Sunday, May 19, 2024

The Road to a Stateless Axis of Resistance

 

MAY 17, 2024

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“Modernity is one of the most delicate and vital issues confronting us, the people of non-European countries and Islamic Societies. A more important issue is the relationship between an imposed modernization and genuine civilization. We must discover if modernity as is claimed is a synonym for being civilized, or if it is an altogether different issue and social phenomenon having no relation to civilization at all. Unfortunately, modernity has been imposed on us, the non-European nations, in the guise of civilization.”

-Ali Shariati

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

-Michel Foucault

The American Empire has really fucked up and they have fucked up pretty predictably, in a way that so many empires before it have fucked up that it’s downright cliche. America, in its infinite exceptionalism, has bitten off way more than it can chew on the world stage and created a downright formidable alliance devoted to its destruction in the process. I speak now of the Axis of Resistance, a loosely affiliated, ragtag coalition of rogue states and militias who, after decades of crushing western Frankenstein monsters like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, have finally trained their sites on America’s original Middle Eastern terrorists in Israel. At first glimpse it may appear that Babylon and their Zionist proxies are winning this war, what with the mountain of dead children reaching the clouds above Gaza, but I implore you to look again.

While Israel horrifies a world with too many smartphones to ignore the Nakba anymore, Houthi rebels have launched over 60 attacks against imperial shipping in the Red Sea, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq has launched over 150 airstrikes against American bases across the Middle East, Hezbollah has made the northern region of Israel virtually uninhabitable with their own artillery barrage, and Iran has joined the melee by throwing over 300 rockets and drones into Israel’s Iron Dome, all while all of the above remain under heavy sanctions and military siege by the United States and its western partners.

The material results of this unprecedented onslaught are far less relevant than the propaganda that these deeds has delivered to a watching world and that propaganda tells us all that the power of the American Empire is worthless in the face of a few pissed off peasants with homemade drones and nothing left to lose. And while these renegades rage, those of us in the west who have stumbled over our conscience in the coverage of the slaughter in Gaza rage with them, creating the most formidable antiwar movement any empire has seen in decades.

Even if Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden manage to succeed in ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, the damage to American prestige and its malignant influence over the Islamic world may be irreversible. Israel, Babylon’s bloody jewel in the desert, could very well become Uncle Sam’s Waterloo and it won’t be China or Russia dancing over his grave either. Those overworked wannabe superpowers are far too busy policing their own increasingly rambunctious and ungovernably massive populations.

No, the true victors of this third-world third world war will be the militias, modern day reflections of the ancient tribes that once roamed these deserts freely before some WASP in beige short pants drew a bunch of lines all over them. We really should have seen this coming. Even before America gave those militias a crash course in three-dimensional warfare with the War on Terror, all the pieces of this set match were already firmly in place, but somehow Michel Foucault seemed to be the only white man who knew the chessboard.

You see, Iran is not the primary source of the Axis of Resistance’s momentum. If that were true, their own republic wouldn’t be as corrupt and toothless as any of their neighbors. While Iran has actually done very little in response to Israel’s mounting atrocities, the Shia militias who are supposedly their proxies have set a thousand raging dumpster fires across the region, often while the Mullahs begged them to tone it down. That’s because the Houthis and the Popular Mobilization Forces don’t actually answer to Iran.

They answer to the Islamic Revolution, a popular uprising against a wealthy and decadent western monarchy that succeeded with zero backing from any foreign world power thanks to an eclectic united front of young anti-imperialists galvanized against the spiritual emptiness of the colonial Enlightenment. This was the original Axis of Resistance, a weird coalition of communist college students and Shia clerics who looked not to Moscow or Beijing for influence, but inward towards their region’s own tribal traditions that strove for solidarity through diversity.

Tehran was never meant to be the final destination of this strangely old revolution. The more radical founding fathers of the Iranian Islamic Guards like the Fatah-trained Mohammad Montazeri and the Fidel Castro influenced Mostafa Chamran strove to form an “Islamic International” against capitalism, Zionism, and Wahabism, drawing on Ali Shariati and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s notion of the “solidarity of the oppressed.”

But an impoverished nation like Iran, crippled by mounting international sanctions and sabotage, never would have been able to sustain this wild dream without the help of a meddlesome American empire constantly crashing into their backyard and changing the property lines. There would be no Sadrists without Saddam Hussein’s American backed rampage against the Shia tribesmen of modern Mesopotamia. There would be no Hezbollah without the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon. There would be no Islamic Resistance in Iraq without the War on Terror.

And as this Axis of Resistance to western imperial chaos stretched and grew increasingly diverse, the Iranian government’s influence over its actions and ambitions began to wane. The Sadrists lashed out openly against the Mullahs’ influence over Bagdad, the Houthi rebels overthrew a dictatorship that Tehran still wanted to groom in Sanaa, and Hezbollah refused to bow to the Mullahs’ corrupt quislings in Beirut.

The Axis of Resistance may not be a traditionally anarchist arrangement, it has always been an uneasy alliance of rogue states like Iran and Syria and non-state actors like the Houthis and Hezbollah, but the fascinating thing about this arrangement is that the longer the American war machine overstays its welcome in the region, the more rogue these non-state actors seem to become, to the point where the supposed proxies are beginning to overpower the influence of their funders back in Tehran.

Both Hezbollah and the Sadrists have formed fully functioning parallel governments to the states that Iran props up within their nation’s borders and the populations that they serve have rallied around these stateless alternatives to central governance, forming thriving, diverse, and autonomous communities while the states they reject rot. This same strategy of crowdsourced Islamic rebellion has proven equally successful in the new war on Zionist terrorism as well. Poorly armed militias from Hodeida to Fallujah have gone rogue to cripple international maritime trade and pin down illegal American troop movements while Washington fails miserably to stop them. Just look to the Red Sea if you don’t believe men.

After bombing Houthi targets in Yemen over 148 times since January, Joe Biden has thrown up his hands and openly admitted defeat. Tim Lenderking, Biden’s special envoy to Yemen, announced in early April that the administration was open to “diplomatic solutions” including ending certain sanctions and recognizing the legitimacy of the Houthi government. The Houthis thought about it for a couple of weeks and then started shooting again, even expanding their targets to the Indian Ocean while informing condescending jackals like Biden and Lenderking that they weren’t interested in engaging their humanitarian blackmail.

Western anti-imperialists can learn a lot from this Axis of Resistance and at the risk of once again being declared a heretic by my fellow anarchists, maybe we should even consider swallowing our ideological puritan pride and fucking join them. After all, wasn’t it a broad and diverse coalition of third world states and first world stateless actors that nearly turned the movement against the Vietnam War into an international revolution? You will never defeat a massive conglomerate of oppression like the American Empire with a single ideology. Foucault, himself a proudly decadent Queer anarchist heretic, recognized this fact and was roundly ridiculed by his fellow comrades on the left for suggesting that Islam could be a viable force against imperialism that should be taken seriously. But shouldn’t it be?

What we really need now is to make the Axis of Resistance increasingly stateless by increasing the involvement of a diverse array of stateless actors across the globe, from street fighting anarchists like antifa and the black blocks to modern day militias like the Boogaloo Boys and Black Guns Matter. From third world liberation movements like the EZLN and the YPG to first world black market entrepreneurs like the Hell’s Angels and the Latin Kings.

The dream is not simply to create a stateless international coalition against empire, but to create a thousand stateless tribes that can peacefully coexist with radically divergent neighbors regardless of the empire’s existence. Once we render this superpower and all superpowers irrelevant, ending their reign of terror will be as simple as blowing them away like the dead seeds of a dandelion. And the Mullahs will evaporate into the ether right along with them.

35,000 dead Gazans is enough. It’s time for the stateless left in the west to step down from their soapboxes and look east again for inspiration. Let’s end this Nakba and the next one by smashing the state that subsists on such carnage once and for all and let’s make weird and dangerous friends doing it.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.


LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: State-less Socialism 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for ARAB ANARCHISM 

Israel seeks bipartisan US support against establishment of a Palestinian state

Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz says the US must lead a resolution at the International Energy Agency’s council next month to promote further sanctions against Iran.

MAY 20, 2024

JERUSALEM - Israel on May 19 called for bipartisan support from the United States against the establishment of a Palestinian state, which it said would be a reward for Hamas and its backer, Iran.

European Union members including Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and Malta have said they could recognise a Palestinian state this month, seeing a two-state solution as essential for lasting peace.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, who met top House Republican Elise Stefanik earlier, said if a Palestinian state was established, Iran would use it as a base to “work towards the destruction of Israel”.

He told Mr Stefanik the US must lead a resolution at the International Energy Agency’s council next month to promote further sanctions against Iran to stop it obtaining nuclear weapons and supporting groups like Hamas.

Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons.

Mr Stefanik has played a key role in trying to stem the protests that have broken out across US college campuses against Israel’s war in Gaza and in support of Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

The Gaza war broke out after Hamas launched a cross border assault on Israel on Oct 7, killing 1,200 people and taking 253 hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, at least 35,386 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health ministry. 

REUTERS



The Ideological Coup: How Disciples


 of Kahane Became the New Face of Israel  

 

MAY 17, 2024
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Image by Levi Meir Clancy.

Throughout history, fringe religious Zionist parties have had limited success in achieving the kind of electoral victories that would allow them an actual share in the country’s political decision-making.

The impressive number of 17 seats won by Israel’s extremist religious party, Shas, in the 1999 elections, was a watershed moment in the history of these parties, whose ideological roots go back to Avraham Itzhak Kook and his son Zvi Yehuda Hacohen.

Israeli historian Ilan PappĂ© referred to the Kooks’ ideological influence as a “fusion of dogmatic messianism and violence”.

Throughout the years, these religious parties struggled on several fronts: their inability to unify their ranks, their failure to appeal to mainstream Israeli society and their inability to strike the balance between their messianic political discourse and the kind of language – not necessarily behavior – that Israel’s western allies expect.

Though much of the financial support and political backing of Israel’s extremists originate in the United States and, to a lesser extent, other European countries, Washington has been clear regarding its public perception of Israel’s religious extremists.

In 2004, the United States banned the Kach party, which could be seen as the modern manifestation of the Kooks and Israel’s early religious Zionist ideologues.

The founder of the group, Meir Kahane was, in fact, assassinated in November 1990 while the extremist rabbi – responsible for much violence against innocent Palestinians throughout the years – was giving another hate-filled speech in Manhattan.

Kahane’s death was only the start of much violence meted out by his followers, lead among them an American doctor, Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down on February 25, 1994, dozens of Palestinian Muslim worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers while protesting the massacre was nearly as many as those killed by Goldstein earlier in the day, a tragic but a perfect representation of the relationship between the Israeli state and the violent settlers who operate as part of a larger state agenda.

That massacre was a watershed moment in the history of religious Zionism. Instead of serving as an opportunity to marginalize their growing influence, by the supposedly more liberal Zionists, they grew in power and, ultimately, political influence within the Israeli state.

Goldstein himself became a hero, whose grave, in Israel’s most extremist illegal settlement in the West Bank, Kiryat Arba, is now a popular shrine, a place of pilgrimage for thousands of Israelis.

Particularly telling is that Goldstein’s shrine has been built opposite Meir Kahane’s Memorial Park, which is indicative of the clear ideological connections between these individuals, groups, and also funders.

In recent years, however, the traditional role played by Israel’s religious Zionists began to shift, leading to the election of Itamar Ben-Gvir to the Israeli Knesset in 2021 and, ultimately, to his role as the country’s National Security Minister in December 2022.

Ben-Gvir is a follower of Kahane. “It seems to me that ultimately Rabbi Kahane was about love. Love for Israel without compromise, without any other consideration,” he said in November 2022.

But, unlike Kahane, Ben-Gvir was not satisfied with the role of religious Zionists as cheerleaders for the settlement movement, almost daily raids of Al-Aqsa and the occasional attacks on Palestinians. He wanted to be at the center of Israeli political power.

Whether Ben-Gvir achieved his status as a direct result of the successful grassroots work of religious Zionism, or because the political circumstances of Israel itself have changed in his favor, is an interesting debate.

The truth, however, might be somewhere in the middle. The historic failure of Israel’s so-called political left – namely the Labor Party – has, in recent years, propelled a relatively unfamiliar phenomenon – the political center.

Meanwhile, Israel’s traditional right, the Likud party, grew weaker, partly because it failed to appeal to the growing, more youthful religious Zionism constituency, and also because of the series of splits, which occurred as a result of Ariel Sharon’s breaking-up of the party in and the founding of Kadima in 2005 – a party which has been long disbanded.

To survive, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has redefined his party to its most extremist version of all time and, thus, began to attract religious Zionists with the hope of filling the gaps created because of internal infighting within the Likud.

By doing so, Netanyahu has granted religious Zionists the opportunity of a lifetime.

Soon, following the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation, and in the early days of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Ben-Gvir launched his National Guard, a group which he tried, but failed, to compose prior to the war.

Thanks to Ben-Gvir, Israel, now, per the words of opposition leader Yair, has become a country with a “private militia”.

By March 19, Ben-Gvir announced that 100,000 gun permits had been handed over to his supporters. It is within this period that the US began imposing ‘sanctions’ on a few individuals affiliated with Israel’s settler extremist movement, a small slap on the wrist considering the massive damage that has already been done and the great violence that is likely to follow in the coming months and years.

Unlike Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir’s thinking is not limited to his desire to reach a specific position within the government. Israel’s religious extremists are seeking a fundamental and irreversible shift in Israeli politics.

The relatively recent push to change the relationship between the judicial and exclusive branches of government was as important to those extremists as it was to Netanyahu himself. The latter, however, has championed such an initiative to shield himself against legal accountability, while Ben-Gvir’s supporters have a different reason in mind: they want to be able to dominate the government and the military, with no accountability or oversight.

Israel’s religious Zionists are playing a long game, which is not linked to a particular election, individual or government coalition. They are redefining the state, along with its ideology. And they are winning.

It goes without saying that Ben-Gvir, and his threats to topple Netanyahu’s coalition government, have been the main driving force behind the genocide in Gaza.

If Meir Kahane was still alive, he would have been proud of his followers. The ideology of the once marginalized and loathed extremist rabbi is now the backbone of Israeli politics.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net