of independence.
As a result, support for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and political organizations like Sinn Féin grew, which later won the majority of Irish seats in the British Parliament.
This ultimately led to the Irish War of Independence, culminating in the establishment of the Irish Free State.

Resistance as Hydra

It is quite clear that the war in Gaza can never end with the “extermination of Hamas,” as Netanyahu and others advocate.
If one believes polls, support for Hamas in the West Bank has increased from twelve percent (September 2023) to “44 percent of the population” (December 2023) since the October 7, 2023.
In March of this year, 59% of people in Gaza and 64% in the West Bank supported Hamas continuing to govern Gaza after the war (PCPSR).
Currently, due to genocide, opinion polls in Gaza are unavailable, but it is clear that support for Hamas and the Al-Qassam Brigades has multiplied since October 7, 2023.

The narrative that this war is meant to “eliminate Hamas” is knowingly false — Israel knows it too.
Only through direct shelling have approximately 43,000 people in Gaza been killed, including around 13,000 children.
If you assume each of these was a son, a daughter, a father, or a mother, you just need to think one step further to realize that Hamas, as well as the general Palestinian resistance, gains two new fighters with every new death.

Particularly, a resistance that justifies its inner legitimacy primarily through the understanding of revenge for 76 years of harassment, oppression, and occupation, cannot be broken militarily.
It functions like the Hydra in the fight with Heracles; when one head is cut off, two grow back in its place.
Heracles, as is well known, defeats the Hydra by burning the severed necks, thus fighting the problem at its root.

Hamas and the other groups of Palestinian resistance are, in their nature, whether progressive or reactionary, causes of the material conditions in Gaza and the West Bank.
They are understandable and not ghostly apparitions, as portrayed by the bourgeois press, which cannot grasp their terror.

Like other resistance movements, Hamas in particular is a reaction to the negligence of the PLO under Mahmoud Abbas, i.e., the antithesis to accepting Israeli harassment, which they connect with concrete rejection of the (often) progressive values of the PLO.
Even before, at the latest since the debacle of the Oslo accords, Fatah and the PLO appeared, to many Palestinians, as neglectful regarding ongoing aggressions, including settlement building, by Israel.
Blaming the PLO for Hamas would be absurd, since the PLO itself is the cause of the division, which in turn is just the cause of U.S. capitalist aggression on the land between Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Nevertheless, to stay realistic; Hamas is not an organization that acts out of pure malice and “blind terror,” as claimed by outlets like Deutschlandfunk, NZZ, and other liberal reasoning sources.
It is clear that Hamas’s success is the dialectical development of the diplomatic failures of the Oslo agreements and the PLO, especially serving the inner logic of revenge.