The Kebra Negast

In the 14th century, the ideological foundation for Ethiopia was written. This text, borne in the ancient clerical language of Ge’ez, was known as the Kebra Negast, or the Glory of Kings. This 900-page epic framed “Ethiopia” not simply as the highlands of Abyssinia but as the biblical and universal land of Cush. This was an ideological construct, an Ethiopian Zionism, that would be wielded to justify imperialist claims over the entire Horn of Africa. The Kebra Negast became the pillar of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and the Solomonic Dynasty that reigned from 1270 AD through 1974, facilitated the fusion of church and state, and most notably, served as the basis for Abyssinia’s European-backed crusades at the end of the 19th century that would lead to the formation of modern Ethiopia as a prison house of nations.

The Kebra Negast, in essence, named the leaders of “Ethiopia” as the direct descendants of the biblical Ancient Israel. It appropriated the name Ethiopia from the Bible’s Psalm 68:31, which proclaimed that “princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” 

As the epic is told, on a delegation to Israel, the Queen of Sheba (of “Ethiopia”) was wooed by King Solomon of Israel, and they had a night of passion. Back in Ethiopia, she had his child. She named that child Menelik, and when he grew up, Menelik traveled to Jerusalem to meet his father, Solomon. Solomon then recognized Menelik as his favorite child and tried to convince him to stay to be his heir. Menelik refused, opting instead to return to his mother. Resigned, Solomon sent Menelik away with a large company, including the first-born sons of his nobles and a congregation of Hebrew priests. Resentful that they were forced to leave Jerusalem, the priests smuggled with them the Ark of the Covenant, a gold chest that bore the very tablets that God himself inscribed the Ten Commandments in. When Solomon discovered the theft, he attempted to pursue them, but the ark’s divine power miraculously flew Menelik and his entire party to Ethiopia unscathed.

According to the legend, since then, the ark has been held in the Cathedral of St. Mary of Zion in Axum, located in modern Ethiopia’s northern Tigray province. Today, a constant stream of the devout huddle in the cathedral or congregate outside to bask in its glow. However, nobody besides the Guardian Monk (the highest ranking priest tasked with watching the ark for life) is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies where the ark is housed. All others, according to the Hebrew Bible, are strictly forbidden from looking at the ark lest they be struck dead by God.¹ Ethiopian Orthodox churches across Ethiopia and throughout the world are constructed as models of Solomon’s temple and contain within them symbolic replicas of the ark.  

Thus, Ethiopia’s mythical relationship to Ancient Israel is consecrated through Menelik I, the Ark of the Covenant, its Orthodox churches made in the image of Solomon’s temple with replicas of the ark, and the distinctive Hebrew traditions, practices, and language imbued within Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity itself.

The story of the Kebra Negast, placed alongside an excerpt from the Jewish text Midrash Tanchuma, shows clearly how Ethiopia as the holder of the ark meant it could best Ancient Israel and situate itself at the center of the universe:

As the navel is set in the center of the human body, so is the land of Israel the navel of the world; it is situated in the center of the world, and Jerusalem in the center of the land of Israel, and the Temple in the center of Jerusalem, and the Holy of Holies in the center of the Temple, and the Ark in the center of the Holy of Holies, and the foundation stone before the Holy of Holies, because from it the world was founded.²

Wielding the Kebra Negast

In the centuries following the Kebra Negast’s completion, the Abyssinian aristocracy, priests, and nuns acted as if they were descendants of the Ancient Israelites. Kings and emperors viewed themselves as Kings of Zion and they invoked Solomonic descent through their names and titles. Zara Yaqob of the 15th century wrote theological treatises that framed Ethiopia as the Ark’s resting place. Emperor Yitzhak (Isaac), took his name from the Hebrew Bible’s Isaac, a founding figure of Judaism. And centuries later, there was Menelik II, the emperor that carried out the European-backed crusades against the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other nations at the end of the 19th century to establish the foundation of modern Ethiopia. 

The significance of Menelik II’s name was that, while wiping out the people in the south and east,³ sending Black Abyssinian settlers from the north into their lands to enslave them,⁴ carving out his gains alongside the European powers in the Berlin Conference,⁵ and mass–converting the survivors from their Indigenous religions and Islam to Orthodox Christianity,⁶ he was legitimizing his claim as the direct descendant of Menelik I, the prized child of King Solomon of Ancient Israel. Thus, contemporary with the genocide of Palestinians and occupation of Palestine by Jewish Political Zionism was the genocide and occupation of the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other nations by Ethiopian Zionism.⁷

The Ethiopian Jews

All of this is to say nothing of the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews who reside near Gondar in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara province. The Beta Israel are both a source of legitimacy to Ethiopia’s claims to descent from Ancient Israel and a source of revulsion, given that Jews are viewed by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians as the betrayers of Christ.

To the Ethiopian Zionists, possession of the Ark, the Beta Israel’s habitation in Ethiopia, and the existence of Ethiopia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity is proof that the Jews of Ancient Israel were “restored” and perfected through their religion. In contrast to European Christian Zionists who played a crucial role in establishing ‘israel’ in Palestine (such as Arthur Balfour and Reverend William Hechler), who believed the world’s Jews must return to Palestine to eventually convert to Christianity and usher in the second coming of Christ, Ethiopian Zionism already proclaims itself the final, perfected version of Israel. Zion, not in waiting, but already fulfilled.

As the Kebra Negast reads:

The daughters of Jerusalem suffered disgrace, and the daughters of Ethiopia were held in honour; the daughter of Judah was sad, whilst the daughter of Ethiopia rejoiced; the mountains of Ethiopia rejoiced, and the mountains of Lebanon mourned. The people of Ethiopia were chosen [from] among idols and graven images, and the people of Israel were rejected. The daughters of Zion were rejected, and the daughters of Ethiopia were honoured; the old men of Israel became objects of contempt, and the old men of Ethiopia were honoured. For God accepted the peoples who had been cast away and rejected Israel, for Zion was taken away from them and she came into the country of Ethiopia.⁸

The Beta Israel endured brutal conditions in Ethiopia. Many of them looked to the Yishuv (early Jewish settlements in Palestine) and later, the newly emerging ‘israel.’ Over time, they saw it as their promised land and in small pockets began to “make Aliyah” — to flock there — undermining Ethiopian Zionism’s narrative of the perfected Zionist entity and bolstering israel’s claims to embodying Eretz Israel, the land of return for the world’s Jews. Given the Beta Israel were considered the world’s oldest practitioners of Judaism, their allegiance lent gravity to whoever could win it.

In fact, on his first visit to Jerusalem in 1924, Haile Selassie (at the time known as the Crown Prince Tafari Mekonnen under Empress Zewditu) rebuffed an inquiry by the Chief Rabbinate of the Yishuv into improving the lot of the Beta Israel. “The history of the Ethiopians and Israelites indicates that these two nations are similar in race… in regard to the Jews known as [Beta Israel] and located in Ethiopia, we will always try to give them our help and protect them from every evil,” he replied.⁹ Holding fast to its Zionist claims, for many more decades, Ethiopia would refuse to give its stately blessing for Beta Israel migration despite ongoing israeli pressure.

Simultaneous Crisis Draws Together the Twin Zions

In October 1935, the Italians unleashed a full-scale attack on Ethiopia as a prelude to World War II. Oromos, who since the era of Menelik bore a deep resentment for Abyssinian rule, seized the moment to reclaim their lost freedom. In 1935, the Raya and Azebo Oromos attacked the Abyssinian armies traveling to and from the Battle of Maichew. In 1936, the Oromo of Jimma attacked and expelled Amhara officials and thereby demonstrated their rejection of colonial rule. In western Abyssinia, the hereditary rulers of the Oromo declared their independence and formed the Western Oromo Confederation (WOC), offering themselves as a mandate territory of the League of Nations.¹⁰

The same year the WOC was formed, Emperor Haile Selassie, by then known as the “Lion of Judah,” fled Ethiopia, avoiding Raya and Azebo Oromo land as he left. In his crisis, the first place he went was to Jerusalem. He arrived just as the Palestinians had initiated their general strike and began their armed struggle in what would be known as the Arab Revolt.¹¹ Selassie, who only years prior had codified in the 1931 Ethiopian Constitution his descent from Solomon and Sheba,¹² arrived to a wave of sympathy from the Zionist press.¹³

The struggle of the Oromo and Palestinians had created their respective antagonists’ crises and made their need for unity apparent. Even then, Selassie still held fast to Ethiopia’s ancient claims to the Beta Israel and Judaism while casting the Yishuv as simply a nascent phenomenon. In a prepared speech to the Hebrew press, he asserted:

I visited the Land of Israel in 1924, and I find that there is great progress in this country. I know that the Jews are quiet people and dedicated to peace. Of course it is also known to you that in Ethiopia there are Jews of an ancient race who live in complete harmony with all others. They preserve their religious traditions and no one hinders them. Please know that we appreciate the support that the Jewish people have expressed for Ethiopia, and we hope that the Jewish press will continue to support us.¹⁴

Of course, such struggle between Zionisms coexisted with a necessary unity imposed by heightening struggle from without. David Ben-Gurion, later the first prime minister of israel, recognized that the crisis in Ethiopia was also a crisis for the Zionists in occupied Palestine:“We knew that what is going on in the world has an impact on what we do in the Land of Israel. That beginning of the crisis should be seen not as April 19th [the outbreak of the Arab Revolt], but in what happened a few months earlier in Ethiopia.”¹⁵ 

A resolution was worked out. Orde Wingate, the same Christian Zionist British captain who formed the Haganah (the precursor to the israel Defense Forces) that crushed the Arab Revolt, a hero to the architects of the Palestinian Nakba,¹⁶ would enter Ethiopia in 1940 to lead the force that defeated the Italians and restored Selassie to the throne.¹⁷  In Wingate’s own words, it was “for the sake of Zion.”¹⁸

The Beta Israel Exchange

Decades later, when the military government that deposed Selassie had its back to the wall, owing to the national liberation struggles of the Eritreans, the Oromo, the Somali, and the Tigray nations, Ethiopia would begrudgingly use the Beta Israel as a bargaining chip. So long as it was done in secret, to avoid tarnishing Ethiopia’s Zionist claims and undermining its credibility to the oppressed world that had taken up anti-Zionism, israel could receive loyal new Black Jewish settlers, who themselves gained in escaping their oppression in Ethiopia. In the act itself, Ethiopia laundered the racial cover it received on the world stage to israel — and conveniently at a time when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had made inroads into Black Amerika¹⁹ and israel faced the wrath of the world for its support of apartheid South Africa. The Beta Israel then settled Palestinian lands, filled the ranks of the occupation army, and took up highly visible political and cultural posts. In return, Ethiopia received weaponry, security expertise, and economic aid to crush the rebellion of the oppressed nations within itself.

Ironically, the brutal, racist israeli state would come to treat the Beta Israel just as poorly as the Ethiopians did. Given that many of the Beta Israel fled persecution to a promised land, they were unquestionably loyal to the israeli Zionist cause. It meant that, even if most of them would come to face abject conditions — from forced sterilizations, to staggering poverty, and rampant police killings — their propensity for revolt was quite low. Thus, while Ethiopia could acquire from israel the means to extinguish the oppressed — primarily the Oromo — the Beta Israel were a useful dumping ground for antagonisms borne from the struggle of the oppressed — particularly the Palestinians. In this regard, the two entities quite literally reinforced each other.

Tewodros’ ambition

The Deir-al-Sultan Monastery

Though Abyssinia (the northern entity that preceded modern Ethiopia) had all the makings of Zion, the one thing it lacked was direct control over the holy city of Jerusalem, which it claimed descent from. Since Christianity was embraced in Abyssinia as early as the 4th century, Jerusalem held a special place in Abyssinian culture, with monks and pilgrims flocking to the city and dwelling there. In the late 12th century, King Lalibela built his own version of Jerusalem in his capital of Roha. Exchange flourished for centuries until Abyssinia’s decline upon defeat by Ahmad Gragn of the east, who occupied its highlands beginning in 1527, as well as the rise of Ottoman rule in Palestine. In this period, Abyssinian presence in Jerusalem became reduced to one monastery known as the Deir-al-Sultan.

The Deir-al-Sultan sits on the roof of the Chapel of Saint Helena that was part of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City. For some time, Abyssinia’s claim to the Deir-al-Sultan served as a powerful symbol of its historic ties to the city. However, in 1838, a plague wiped out its monks, and with permission from the Armenian Patriarchate, the Egyptian Coptic monks in the neighboring monasteries moved in and laid claim to the Deir-al-Sultan.²⁰ Three years later, a new group of Abyssinian monks arrived and accused the Copts of unfairly seizing the site. This marked the beginning of a long-term conflict.

The Rise and Fall of Tewodros II

In this period, a man by the name of Kassa rose to power, inheriting a weak, divided Abyssinia. An ancient prophecy, known as Fekkare Iyasus (The Explanation of Jesus) foretold that a king named Tewodros would save Ethiopia from destruction and rule for around 40 years.²¹ Kassa harkened back to this prophecy and took the name of Emperor Tewodros II.

Upon taking power, Tewodros II wielded this divine mission to grease the wheels of his imperial ambitions. He revived vigor around the Kebra Negast and sought to reclaim the Deir-al-Sultan, on which the Ottoman Turks sided with the Egyptians.²² This was considered a great humiliation and drove Tewodros II’s burning desire to take Jerusalem by force.²³ While ensnared in war on all fronts, in October 1862, he sought sympathy from Queen Victoria as a fellow Christian monarch and a self-professed descendant of Ancient Israel and wrote to her:

Since my ancestors, the kings, have until now offended our creator. He had handed their kingdom over to the [Oromo] and the Turks. But now, ever since I was born my Creator has raised me from the dust and given me power and placed me over the kingdom of my ancestors. By the power of God, I have dislodged the [Oromo]. But when I told the Turks to relinquish the soil of my fathers they refused; and so, by the power of God, here I am about to struggle against them.²⁴

Before Tewodros II could even dream of Jerusalem, he faced many obstacles, including Oromo militias in Wollo, rebellious nobles in Tigray, Egyptian pressure from Sudan, and Ottoman expansion along the Red Sea coast. He could not defeat them all. In fact, the Foreign Office in London failed to even pass the letter to the Queen,²⁵ given it sought appeasement with the Ottomans who occupied Jerusalem. Evidently, Tewodros II was not an ally but a nuisance. As a last ditch effort, Tewodros imprisoned missionaries and representatives of the British government. In response, a British expedition led by General Richard Napier faced Tewodros II in the Battle of Magdala in 1868. The British defeated his forces and freed the hostages. Rather than surrender, Tewodros II committed suicide, ironically with a pistol gifted to him by Victoria.²⁶ His dream was to remain unrealized.  

In Lieu of Conquest

Licking their wounds, subsequent emperors and rulers would have to abandon direct conquest of Jerusalem and opted instead to shore up Abyssinian presence elsewhere in Jerusalem to lend credence to its claims of having direct, holy ties to the city. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Abyssinians acquired houses and lands in west Jerusalem. Meanwhile, a succession of emperors built Solomonic churches and monasteries, such as the Debre Genet monastery, and many other buildings. By 1905, the Ottoman authorities designated this part of Jerusalem as Haret al-Habash, what is known today as the Ethiopian compound centered on Ethiopia Street, a lasting imprint of Ethiopian Zionist claims to descent from Jerusalem.

The fate of Deir al-Sultan’s keys remained in flux for another century after Tewodros II’s death. Diplomatic struggle over the monastery occurred throughout, including on Selassie’s 1924 tour when in Cairo he submitted a request for the keys directly to the highest level of the Coptic Church and the Egyptian Prime Minister.²⁷ Of course, he was resoundingly rejected and would not see success until the later period of his reign. In the meantime, he sought conciliatory measures, such as an arrangement with the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem where he acquired a room in the monastery of Abraham which was connected by a door to the Deir-al-Sultan — among other backroom deals.²⁸ These were, of course, token arrangements.

The Forging of Twin Struggles, 1960s-1970s

The Naksa

Palestine and Oromia would see a new period of converging struggle. At the end of 1964, the Palestinian national liberation movement’s Fateh began launching guerrilla offensives against israel under the front organization Al-Asifa. Al-Asifa’s first communique proclaimed:

From our people, steadfast to the limit, and from the conscience of our battling homeland, our revolutionary vanguards burst out, believing in the armed revolution as the way to Return and to Liberty, in order to stress to the colonialists and their henchmen, and to world Zionism and its financiers, that the Palestinian people remains in the field; that it has not died and will not die.²⁹

In this mounting struggle, israel retaliated against the guerillas and neighboring Arab states. Syria and Jordan especially were caught in the middle and vacillated between supporting the Palestinians and fighting against them. This escalated into the Six Day War in 1967 and culminated in the Naksa — the day of setback. Here, israel, in conventional warfare, defeated Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq in six days. It captured the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Sinai. Up to 325,000 Palestinians were displaced. Though 1967 was a setback, it opened the way for the Palestinian guerillas to take leadership of their own struggle and break away from the humiliated Arab armies.

Macha-Tulama and Bale

Along with the Palestinians, Oromos had their own developments in the 1960s. In 1963, Oromo intellectuals, army officers, soldiers, students, and merchants used a loophole in Ethiopian law to form the Macha-Tulama Self-Help Association. In its constitution, the Association established two objectives: First, to establish schools, health clinics, and roads in Oromia where they were needed. Second, to build churches and mosques while provisioning financial and legal assistance for disabled and unemployed people.³⁰ In essence, “the first set of objectives aimed to improve the welfare of the Oromo nation; the second sought to mobilize the Oromo people toward a common goal by undermining the colonial policy of divide and rule based on religion, class, and region.”³¹ The Association achieved such widespread popularity that within three years, membership reached more than two million.³² It was effectively operating as “a government within a government.”³³ And among its membership were not just Oromos but were 26 leaders from other colonized nations brought to heel under Menelik II, including the Afars, Sidamas, and Walayitas.³⁴

During this time period, Oromo peasants in eastern Bale began a massive armed rebellion against land alienation, heavy taxation, maladministration, and Ethiopian occupation as embodied in the presence of Amhara landlords. In the rebellion, the movement’s leaders united the Oromo with Somalis under the banner of Islam to fight the Ethiopian state. Together, they mounted decimating attacks on landlords concentrated in the local towns.³⁵ The landlords were no match for the peasants, who used guerrilla tactics and at one point held 75% of the Bale region while encircling the provincial capital of Goba.³⁶

The two movements in Bale and Macha-Tulama weren’t only simultaneous, but actively linked up and coordinated with each other. Ahmed Buna, a schoolteacher and member of the Association who would go on to co-found the Marxist Oromo Liberation Front, smuggled the leaders of the Bale armed resistance to Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) in 1965. While there, the leaders discussed how best to coordinate their activities. Mamo Mazamir, one of the revolutionary members of Macha-Tulama involved in the discussions, lucidly analyzed the Oromo struggle and pledged solidarity with the rebels of Bale:

The history of mankind shows that a people who rise in the struggle for freedom and independence, in defiance of death, are always victorious. The life and death struggle of the oppressed masses in the Ethiopian Empire against the hegemony of the Amhara and their allies headed by American imperialism is a sacred liberation struggle of millions of oppressed and humiliated people. That struggle will surely intensify in the course of time, as the oppressed peoples organizational means and consciousness become deeply rooted. As learnt in discussions, the Macha and Tulama democratic movement, which was created to raise the consciousness of the Oromo people is in the present situation working day and night to put in hand coordination activities that are within our reach. In fact, the militant members are working now on the means of organizing a nationwide people’s movement which is based on realizing the aspirations of Oromo people. Please, keep up your heroic armed struggle, defending every inch of the Oromo nation to the last drop of your blood. The decisive war of resistance you are conducting in Bale will, despite the maneuvers of imperialism, Zionism and local reaction, be victorious. We shall continue doing everything we can to keep in touch with you.³⁷

The communique from Al-Asifa and these words from Mazamir demonstrate that the Oromos and Palestinians were two fronts of the same struggle. They were both conscious of themselves as nations with a right to self-determination and they knew that their enemy was imperialism and Zionism. And in the exact same moment, the two fronts were unleashing a struggle to the death to liberate themselves from Zionist imperialist oppression.

Eventually, Ethiopia, whose intelligence by that point, according to an israeli historian, was “literally run” by israel,³⁸ were able to crush the Macha-Tulama movement by framing, torturing, and killing its leaders.³⁹ With the help of the israeli counter-insurgency and Anglo-American demolitions experts, it defeated the Bale Revolt,⁴⁰ and left over 700,000 dead.⁴¹ From this defeat, the Oromo peasantry suffered; 36.5% of the administrated land in the district where the rebellion emerged was confiscated by 1968. By 1970, the leaders of the Bale Revolt negotiated amnesty for themselves and ended the revolt.⁴²

A Resolution Between the Twin Zions

That same year, the israeli government, newly bolstered by its spoils from the 1967 war, marched in, changed the locks of Deir-al-Sultan, expelled the Coptic monks, and handed the keys to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, even defying a ruling by the israeli Supreme Court to return the key to the Egyptians.⁴³ That lock-changing marked a resolution in Ethiopia’s century-long pursuit of the Deir-al-Sultan key that spanned multiple emperors and rulers. And by doing so, the two powers did not just merely resolve a monastic dispute, but through defeat of Palestinian and Oromo resistance movements, and the conquest of their respective lands, consecrated formal unity between the Ethiopian myth of Solomonic descent and the israeli Zionist myth of Jewish return.

Of course, the driving force of their convergence was not conspiracy, but the struggle of the Oromo and Palestinians that drew them together. The two entities were forced to an agreement that could accommodate both Zionisms, a necessary qualitative leap in unity between the two oppressors.

Meanwhile, capturing Jerusalem brought sheer ecstasy for the israeli Zionist project and gave it a base to further expand its territorial ambitions. In Ethiopia, the access to the Deir-al-Sultan similarly brought celebration and helped cement its spiritual claims to Ancient Israeli descent. With this arrangement, when israel strengthened, it could only legitimize Ethiopia more. It was in Ethiopia and israel’s utmost interest to band together to crush the Oromo and Palestinians.

In the diplomatic realm, such mutual interests of Ethiopia and israel were referenced through incessant overtures to an “ancient” relationship stretching back to Biblical times.

The Birth of the Oromo Liberation Struggle and Contact with Palestine

The embryo of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) was within the Macha-Tulama movement. Its primary founder, Baro Tumsa, became an active member of the association as a student, where he served as a legal advisor while also coordinating the youth wing.⁴⁴ Goaded on by the government’s escalating violent suppression of the Macha-Tulama movement, Baro and his comrades formed clandestine study circles while secretly distributing propaganda.⁴⁵ They established relationships across Oromo society within and without Oromia, including with Oromo students at Haile Selassie University who played a central role in the student movement that toppled the emperor in 1974.⁴⁶ Similarly, they established relations with other colonized nations, such as the Sidama and Afar, and other liberation fronts, such as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF).⁴⁷

At the same time, Oromo revolutionary Elemo Qilxu, who was living in Aden, Yemen, established relationships with the Yemeni, Syrian, and Iraqi governments, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF).⁴⁸ Other Oromos received military training in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iraq, and Syria. They opened offices in several Southwest Asian and North African countries already aiding Palestine, most notably in Damascus and Beirut.⁴⁹ In 1969, Abbaa Gadaa Jaarraa and others went to Iraq to receive guerrilla training for seven months.⁵⁰ Then, on their journey to Hararghe in East Oromia, Jaarraa and 38 other fighters were captured, disarmed, and imprisoned by the Somali government for five years.⁵¹

In 1972, Baro sent Getachew Baissa, Mitiku Terfassa, and Yusuf Bakar through Somalia to receive military training in Vietnam, the DPRK, China, and throughout SWANA where they learned from Palestinians. The Somali government, then led by Siad Barre, which at the time possessed its own Pan-Somali ambitions in reuniting Ethiopia’s Ogaden region and East Oromia with itself, refused to help the three. Only Bakar was able to make it to Yemen, while Getachew and Mitiku returned to Oromia.⁵² Years later in 1975, Baro sent a second delegation of six Oromo university students to Somalia to receive training and secure support for the Oromo national movement. These were Muhee Abdo, Aboma Mitiku, Demisse Techane, Zakariyas Hassan, Hashim Gobana, and Mohammed Ibrahim Khalil. The Somali government rebuffed them and advised them to go to Aden to work with Bakar. [53]

Unperturbed by the Somali government’s arrest of Jaaraa, Elemo persisted on, traveling to Finfinnee to link up with the emerging Oromo political group led by Baro Tumsa, which formed the central coordinating body of the OLF in 1974.⁵³ From there, Elemo moved east to begin the armed struggle against settler colonialists between 1973 and 1974. In these early battles, Elemo and five others were killed, causing the group to disband. But, not before they killed or wounded several enemies.⁵⁴ Out of this early armed struggle, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) was formed.⁵⁵

In 1974, the Ethiopian emperor Selassie fell to a tidal wave of discontent. In the power vacuum, the Derg military government seized control, while two Ethiopian political parties, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON) and Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), contended with the burgeoning Oromo national movement. And though they called themselves socialists, what they both had in common was their rejection of the Oromo right to self-determination, decolonization, and the Oromo colonial thesis that stated that Ethiopia colonized the Oromo with the help of European imperialism, and imprisoned the Oromo and other nations during the Scramble for Africa.⁵⁶

While the OLF considered that the colonial question was principal, requiring either full separation of Oromia from Ethiopia or the establishment of a democratic multi-national federation or confederation, the Ethiopian socialist parties liquidated the Oromo question into a larger class question. They simply treated the Oromo land question as indistinguishable from the feudal question without the need for political self-determination for the historically oppressed Oromo nation. Given that many Oromo students and intellectuals were either thoroughly imbued with Ethiopianist ideology, or themselves possessed their own personal interests intertwined with Ethiopia, they joined these Ethiopian parties while deeming the OLF “narrowly nationalist.” MEISON would ally with the Derg and EPRP would lead the opposition to it. Both, unable to shore up the colonized majority due to their own chauvinism, would eventually be savagely liquidated by the Derg.

Thus, surrounded on all sides by a hostile military government, obstructionist neighbors, and settler “socialist” parties, in their May 1975 pamphlet, titled “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation and Amhara Despotism,” the OLF clearly placed its liberation struggle right alongside the Palestinians. At the time, the Palestinians were similarly facing down Zionist occupation, betrayal from Arab regimes, and relying on allies ensnared in bourgeois state building.

In the pamphlet’s closing, the OLF resoundingly stated:

The enemies of our revolution are many, and they are organized under different banners of reaction, which could very easily be related to the root of settler colonialism. Hereby, we call upon all progressive Organizations and Democratic Forces to hear our battle cry for our political independence, progress, and Socialism. Thus, our struggle to deface the colonial aims and imperialist reaction will continue until victory. World progressive forces, unite and struggle for worldwide total victory. Long live the world struggle against imperialist forces and colonialism. Long live the Oromo people’s revolution. Long live the Palestinian revolution. Long live the Eritrean, Afar, Somali, and other oppressed peoples’ revolutionary struggles. And down with Abyssinian and Zionist settler colonialism. Down with imperialists and reactionaries. Ever forward with victory.⁵⁷

In sum, the OLF, the highest expression of the Oromo nation’s aspirations, saw itself as an inviolable pole in the anti-Zionist struggle, inseparable from the struggle of their comrades in Palestine.

All of the above, then, induces a series of questions. What could Zionism be but the mythological ideology of settler colonialism? What could support of Ethiopia be but support for Zionism and the occupation of Palestine from the rear? What could be the negation of Zionism but the struggle of the Oromo people, consciously and inviolably fused with that of the Palestinians?

References

1. 1 Sam 6:19 (English Standard Version). ︎
2. Midrash Tanchuma, Kedoshim, Buber ed., trans. John Townsend (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1989), Kedo. 10, https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma_Buber%2C_Kedoshim.10.2?lang=bi​​​​​​​ ︎
3. Harold Marcus, “Motives, Methods and Some Results of the Unification of Ethiopia during the Reign of Menelik II,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Haile Selassie University, 1966), 269–280. ︎
4. League of Nations, “Perpetual Servitude Resulting from Defeat,” Report of the Committee of Experts on Slavery, C.240.M.171.1935.VI (Geneva: League of Nations, 1935). ︎
5. Bonnie Holcomb and Sissai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1990), 103. ︎
6. Ibid, 289. ︎
7. Ibid, 71–125. ︎
8. The Kebra Nagast, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), chap. 87, 147–48. ︎
9. Haggai Erlich, Alliance and Alienation: Ethiopia and Israel in the Days of Haile Selassie (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2014), 28. ︎
10. Ezekiel Gebissa, “The Italian Invasion, the Ethiopian Empire, and Oromo Nationalism: The Significance of the Western Oromo Confederation of 1936,” Northeast African Studies 9, no. 3 (2002): 76. ︎
11. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 32. ︎
12. “The Constitution of Ethiopia,” 1931, https://ethcln.com/system/files/ethiopian-constitution-of-1931.pdf. ︎
13. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 35–40. ︎
14. Haaretz, May 19, 1936. ︎
15. David Ben-Gurion, lecture to the Council of the Histadrut, February 1, 1937, Ben-Gurion Archives, Item #88003. ︎
16. Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1972), 58–59. ︎
17. Simon Anglim, Orde Wingate and the British Army (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 57–144. ︎
18. Avraham Akavia, “Orde Wingate,” in The Friends of Israel (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1950), 94. ︎
19. “Jackson and Arafat Confer in Lebanon,” New York Times, September 30, 1979. ︎
20. Stéphane Ancel, “The Ethiopian Orthodox Community in Jerusalem: New Archives and Perspectives on Daily Life and Social Networks, 1840–1940,” in Ordinary Jerusalem 1840–1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, ed. Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 50–51. ︎
21. Ras Iadonis Tafari, THE EXPLICATION OF JESUS [Yeshua]: FIKARE IYESUS: A Raw Translation in English (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). ︎
22. “The Amharic Letters of Emperor Theodros of Ethiopia to Queen Victoria and Her Special Envoy,” Journal of Ethiopian Law 14, no. 1 (March 1989): 115. ︎
23. “The Ethiopian Community in Jerusalem from 1850 to the Conference of Dar-el-Sultan 1902: The Political Struggle for Independence,” in Ethiopian Studies: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference, Tel-Aviv, 14–17 April 1980, ed. Gideon Goldenberg and Baruch Podolsky (Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1986), 487–500. ︎
24. “Amharic Letters,” 115. ︎
25. British Museum, “Maqdala Collection,” Contested Objects Collection, accessed July 8, 2026, https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/maqdala-collection. ︎
26. British Museum, “Maqdala Collection.” ︎
27. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 28. ︎
28. Stéphane Ancel and Vincent Lemire, “Across the Archives: New Sources about the Ethiopian Christian Community in Jerusalem (1840–1940),” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 71 (Autumn 2017): 109. ︎
29. Mu’assasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah, Al-Watha’iq al-Filastiniyah al-’Arabiyah li-’Am 1965 (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah, 1965), 1. ︎
30. Asafa Jalata, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 75. ︎
31. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” American Journal of Islam and Society 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 103, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385. ︎
32. Asafa Jalata, Baro Tumsa: The Principal Architect of the Oromo Liberation Front (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 131. ︎
33. Olana Zoga, Gizat na Gizot: The Macha-Tulama Association (Addis Ababa, 1985 Ethiopian Calendar), 37. ︎
34. Asafa Jalata, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 75. ︎
35. Mohammed Hassen, “The Oromo Nation under Amhara Colonial Administration,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44, no. 3 (1981): 36. ︎
36. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” American Journal of Islam and Society 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 104, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385. ︎
37. Borana Tullu, “The Bale Oromos’ Armed Struggle, 1963–1970: A Basic Lesson for the Oromo National Liberation Movement,” Saba Oromo: The Journal of Oromo Students in Britain 1, no. 1 (1980): 25–26. ︎
38. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 137. ︎
39. Norma J. Singer, “Ethiopia: Human Rights, 1948–1978,” in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, ed. Robert L. Hess (n.p.: [s.n.], 1978), 663–678. ︎
40. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26, no. 3 (2009): 104. ︎
41. Asafa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868–2004 (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2005), 184. ︎
42. John Markakis and Nega Ayele, Class and Revolution in Ethiopia, 1st American ed. (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1986), 53. ︎
43. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 189. ︎
44. Asafa Jalata, Baro Tumsa: The Principal Architect of the Oromo Liberation Front (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 90. ︎
45. Ibid, 31. ︎
46. Ibid, 101–110. ︎
47. Ibid. ︎
48. Ibid, 181. ︎
49. Ibid, 155. ︎
50. Ibid. ︎
51. Ibid, 131. ︎
52. Ibid, 155. ︎
53. Ibid, 132. ︎
54. Ibid, 181. ︎
55. Ibid. ︎
56. Ibid. ︎
57. Oromo Liberation Front, “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation and Amhara Despotism,” 9 May 1975. ︎

Tamer Nahed, a journalist from Gaza, reports that “In just the past two days, three people have been killed by fire from these cranes. One of them was sitting quietly with his father in a small café, trying to breathe for a few minutes. Hours later, a 5 year old girl was killed while playing near her home. These cranes have turned the entire city into an open field. The latest military technologies are directed at civilians. We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons. The horror is not just in the sound… it is the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times, where even children cannot run in the street without fear.”

The official death toll in Gaza has surpassed a staggering 73 thousand people, with an unknown number of additional victims, possibly in the hundreds of thousands, buried under the rubble. The majority of the surviving inhabitants of the Gaza strip today remain in the same tattered refugee tents they were forced into years ago, daily battling brutal inhumane conditions, including exposure, disease, malnutrition, critical shortage of medical supplies, and the pervasive random acts of aggression by the occupation forces. Each rainfall leads to flooding and stagnant water, lack of sewage and waste disposal systems has led to a crisis of unsanitary conditions, and swarms of rats and flies infest the living quarters of the survivors. Occupation forces continuously patrol the coastline, firing indiscriminately on people attempting to fish for food. Only a trickle of aid is allowed into the strip by the occupation. Shortages of machine oils and parts for repairs have led to the breakdown of machinery in bakeries and other vital services. Bread lines are many hours-long and survivors report that there is no guarantee of receiving food, with many leaving empty-handed after standing all day exposed to the elements.

Occupation forces continue to push their imposed border further into the strip, squeezing the beleaguered population into an ever tighter and more concentrated region, in flagrant violation of the ceasefire agreement’s stipulation of a gradual withdrawal. Last month the Gaza government reported that since the ceasefire’s implementation on the 10th of October the occupation had violated it with over 1100 airstrikes and over 900 shootings targeting civilians. Aid shipments have been restricted to a meager 25% of the quantity stipulated by the agreement, leading to persistent shortages of all vital goods.

Particularly urgently, water insecurity is pervasive and more critical with every passing day as summer sets in and punishing heat torments the survivors. According to the Palestine Information Center, “In Al-Shati Camp, securing water has become a compulsory daily routine that is stealing children’s childhoods. Ashraf Miqdad, a father of four, wakes up at dawn to prepare empty containers and takes his children along to walk long distances to secure enough water for just one day. He expressed deep concern over the noticeable decline in the number of water trucks reaching their area.”

“UNICEF reports that 82 percent of households in Gaza are already experiencing water insecurity, while 70 percent are unable to access even the minimum humanitarian standard of six liters per person per day.” The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 100 liters per person daily for good health and sanitation.

Today Tamer Nahed is asking for our help. He says: “90% of water stations in Gaza have gone out of service, and thousands of families, including my own, are struggling every day to access clean water. For this reason, I decided with my team to launch a project to provide 10 water trucks to camps and families suffering from severe water shortages. Imagine that $200 can provide clean water for more than 80 families. Our goal is to deliver over 40,000 liters of fresh water to those who need it most. This project is completely non-profit, and I will not receive any financial benefit from it. We will document every water truck and every distribution process to ensure full transparency.”

The raw reality of settler colonialism is the deprivation of the most basic necessities of life and the most fundamental human dignities. We all have a duty to resist – by any means necessary. Assisting Palestinian survivors in Gaza is one of the simplest and most direct ways you can make a difference in this struggle. Please help if you can.

The Pied Piper is arguably more dangerous than the hunter, and neither should be discounted.

Background

Mamdani’s campaign started with a surge of popularity riding on radical anti-zionist talking points. A long-time “pro-Palestine” activist, supporter of BDS, and critic of zionist settler violence in Palestine, Mamdani has been a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America since 2017, and the New York State Assembly since 2020. Using his elected position to amplify his particular brand of “radical” politics, Mamdani’s public visibility quickly ramped up following his condemnations of the genocidal zionist reprisals following the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood uprising. By repeatedly stirring controversy within settler power structures and zionist media, Mamdani has spent the last two years building a popular image of a radical “socialist” Muslim within a key hotbed of settler political struggle, carefully ramping up the controversy to keep himself in the media spotlight by spouting radical rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada” and “abolish the police.” In October 2024, he announced his candidacy for the 2025 Mayoral race, winning the Democratic Party primary in June 2025. 

Surprising no-one paying attention, Mamdani began walking back his phony radicalism as soon as his candidacy was assured, currying alliances with key members of the NYC police force, choosing open zionists for his staff,¹ announcing his support for the zionist occupation’s “right to exist,” and declaring his intent to greatly expand the police budget for prosecuting anti-zionist activities. 

Principles of Settler Opportunism

The “socialists” who run for office are little more than political adventurists and opportunists. A political adventurist here means an individual who sees themselves as a heroic figure setting out to save the masses from their oppression. They believe they can “make a difference” by struggling within the system, so long as they retain their “principles.” They set aside the necessity of first constructing a class that is conscious of itself and able to coordinate political action according to a definite plan, and try to instead champion what they individually perceive to be the interests of this class (which does not yet exist!). This necessarily produces an eclectic undisciplined political line, because one individual, or group of individuals (like the many so-called “communist” parties) is not capable of producing a correct political line. Only a vanguard party with the backing of the masses, acting in their interests according to their will, can do this. Adventurists either do not know this, or do not care. They believe that by “showing the way,” the masses can be inspired to spontaneous action in support of their own liberation. They believe that by spurring the masses to all go to the polls, they are at the same time building working class unity, solidarity, consciousness, or whatever. Inevitably, they are ultimately defeated: either they fail to gain any purchase within the system and wash out, or they realize the futility of pushing a “revolutionary” line all by their lonesome and turn to opportunism. To this end, political adventurism is materially indistinguishable from opportunism.

Opportunists are in it for whatever they can get. They may agree in principle with a revolutionary line, but in practice they are more than willing to discard inconvenient segments of the masses in the interest of political expediency. Often they can be found eagerly doing this in anticipation of what they believe will win the most “support” at the polls. Inevitably, their most radical edges are rounded out and dulled by constant contact with the inertia of bourgeois/settler governance. In the game of musical chairs that is settler colonial privileges, the most vulnerable people are the first pushed out of the way, and the opportunists are the ones who take up the task of doing the pushing. Because it may be “politically inconvenient” to militantly struggle against the settler colonial occupation and genocide against Palestine, they tell us that these issues must be set aside “for now,” to be pursued “later” when the movement has built more momentum and mass power. Of course what they fail to mention here is that in doing this they are dividing the masses, weakening the movement by directing mounting class struggle into dead-end reformist avenues down which only a small section of the masses can advance. Their actions lead to the sacrifice of all principles on the altar of “pragmatism.”

Besides Mamdani’s tepid criticism of some of the most depraved zionist acts of violence, the key reforms he promised (and those which have won him such widespread support among the imperial left) are as follows: 

• To freeze rents and build “affordable” housing
• To crack down on “bad” landlords 
• To establish city-owned grocery stores
• To establish free public transit
• To raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (This in particular appears to be why the “progressive” settlers are so thrilled.) 

A full explanation of the flaws in the rent freeze is well beyond this article, but suffice to say that whatever attempt he may or may not make at expanding and stabilizing the private property regime, it won’t put a dent in the empire-wide land speculation that is the real cause of the housing crisis. Cracking down on “bad” landlords is laughable, considering the socialist position is not to hound out malfeasors, but to liquidate entire classes. And rather than feeding people directly, Mamdani would prefer to compete on the market by creating his own NYC brand grocery store!

This minimum wage increase will mostly benefit the service workers in the empire’s finance capital, the people who keep the gears turning in the nerve center of global imperialism. The claim being made by the settler “socialists,” is that this push for higher wages for some of the city’s workers is building the mass base necessary to push through some “real” reforms—just later on, at an unspecified date and time. There’s no word on how that’s to be accomplished or what the demands will be, but never mind that, they say, we’re getting paid. How exactly is socialism advanced by the appointment of a bourgeois politician as the mayor of the bourgeois finance capital of the empire in the middle of a holocaust being waged against Palestinians? That this disgusting mockery of human decency is being held up as a beacon of hope for the socialist cause hinges on the idea that wage increases are a victory in themselves, that advancing the conditions of some workers is always an advance for the socialist cause. We contend that this is simply not true. Let’s ask the real question: wage increases for who?

Simply being employed, however wretched that employment may be, is itself a position of privilege and power in the imperial system. Yes, the bourgeoisie remain the top dogs, but people who “work for a living” in the colonial economy are still a privileged group: their class position depends on the continued exploitation of people who can’t work for a living. 

There has never been a challenge to the employment problem, and a major reason why is that following along to the plans of the Imperialists keeps wages high and development uneven, securing employment while simultaneously securing unemployment. 

Example scenario: Capitalist introduces labor saving machines that double productivity. Rather than overproducing, they cut the workforce in half and raise the wages of the leftovers by 50%. Overall, the capitalist just reduced aggregate wages by 25%. The business operates at the same level. They don’t overproduce and break their market position, the workers who didn’t get cut have a huge wage increase that puts a contradiction between them and their laid off siblings.²

– @probablykaffe

Many people are excluded from the “productive” sphere on the basis of nationality, gender, ability, etc. We know that a Black person is much less likely to have access to employment than a white person—in fact, the Black unemployment rate in New York City is more than double that of whites (8% vs 3.5%). Disabled people are often completely excluded from a livable income, with less than 25% of people with any disability being employed, and fewer than 1 in 5 autistic people. According to the 2022 US transgender survey report, trans people in the US face a whopping 18% unemployment rate, more than four times the empire-wide average, which frankly should be considered a demographic crisis. These are entire populations of people who are excluded from the privilege of accessing employment, and those who do gain access are often limited to part time or sporadic/seasonal work. And all of this is before we even get into the issue of the role of US imperialism in inflating worker wages inside the empire at the expense of billions of global south workers. 

It can’t be dismissed how difficult it is to be a low wage worker in New York City. There’s a very good reason people are clamoring for this reform. But as the grip of capital tightens around your throat, disabled people who have been suffering under brutal austerity conditions for years are dying at atrocious rates under state eugenicist campaigns. The fact that these plans don’t address the needs of the most oppressed, and in fact perpetuate their oppression in a mystified and more acute form, should be a warning that Mamdani doesn’t deal in social revolution but rather in reinforcing the capitalist state with a “kinder” face. How does the “socialism” of Mamdami do anything to build solidarity between oppressed groups? What is the plan for carrying this movement to a higher stage of struggle? What is being accomplished here, except grabbing more for a select few while the most vulnerable people continue to languish and die in ever-increasing poverty and homelessness? Is the wealth supposed to trickle down from people with jobs to those without? Everyone needs to eat before you reach out your hand for seconds! If any group is forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of “progress” then inequality is reproduced and oppression persists. What does “universal emancipation” mean to you, seriously? If your “socialist” candidate isn’t running on the democratic mandate of the masses of the exploited, and held to account by that democratic mandate, following a definite plan to continually heighten the struggle and broaden the involvement of the masses, then they aren’t a socialist. Unfortunately, the democratic institutions necessary for this, a vanguard party or socialist state, do not yet exist in this land. Our efforts, therefore, should not be to run candidates accountable to no one, but to build the party capable of holding leaders accountable, so that we can finally seize the state. 

Whose Side Are You On?

We must be very clear on this point: Palestinian sovereignty is non-negotiable, just as much as all anti-colonialism is. There is no middle ground or compromise with the settler colonial system. Either we destroy it or it destroys us. Any position which leaves room for the continued existence of “israel” in any form is a denial of the sovereignty and humanity of Palestinians. In tossing out this issue, by “compromising” with genocide, they draw a line between themselves and the Palestinian people. They separate international humanity into two groups pitted against one-another: “us,” and “them.” In the arena of class warfare this division is fatal. When one section of our forces advances while leaving another behind, reactionary forces are afforded room to encircle and defeat both groups, usually by absorbing the opportunists and killing off the rest. Either all the oppressed advance in unison, or we get picked off one-by-one. Genuine revolutionaries demand that every oppressed group be respected, uplifted, and empowered; this will be done in opposition to the dominant groups, who recognize every gain for the oppressed as a loss for their profit. On the other hand, opportunists are content to allow reactionaries to pick off “inconvenient” groups, so long as they personally benefit in the end.

This strategy of divide and conquer, directed from the rear by the bourgeoisie and spearheaded by opportunism, goes back to the earliest days of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular it has come to dominate and define imperial politics over the last century. When the interests of those privileged enough to have jobs are prioritized ahead of those who aren’t, the material division between the two widens. The privileges of the advantaged group are reinforced at the expense of the disadvantaged group, which produces an incentive to keep it that way in the privileged group. This is how reaction breeds. The issue with homelessness is not “the lack of supply” but the capacity for landlords to evict tenants. Ensuring everybody is housed and safe needs to come ahead of reducing market prices on apartments.³ The speculative value produced by rent extraction is what drives the constant inflation of property prices, not “undersupply.” When the health and safety of disabled people is considered a secondary concern to the “comfort” of abled people, and (for example) masking is not enforced, disabled people are excluded from the movement, further weakening it. When trans rights are considered a “token” issue and worth ceding ground on in exchange for concessions for “the majority,” the movement further fragments as trans people are left behind to struggle to survive and to die alone. When Indigenous sovereignty is treated as a secondary concern, or a threat to the property “rights” of “the majority,” the settler-Indigenous divide deepens, and one of the most revolutionary elements of all human society is ejected from the movement. It is this way that, in the name of “the majority,” the opportunists carefully and meticulously carve up the movement into bite-sized chunks that the reactionaries are only too eager to devour. The bourgeoisie and settler masses will always demand that we sit down and shut up and in exchange they will grant some privileges to those of us who acquiesce while they slaughter those who won’t or can’t. Every “temporary” retreat from solidarity turns into a strategic defeat for the movement.

In the coming months, Mamdani supporters may pretend to be shocked at his complicity in settler violence and his leadership in maintaining the colonial occupation of Lenapehoking, just as they are now pretending to be critical of his zionism. The signs pointing towards his opportunism were always there for those willing to see. While he did condemn the zionist reprisals on October 8, 2023, he was quick to also condemn the Palestinian resistance within the weeks following, and since then has eagerly participated in spreading zionist propaganda lies about supposed “war crimes” committed by the resistance.⁴ Mamdani has carefully and consistently played both sides, spouting anti-zionist rhetoric out one side of his mouth while materially aligning himself with colonial hegemony with the other. This barefaced opportunism, and its inevitable tragic outcomes, should be wearily familiar by now to those of us with the slightest of principles. It’s plain as day now, just as it has been for years, that Mamdani is just another lying settler pig—perfectly content to take advantage of public outrage against the Palestinian Holocaust for his colonial ladder-climbing career. 

For as much ink that has been spilled and attention monopolized for this man, little mind has been paid to the social processes underlying his ascent to international fame and infamy. Mamdani’s popularity and controversy could well serve as a case-study in how the left wing of capital uses radical window-dressing to conceal maintenance of the status quo, but we’ve had enough such case studies to fill a library. What is happening to us on the ground? Whether you’re cheering and applauding or booing and hissing, you’re watching the show — so how has the so-called “revolutionary left” become so enraptured by what amounts to performance art on a stage inside a colonial garrison? The complete hegemony of the settler empire’s cultural influence continues to mislead and dull the senses of our aspiring revolutionaries, but not by lying to us to convince us that one settler politician or another is a radical. Even the most ineffectual liberal “socialist” will openly admit that they don’t believe Mamdani will deliver anything resembling a radical break. After all, they’ve “learned their lesson” from former DSA campaign outcomes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vile opportunism. But if they’ve learned their lesson and “don’t expect much” from Zohran Mamdani, what exactly are they doing? The answer is a parallel to Mamdani’s career.

The Social Technology of Settler Socialism

The mass base of Democratic Socialism is the lower and middle strata of settler colonists.⁵ These people are genuinely discontented with the system, but pay attention to their grievances! “Housing is unaffordable, wages are too low, social safety nets are not robust enough, and  education is too expensive.” Wealth and capital have become too concentrated in the hands of a minority, “the 1%,” and they aren’t getting what they see as their due share. Are these the grievances of a revolutionary, or of petulant settler youth and failed settler aspirants? Are these demands aiming towards the complete destruction of the colonial system and the restitution of Indigenous land sovereignty, or are these demands aiming at a “fairer” redivision of the spoils of colonial conquest and imperialist exploitation? Are the grievances rooted in a desire to end class society or to simply make it more comfortable for those fortunate enough to live within the colonial jurisdiction at which their reforms are aimed?

The DSA professes to be a “socialist” organization, so on the surface it appears to be approaching an alignment with national liberatory, decolonial, and communist struggles. But is this really the case? Remember to always analyze the class position of a given organization by the actions it takes, not by the ideology it professes. Ideology is always a more or less accurate reflection of class alignment, but recall the scientific tenet that the appearance of a thing does not perfectly match its content—therefore we have to look deeper. The reflection can be, and often is, inverted. Zionism purports itself to be a liberatory movement, which is an inverted reflection of reality. Amerikan liberalism purports to be interested in universal democracy, which again is an inverted reflection of reality. So, is DSA really socialist? What are the outcomes of DSA’s political activity? As of this writing, no militant organizations or movements have emerged from the DSA, and decades of organizing has yielded little but a few “more radical” Democratic politicians in colonial office positions. The standard explanation given by “communists” within the DSA for its lack of revolutionary action is that the masses have yet to be radicalized, and therefore struggle within the DSA is necessary to bring them the consciousness they need to begin to take revolutionary action. In 43 years, however, the DSA has largely remained ideologically stationary.

This “failure” to radicalize the masses is a constant point of debate and analysis. Many individuals and organizations within the communist milieu but outside the DSA contend that the source of this failure is because the organization is ideologically democratic socialist (i.e. not revolutionary in ideological outlook), and therefore a different, “more communist” organization is required to impart the necessary revolutionary outlook in its adherents. But this is putting the cart before the horse! Ideology does not dictate material alignment, material alignment dictates ideology. The DSA is not a stagnant ineffectual organization because of its backwards ideology—instead it has a backwards ideology because this is necessary to fulfill its actual goals. What are its goals? The purpose of a system is what it does, especially a system which has remained more or less stable and self-reproducing for over four decades. So what does the DSA do? It reels in members of oppressed groups (trans, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, etc) and disciplines their activities into serving the interests of its colonial middle-class leadership by mixing them into a single “organization” under middle-class leadership. The profession of “socialist” aims is a smokescreen to obscure the actual aims of the organization, which is ultimately little more than colonial, careerist ladder-climbing.

What of the internal criticisms levied at the organization? Many of the members are often very dissatisfied with the outcomes of their political activity, and among the common refrains is the need for more centralized leadership, for the ability to enforce a political line on the politicians they get into office, and for the organization to divest itself from cooperation with zionism. Yet despite a resolution passing in August⁶ enabling the expulsion of zionist membership (which was barely successful, succeeding with 56% percent of the vote), the openly zionist Mamdani continues to be backed by the DSA, and the overall strategy of the DSA continues to be to maintain its involvement in the zionist Democratic Party. The reality of the matter is, despite professing anti-zionism for the first time in its long history, the DSA remains a zionist organization, and its new “anti-zionist” mask is the same “anti-zionism” of the broader imperial left—an anti-zionism that affirms the necessity of the occupation to continue. Little more than a barefaced lie.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The settler empire has long since perfected the social technology of penetrating organizational and community structures built by, or being built by, the oppressed, with the aim of taking them over from within and submitting them to colonial interests. Where the oppressed see a dire need for unity and solidarity in the face of colonial genocide against our siblings in Palestine, the lower and middle strata of settlers see an upsurge in laboring subjects available to fill the ranks of their latest campaign for redivision of the imperialist spoils. That, in essence, is what the Democratic Socialists of America is: far from a dysfunctional organization which routinely fails to meet its goals, the DSA is a well-oiled machine of settler-colonial annexation. In which revolutionary currents among the oppressed are carefully cultivated within a narrowly bounded arena of struggle, both in order to prevent a dangerous rupture of the colonial system, and in order to ultimately benefit the settlers served by the DSA. That this process occasionally settlerizes individuals from oppressed demographics is part of the point—in order for the DSA to function as intended it’s necessary that the occasional individual from an oppressed demographic attains an internal leadership position or a colonial office position, but this is always predicated on the condition that they closely adhere to the interests of colonial maintenance; they must not engage in illegal activities, such as organizing and arming militant struggle. “Class peace” remains the priority ahead of anything else, even when the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children hinge on the taking up of armed struggle. To the settler socialists, their deaths are water under the bridge so long as wages are increased enough to broaden the number of people who can access the colonial land exchange.

For revolutionaries, what the success of the DSA and Mamdani’s campaign represents is a complete capitulation of the “Free Palestine” movement to settler annexationism and zionism. We’ve failed to differentiate between friends and enemies, failed to take the actions necessary to expel enemies from our organizations and communities, failed to build up the militant organizational capacity necessary to wage armed struggle against zionism, and in doing so failed to defend the lives of our Palestinian siblings in their hour of greatest need for two years ongoing. And yet, Mamdani’s electoral success is lauded as a victory for the left! Indeed, this is a triumph for the left wing of zionism. With hardly a word to the contrary, we’ve rolled over and allowed this travesty to unfold for two years, all the while repeating the inane mantra that “any day now” the masses of settler oppressors will “radicalize” and join forces with the oppressed to aid in the overthrow of their colonial system. In doing so, we’ve demonstrated our own willingness to be complicit in a holocaust so long as this complicity keeps us out of the prison cell and out of the line of fire.

Our Place in History

When freshly stolen land became scarce and prices rose in the late 1700s, the lower and middle masses of settlers eagerly aligned with the planter bourgeoisie to oppose British rule and expand the colonial system. Indigenous peoples bore the cost of their genocidal brutality.⁷ Since then this pattern has repeated itself over and over. At each moment of crisis in the colonial system, the dispossessed and poorer settlers will seek out temporary alliances wherever they can find them to bulk up their ranks for coming confrontation with the ruling strata, but always with the sole aim of securing their own slice of colonial land and their own share of imperial wages.⁸ As times change and ideologies shift and develop, the colonial redistributionists will find alliances in different places. During the period of protracted economic crisis in the 1930s, the redistributionists found alliance with rising Black nationalism, only to cast off their allies the moment a fresh flood of booty came pouring in following the empire’s successful conquests at the close of the Second World War, and by the 1950s the Communist Party USA had successfully liquidated all revolutionaries from its ranks and disavowed national liberation. In the 1960s, a new wave of national liberatory struggles rose, and by the 1970s, settler “radicals” had successfully played out their role in crushing all resistance. The defeated liberation movement became a victorious “Civil Rights Movement” in the settler history books.

Today the same pattern plays out yet again in real time before our eyes: with the colonial system’s internal stratification at historic highs, and faced with the objective necessity of violent armed struggle in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the US empire, the settler “left” floods into our organizations and our discussion spaces, reads our literature and learns our language of resistance, claims to be our allies in struggle, and spends two years marching in circles to maintain the facade, while shoring up support for their preferred reformist. Time and energy and resources that could be spent serving the needs of the most oppressed, building dual power institutions, organizing guerilla strikes against weapons manufacturers and zionist finance institutions, etcetera, gets repeatedly diverted into the same century-old discussions about whether socialists should vote. Those of us aiming to build the revolutionary forces necessary for winning this war find ourselves surrounded by the most dishonest dregs of humanity, grabbing and pulling us back from struggle to keep our labor squarely aimed at shoring up the structures of oppression holding us down. Make no mistake, when $30/hr is firmly in hand, these so-called radicals will ride into the sunset towards their very own mortgages on stolen land and pensions funded by imperialism. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for personal gain at the expense of the Palestinian resistance is not a betrayal of the “socialist” movement, but the blueprint to be followed by each of its adherents. We’ve already failed to lend Palestine the support it needs for two years ongoing. If the aspiring revolutionaries of our new rising wave of national liberation fail to recognize the myriad methods that settler opportunism uses to exploit our labors for individual gain, we too will take our place in the history books as the defeated “extreme fringe” of a successful movement to redistribute the spoils of genocide and oppression.

1.  Julian Gerson, political director for Mamdani’s electoral campaign, previously served as a campaign manager for US congressman Jerry Nadler. Nadler describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and “a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.” Gerson is on record saying, “Jerry embodies the idea that one can absolutely be pro-Israel and progressive simultaneously.” ︎
2. From Kaffe in the same thread: “The ratio of the sub-employed population has been roughly the same for the last half century, even as the role of ‘housewife’ has eroded (good riddance), with the shift in joblessness going mostly to the Nationally Oppressed. The abolition of unemployment (a Soviet right), is so little entertained for two reasons:
   1. The Labor Aristocracy refuses to let go of wages and security, even if that value could be re-allocated for increased employment, and erase the security problem. 
   2. The work that desperately needs to be done (i.e. land healing), would reduce dependency on Imperial relations, making it more difficult to compel the working class to reproduce them.
   Instead: insecure-security, stratified wages, uneven development (the cause of high economic migration — the medium of insecurity and stratification), and the ‘public works’ cages a million people yearly, militarizes the population, and (re)builds Bourgeois terrorism.” ︎
3. Hence why housing was a right in the USSR, “Thus a worker cannot be put out of his room, even for non-payment of rent. His wages can be attached, but if he is unemployed his rent is free. He cannot be charged more than a certain low sum, fixed in proportion to his wages.” Anna Louise Strong, The First Time In History, (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1924),149. ︎
4.  “…of course I condemn Hamas. Of course I have called October 7th what it was, which was a horrific war crime,…” ︎
5. According to the 2021 DSA Member Survey Report, 85% of membership is white, compared with only 4% Black representation. 28% of members are full upper-PB with household incomes of $100k or more. 80% of respondents had bachelor’s degrees, and approximately 60% of respondents occupy petty bourgeois or labor aristocratic positions, split between scholars, academics, white-collar, tech workers, non-profit organizations, public sector employees, healthcare or social work, self employed, writer, performer, arts, and political org/union. ︎
6. See resolution R22. ︎
7. “This pretense toward ‘freedom’ continued in 1776 when settlers revolted when London seemed to be loath to continue funding their wars of dispossession against indigenes and the constant conflict with enslaved Africans that was an adjunct of that process” Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 154 in the PDF. ︎
8. See J. Sakai Settlers Ch. 4.4, describing the process of the settler economy importing Chinese labor to displace the Mexican population of the southwest, only to then violently expropriate Chinese industry and landholdings. Afterwards, the same participants in these genocidal purges urged “unity” with Afrikan labor, as the next phase of the developing industrial unionism movement: “Terrance Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor (who had personally called for wiping out all Chinese in North America within one year), suddenly became the apostle of brotherhood when it came to persuading Afrikans to support his organization: ‘The color of a candidate shall not debar him from admission; rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test.’” ︎

What is the psychological impact on the children for whom their agency over their own bodies is violently ripped away from them, whose bodies are disfigured against their will, and their identities and very humanity denied them by friends, family, and society? These mechanisms of social abuse lead many trans people to attempt suicide. Rather than treat us as victims of social violence, reactionaries proudly tout “41%”, referencing the trans suicide attempt rate. It is of course nonsense to assert that being trans makes us suicidal, rather than the issue of the above denial of our fundamental humanity, and denial of our access to life-saving medical care, and denial to community, love, support, and respect, that produces suicidal individuals. It’s social murder. But that is naturally the aim of these policies. The cruelty is the point. They want us dead. This is a deliberate policy of genocide, which we have written about before (Transition or Death, Total War and Trans Liberation, Death Before Detransition: In Solidarity with Jaia Cruz). This assertion is in no sense hyperbole or exaggeration. Trans people are under genocidal assault by the settler state.

The proponents of this policy are well aware of this, and consider this forcible imposition of their own values onto the bodies of children to be “protecting” them. Protecting them from what? From the freedom to choose, which naturally builds on the innate drive to resist infringements on that choice. If children are permitted agency over their own lives, then what guarantee is there that girls will grow up into submissive subservient women, obediently serving the interests of abusive patriarchal fathers, husbands, and the state? What guarantee is there that boys will grow up to take their place in the home, workplace, and state as the violent enforcers of the patriarchal order? If given a choice, children can choose anything, and as far as the settler-colonial system is concerned, that is unacceptably dangerous. These children will be ruthlessly punished for choosing “wrong”, and so in a twisted sense stripping away their freedom to choose certainly does “protect” them.

It should be stressed that this danger perceived by the transphobic reactionaries is in fact real. We are a threat. By simply existing out in the open, trans people, particularly trans women, threaten the continued enforcement of transmisogynistic violence which undergirds the very fabric of the cispatriarchal regime and consequently the material reproductive base of the settler colonial occupation of Turtle Island. We lay bare the crying contradictions of this societal death cult. We exemplify in action as well as in words that you really do have a choice, you don’t have to submit, you can live the life that you want for yourself, you can be the person that YOU want to be. By demanding respect for our humanity and our agency, we demand in the same breath respect for everyone’s humanity and everyone’s agency.

The existence of trans people then is an irreconcilable contradiction, a revolution in process against the hegemony of patriarchy. This as-yet-incomplete revolution forces compromises by the regime. It begins to accept our existence, but only in part, in incomplete form, and it demands at the same time compromise from us. The forms of these compromises are varied, ranging from “stealth” where our existence as trans people is accepted only so long as we remain invisible and indistinguishable from cis people, to “respect” for our “identities” wherein our humanity is treated as a relatively harmless aberration, a “delusion” to be tolerated and humored, or a “mental illness” to be pitied rather than a revolution to be feared. But the fear is there nonetheless. We’re depicted in the news media and mythologized in horror movies as grotesque brutish caricatures of women, bent on the predation and murder of “real” (cisgender) women. A cold gripping terror of trans women is woven into the very fabric of this society. We are the worst thing you can possibly be, repulsive to all decent upstanding people. At least, that’s how the bourgeois media likes to present us, as a cultural boogeyman to be reviled. And as the empire’s grip on power declines, as its legitimacy in the hearts of the people falters, the fear turns to panic, and it begins clawing back what little it gave us. The empire itself is terrified of us and killing our trans children because of it.

Trans people, particularly trans women, have always been at the forefront of the Queer liberation struggle. From the Stonewall riots to STAR’s collaboration with the Black Panthers, trans women have consistently been on the bleeding edge of militant struggle, cutting into the heart of the empire. Today the Communist movement finds itself disproportionately represented by trans women. Nearly every org has us, and some of our orgs are majority trans. And the reason is simple: we’re marked for death by a society which has never had a place for us and never truly will. When our very lives are forfeit, we have absolutely nothing left to lose but our chains. We’re drawn to Communism because the settler colony leaves us no choice: revolt or die. Make no mistake, this assault will continue and it will escalate. The support by Communists for the Palestinian liberation struggle will be pointed to as evidence of “transgender terrorism”, necessitating additional crackdowns, surveillance, imprisonment, and disappearing. Cutting off trans children from lifesaving healthcare is accompanied by banning the discussion of trans issues among all children. We face punishment, arrest, and even death for simply talking to kids about this. They will begin to consider us unfit parents and those of us who have kids will face the reality of the state’s willingness to kidnap them in order to break the generational continuity of our revolutionary resistance. Don’t believe us? Disabled people already routinely face this, and are being pushed ever further into the margins of society where they can be left to die with nobody watching. 

This is nothing new. The AIDS epidemic was left to run rampant, deliberately exacerbated, research was blocked, and trans and queer people began to waste away and disappear, because they were afraid of us, because they wanted us dead, and those deaths set the revolutionary movement back by a whole generation. The genocide against us destroyed and continues to destroy countless lives and their accumulated experiences, knowledge, culture, and traditions of resistance. But this tendency towards genocide, and the tendency to target children, goes back even further—it is baked into the structure of settler colonial society. The empire’s genocidal hunger for control over this land faced militant resistance by the Indigenous nations for centuries, until finally the policy to “kill the Indian to save the man” was implemented. The state kidnapped children from their Native parents, forcing them into brutal reeducation camps disguised as “residential schools.”

Native children were abused and tortured into adopting the colonizer’s language, religion, and culture. Their spiritual and philosophical understanding of the world was beaten out of them. Their hair was cut short, their clothes were destroyed and replaced with what the colonizer deemed acceptable. Any “confusion” about gender roles (which the Indigenous nations had very different views on), was violently stamped out. Their very names were stolen from them, replaced with names suitable for “Christian” society, and unspeakable sexual violence was inflicted on them as a disciplinary measure. In breaking the Indigenous cultural continuity, the traditions and experiences of resistance were shattered. Traditional communal practices and modes of organization were erased, and the very language of resistance was lost (a process referred today as epistemicide).

This is why they are targeting trans kids first. Not because there’s any “reasonable scientifically-grounded” argument for blocking lifesaving healthcare for children, not because children are “threatened” by trans education, or by sex education, but because the empire itself is threatened by our tradition of resistance. It is terrified that we are forming part of the leadership of the revolutionary struggle that will overthrow it, and it is seeking to erase our history, culture, and knowledge through both exterminatory and “cultural” genocide. Similarly, the targeting and extermination of Palestinian children by the zionist occupation is far from an accident, but a deliberate measure to break the continuity of resistance, to stave off the revolution for generations to come. 

The Black, Indigenous, trans, and queer revolutionaries of yesterday were crushed by coordinated campaigns of genocidal propaganda, state terrorism, assassination, and biological warfare. Palestine faces the brunt of the current wave of the genocidal onslaught, (as of this writing the occupation is killing 150 Palestinians a day) but the violence won’t stop with them. The fate of colonized peoples everywhere, from Palestine to Turtle Island, is bound together by the violence of settler colonialism; and as a group fundamentally incompatible with the settler regime, the fate of trans people too is bound up with theirs, as is the fate of disabled people. We aren’t in this struggle alone! It is the solemn duty of the Communist movement to center and uplift the struggles of the most oppressed, to center the Black liberation struggle, the Indigenous/Palestinian liberation struggle, the Queer liberation struggle, the trans liberation struggle, the disability liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle. These forces can and will be united, they must be for all of us to survive. These are the forces of the revolutionary proletariat, whom Communists must weld together into a united class capable of leading the Revolution. Together, we will take the future into our own hands, by force, and carry forward the banner of humanity, marching hand-in-hand over the flaming wreckage of this most ruthless and destructive of empires, towards a shining future of peace and equality for all.

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Let’s get to work.

However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

30 years after apartheid, the 7% minority of white settlers continue to occupy 72% of South Afrika’s farmland. Legalistic mechanisms for land reforms have failed to address the problem; only 9% of the land has been returned to the Black people it was stolen from. Before it can return land, the government needs to provide compensation to the white settler. In other words, the law requires the government to pay thieves to return stolen land. Black South Afrikans can’t get their land back because doing so would bankrupt the country. The result? In 2025, South Afrika has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the world. The average Black household owns 5% of the wealth of the average white household. These statistics alone explain why South Afrikan white lobbying groups — who project false claims of supposed “racial persecution” throughout the world  — have spoken out against relocation to the U.S. Relocating white settlers would only hamper domestic settler efforts towards retaking full political power and overturning the basic legal rights won by the Black majority in 1994. One white pensioner spelled the situation out clearly: “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” 

Trump’s relocation of white settlers appears to be part of a larger U.S. attack on South Afrika’s government. In 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted the “Land Expropriation Act” —  essentially an eminent domain law which allows the government to repurpose private land for the public benefit. According to the law, land can only be expropriated without compensation in limited scenarios, like when property is unused or abandoned. To this day, no land has been seized in South Africa without compensation. This is the law that Trump claims will cause “white genocide” in South Afrika. The U.S. had already cut off nearly all foreign aid to South Afrika back in February, throwing the country’s healthcare system into a new crisis overnight. 

Although Trump and his imperialist collaborators understand the reformist nature of South Afrika’s government, the country is still centered in the U.S.’ crosshairs because of its rejection of outright western colonial rule. South Afrika has been represented by the ANC (African National Congress) — the party of Nelson Mandela — since the end of apartheid. In all likelihood, the U.S. wants to remove the ANC from power and replace it with one of the more imperialist-friendly parties representing white interests. In its 30 years of rule, the ANC has built strong economic relationships with enemies of the U.S. such as China, Russia, and Iran. The South Afrikan lawsuit against so-called “israel” in the International Court of Justice — supposedly the highest court in the world — continues to isolate the zionist entity, which has lost sympathy even in the West. If the U.S. were to succeed in its regime change effort, they would replace the ANC with a party such as the Democratic Alliance. With its bedrock of white support, this party would be quick to submit to the U.S. by signing extortionist trade deals and dismissing the I.C.J. lawsuit. For Trump, the chance to bully an oppressed country like South Afrika while pandering to the white base at home was too convenient to pass up. 

From within the U.S., we can see how the relocation fiasco is in perfect alignment with the current fascist playbook. The illusions of a multi-racial participatory society in a racist settler colony are dissipating in the face of an explicit preference for white immigration, especially those who show loyalty to the imperial project. I.C.E. agents and deputized local police are snatching undocumented people from their homes and workplaces. The most immediate hurdle to the new terror project lies in the capitalist class itself, who keenly appreciate the essential role of undocumented immigrants in the Amerikan economy. Capitalists in both meatpacking and agriculture economic sectors pleaded directly to Trump that the ICE raids are having a bad effect on business. By working the hardest jobs for the least pay, undocumented workers ensure that Amerikans have access to cheap produce while guaranteeing a steady profit for the capitalist. The class collaboration between these capitalists and Amerikans at large is essential to the arrangement. Without undocumented labor, the already small profit margins in agriculture and meatpacking would vanish, which would then trigger skyrocketing food costs. The takeaway from this is that there was already ample reason to be in the streets before the ICE raids began. Instead of waving the Amerikan flag like the recently-arrived South Afrikan settlers, protesters should agitate based on the general conditions of racial hierarchies in labor. Violent ICE raids will of course continue, although the business enterprises of certain capitalists will now be spared by the Trump regime. The federal and municipal pigs will continue to arrest grandparents, parents, and children. 

While fascists balance the contradictions between their rhetoric and reality, they still agitate their base by attacking a sovereign nation with racist dog whistles. On June 2, 9 more settlers from South Afrika arrived in the U.S, and more will be on the way unless South Afrika bows under the pressure. We must never forget that Land Back is as desperately needed here on Turtle Island as it is in South Afrika. Amerikan fascists feign horror at Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of land repossession. Imagine their response to a real campaign for Land Back on what they consider to be their home territory. 

Spend these summer months engaged in social investigation or engaged in study. USU and the All-Empire Workers’ League are here to join you in struggle with materials and assistance as we work on tangible projects in the real world. Whatever you do, don’t let the summer pass you by as white supremacists continue their push to convert the mass fascist state into its final, deadly form. 

1.  The term “global flea market” is borrowed from George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye (page 118)  ︎
2. For further discussion of colonial psychology, see Chapter 2: The Historical Background in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, with special attention paid to page 32 (local page source) ︎

The news and the news media determine who gets to be considered “innocent” of crimes. Yet we know the zionist state makes use of “civilians” in order to further its goals. In a time of genocide, even reporters and propagandists can be found guilty under the Genocide Convention, which even the U.S. government claims to recognize (despite its name, the Genocide Convention is an international treaty making genocide an international crime, rather than a convention for genocidaires. One can be forgiven for mistaking it for the latter, however, as the United States, one of the most genocidal states in history, is a proud signatory to the convention. It  became a signatory to the Genocide Convention on December 11, 1948). At the Nuremburg trials, those who enabled the genocide were found guilty and executed. The zionist state utilizes Hasbara, the method of propaganda in which state actors, embedded as civilians, lie openly about the actions of the regime to launder its image and erode public trust in Palestinian sources. If the zionist state continues to utilize “civilians” and Hasbara, then we should not expect any citizens who support its genocidal forces to be considered “off limits” to counterterror. 

This trick — claiming colonized people are already guilty — is one that the U.S. imperialists have used for a long time. From Palestine to Sudan, the West has robbed the people of their right to innocence. Ibrahim Traore, president of Burkina Faso, for instance, is said to be a violent tyrant — so the U.S. can plot to assassinate him and pillage his country. Who is really innocent? What are the true crimes? If you listen to the U.S. government, you’ll never know.

There is a cradle of popular revolution rising. The zionist genocide is not merely confined to the borders of the zionist state. In fact, it is a genocide being carried out with the policy protections and active support of the United States government and our ruling class. It is a United States genocide. The United States has determined to expand its military borders to the four corners of the earth; its bases are located throughout the entire world. Its tendrils reach into every economy in every country. In such a case, the front, the frontier, the border, is everywhere. There is no “rear,” there are no “civilian populations.” Take the words of the genocidaires as true: there are those who are for and those who are against it.

“There are no innocent civilians,” according to the zionist embassies.

Every act of resistance builds up friction inside the imperialist machine. It is right and brave to inhibit the empire from carrying out its genocidal tasks. Policy makers and imperial managers must be made to understand that they are not secure. They are not safe behind the walls of a U.S. border. There is no territory, there is no home, that cannot instantly become the frontlines of the fight. Only when the political actors and the ruling, owning, capitalist class realize that they cannot sit safely in their glass and steel towers and derelict the murder and massacre of millions across the globe will they relent, will they pause. For them there are only two considerations: 1) profit, and 2) geopolitical stability. That means the ability of the U.S. empire to continue supporting their businesses abroad and extracting profit. It can all be boiled down to profit and its continuation. If we want our collective voices to be heard, to be louder than the few additional dollars for the U.S. ruling class, then we must amplify them. We cannot speak, we must shout. We cannot talk, we must argue.

There is only one argument the enemy respects.

Last week, the popular consciousness once again exploded: Elias Rodriguez, unable to find an organization that was prepared to meaningfully confront the economic and political machinery of the U.S. state — unable to find some way to strike at the U.S. backbone for the zionists’ genocidal army — took desperate, direct, action. He killed two genocidaires in the heart of their rear base, the United States.

With this act, Elias has done more to expose the opportunists who wrap themselves in red flags than a century of angry condemnations. As the news and capitalist police rushed to connect Elias with the PSL that “party” for socialism and liberation issued a statement disowning him. “We have nothing to do with this shooting,” their media people wrote — but they didn’t stop there. “We have nothing to do with this shooting and we do not support it.”

OK, they’re under pressure to prevent the state from swinging its heavy hammer in their direction. It’s a cowardly but comprehensible move from an organization with no underground that has never laid out a clear theoretical path from the present moment to a future revolution. A Communist party cannot hide its plan for revolution!

The CPUSA then released a long-winded weepy statement condemning “MAGA” and Trump and openly denouncing violence. They never mention, of course, Joseph Robinette Biden or his genocidal advisors. Scores of Trotskyists began to wail and gnash their teeth, doing their best to deny Elias’ heroism.

These people have either forgotten or are intentionally distorting the goals and meaning of the Communist movement. Our aim is to carry the red flag forward, to rally all progressive forces to fight for liberation. Liberals, who make even their protests serve to uphold the capitalist-imperialist systems of oppression, despise liberatory violence. Pacifism is the credo not of the revolutionary, but of the priests of capitalism, of the adherents of order. Our work is to destroy the capitalist order.

One of the tasks of the Communists, especially now, while the revolutionary class in the West is scattered and incoherent, is to teach the masses to reach toward a revolutionary horizon; it’s to give the working class the power to imagine a future where they actually confront the enemy class and its footsoldiers, not metaphorically, but actually — with guns and bombs.

Anything that makes that job harder, like scandalizing the outbursts of liberatory violence that come with the sharpening of contradictions, is not only a poor tactic, it is actively reactionary.

Petty-bourgeois social democrats and “Communists” tend to be cowards. Unable to imagine revolution, unable to conceive of fighting or (imagine it!) dying for a better world, because they already have so much to risk, so much to lose. They have an instinctive fear of destabilization and violence. Psychologically, that occurs because the capitalist state and the status quo works for their class. They see, in the state and its politicians, their actual representatives, or at least their proxies. They see, in the state and the police, human beings; themselves.

Denouncing violence will not endear the working class to communism. It will not fool the agents of the capitalist state. It will not deflect scrutiny or prosecution. By denouncing explosions of liberatory violence, a Communist does not correct the “error” of the masses in their use of individual terror. Warping Lenin’s criticisms of the Social Revolutionaries can’t justify a Communist in rejecting liberatory acts of spontaneous terror. Adventurism is the act of an organization that disorganizes the masses, not the spontaneous expression of mass anger. There is no coherent class consciousness in the U.S. to disorganize, let alone a party that might disorganize it.

What is the source of this gross misdiagnosis? The Trotskyists and revisionists have identified Elias Rodriguez’s acts as the result of organized terrorism, directed by a theoretically insufficient party, like the violence of Narodnaya Volya or the Social Revolutionaries. What they fail to realize is that Russia had to pass through Narodism before it arrived at Marxism-Leninism; Narodism was the unconscious urge without scientific analysis that helped to organize the class. The second thing they fail to recognize is that there is no revolutionary party in the West. If there were, Elias Rodriguez would not have done what he did, because there would have been a viable organized alternative.

And yes.

That party might make use of terror against the state.

Mahmoud has not been charged with any listed offense; his crime is his support for the Palestinian national liberation movement. Mahmoud stood against the slaughter of his people and the ongoing theft of their homeland. The fascist Empire is committed to worldwide terror and the enslavement of humanity. The state would rather us remain silent, going about our cleaved lives apathetic to genocide — this is vile and unacceptable. 

Free speech is dead. Did it ever exist in the first place?

Our free speech rights go about as deep as a puddle on the side of the road. The American Fourth Reich, aided by the skeletal Democratic party, has gutted what little was left of so-called “civil liberties” in this country. The U.S.’s liberal democracy was founded on the “rights” of only the white, slave-owning, and propertied classes, leaving everyone else, especially enslaved peoples, grasping for the shards of a deadened life.

Regardless of what the slave owners who founded this country may have intended when they wrote the Constitution in 1791, the settler-imperial government has never meaningfully valued free speech. Just seven years and one president later, the John Adams administration would pass the Alien and Sedition Acts: the Sedition laws criminalized any negative speech against the government, while the Alien Acts let the president deport any foreign nationals. Adams, who was a federalist, used the Sedition Acts to arrest journalists supporting his political opponents, the Democratic Republicans. The minute differences between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans are not terribly significant — (both supported the slavery of New Afrikans and the genocide of Indigenous Turtle Islanders) — suffice to say they were the two dominant tendencies of early USian politics. Adams lost the political battle; the Democratic Republicans won the next election and repealed the Sedition Acts. And the Alien Acts? They remain in effect to this day. The president may therefore deport any foreign national they consider to be dangerous, based on this 225 year old law.  In essence, dystopian state repression is one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy.

The Alien and Sedition Acts would be the first major crackdown on free speech, but they are not the last, nor the most recent. The Democratic-Republicans had their own opportunity to silence mass dissent a few decades later when the abolition of slavery became a contentious issue. In 1836, an Andrew Jackson-controlled Congress ratified a gag order banning any mention of abolition in the halls of Congress. 

In light of the modern national security state, first amendment rights are shallow.  With state surveillance and a history of interference in liberation movements, an American citizen’s speech may be free, but only so long as their words remain barren and removed from action. The Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement: when nationally oppressed groups peaceably assemble, we can see time and time again that the First Amendment often has a selective application. Perpetual surveillance, state assassinations; sharpened knives which they are ready to use against any defiant organization. 

Before the regime will criminalize your collective expression, two circumstances must generally be met. 

1. The expression must be dissent, i.e., it must go against the regime’s foreign or domestic policy.
2. The expression must be popular. The degree of popularity can vary, but generally, the dissenting speech or collective expression must be popular enough for the regime to consider it a threat to its rule or the implementation of its policy. 

Popular dissent is forbidden.  

If this clownish blockheaded President is trying to weaken free speech rights on campus, he is late to the party. Colleges and universities across the Empire beat him to the punch by launching a full scale offensive against the right to protest before the Fall 2024 semester. Protests now have formal time limits. They are banned in popular gathering spots. Fascism on the Amerikkkan campus is objectively bipartisan. Trump’s threat is a promise to build upon the groundwork that was laid last year. Do not be scared. For fear is your greatest enemy. Now, we’re all able to see clearly without the blinding, twisted distortions of Democrats who use identity essentialism as bait in order to duplicitously rally support for their graveyard of a party, and therefore gut the very undercarriage of revolutionary understanding and action of the mass of vexed workers.

Saturday’s attack on student resistance was orchestrated by the regime’s use of the word “terrorist;” it is, by all means, a propagandistic term in the modern U.S., the same way “communist” was in the past, and is in the present. The state of course uses the veneer of a mythical “antisemitism” to justify its draconian measures. Claims of a phantasmal antisemitism from the very same administration that goes around giving Nazi salutes. Remember, the Trumpian gendarmes are the very same ilk that said “Jews will not replace us.” The very same people whose base committed a massacre in a synagogue,  now want to wage a “holy war,” which they pretend is for the very Jewish people they tried to mass murder. 

However, we must recognize that we’re in the depths of a revolutionary moment. The inflection points of class war are nearing a breaking crescendo, and it is up to us in the anti-imperialist movement to understand this dialectic of intense struggle and form a clear and firm guide to action. Now is the time to unite with left and progressive forces (While not compromising the proven Marxists analysis) to defeat the fascist juggernaut. In the age of techno-imperialism and the mass slaughter of our people, we must do away with the muddled Trotskyist tendency of splintering into groups of 50 (that has historically gutted the left in this country) and form a temporary alliance to defeat the strangling repression of the Trump regime. We, the mass reserved army of labor must pick up the red banner and fight for the liberation of all those colonized, imprisoned, and hyper-exploited. 

Over the coming weeks and years the three stages of the ceasefire agreement are supposed to be completed (that is, if the zionists do not reverse the process). The conditions are: the beginning of a ceasefire, the releasing of settler hostages, the freeing of Palestinian political prisoners, the clearing of IOF forces out of Gaza, and humanitarian relief. Stage two formally establishes the ceasefire and consists of more freeing of Palestinian political prisoners. Stage three is the great reconstruction of Gaza.

In the past, Democrats pointed fingers at the Bush family for their genocides in Iraq. Now, Palestine, Gaza, this is their genocide. The Democratic Party genocide. The Biden-Harris genocide. They said the other party would do genocide worse — but now it is wholly the operation of the Democratic Party. Still, arguing Trump is worse when it comes to Gaza can be ascribed only to ignorance and lies. Every Democrat who said there was no way to stop the genocide has nothing to say now. Nothing remains in the bank of excuses — it is empty, they have no choice but to embrace reaction even more explicitly and to deny the blatant reality that has arrested their efforts.

Reactionaries will try to sell the lie that this ceasefire changes the entire situation. Fundamentally, no change in the relation between colonizer and colonized has been affected. Palestine remains in antagonism with the zionist entity; struggle for the liberation of Palestine continues as long as the zionist entity continues to exist. It is a temporary move, not a permanent qualitative leap.

It is important to stress this because as we write these words, the zionist imperialist running dogs are now proceeding to storm the streets of Jenin in the West Bank (after already having stormed Jenin time and time again in the years of constant attack and bombardment). Zionists are ordering displacement of Palestinian people in Jenin and are trying to kill the Palestinian resistance there, which is itself, like Gaza, a home of refugees displaced from other Palestinian communities. To the degree that Gaza is able to live in so-called “peace” shall be the degree to which Jenin is being bombed and raided.

Gaza — every city; north, south and central — is left completely in ruins. Not a single part has been untouched, there are but rubble and broken families scattered about, the people dreaming of relatives that today only exist as memories. Already before October, Gaza suffered high rates of PTSD, depression, and poor mental health — particularly among youth. How much has it risen, after 400 days? Now more than ever before, the terrorized Palestinian people will fight for their nation; the Palestinian people have repeatedly had to bury entire family lines and have been militarized by it. If it was to be argued that this was about clearing Gaza of resistance fighters, even the highest-ranking zionist officials know (though perhaps want to forget) that this is impossible — unless every Palestinian person is murdered. The women and youth are now militarized. Gaza’s streets were filled with civilians chanting “we’d rather die than be humiliated.” And this is why zionism can only mean the complete extermination of the Palestinian people. A permanent ceasefire is impossible — it will not hold, it is simply extra time for the zionist entity; a ceasefire is an unsolved antagonism, it will last as long as the previous ceasefire that was agreed to in 2021. There have been many ceasefire agreements — practically every zionist operation in Gaza has ended with a ceasefire, though the firing never ceases — and soon after the zionist offensive against Palestine started back up in full swing.

We have to stay vigilant. Palestine must remain our pulsing priority, all the more so because we are in the imperial core — the decaying, moribund, spiritually dead core that has been trying and failing miserably to wash its hands of all of the Palestinian blood that has stained it. 

What, in any case, is a ceasefire when the West Bank is still under attack? What is ceasefire while relentless, unyielding settler expansion continues into Gaza, along with the continued colonialist whitewashing and demolition of everything Palestinian? What is a ceasefire when Palestine is still under blockade, when Palestine still cannot control its resources and the zionists can cut them off at any time, when Palestinians do not even have houses to live in during wintertime?

Criticism must be made of those who insisted only upon “ceasefire now” in the west: a westerner is someone drowned in material privileges from the super exploitation of the entire world. On this basis, chauvinism is a conditioned trait of the westerner. To be cured of it they must be persistently, unceasingly educated in a decolonial Marxist politic that leads them to supporting resistance of the third world against “their own” bourgeoisie, imperialism, and colonialism. “Ceasefire now” accomplishes nothing in this direction — it only requires temporary attention to a colony, rather than the persistent demand for the immediate liberation of the colony. We will not stop and shall not rest until the dissolution of zionism. “Ceasefire now” only means taking the knife out of the back of the oppressed by a few inches. It neither removes the knife nor covers the wound. It does not start any process of healing and restoration. This demand being so strongly emphasized will bring with it many “pro-Palestine” westerners who only care for Palestine when the terror is most explicit — and they will be distracted and apathetic. These people will forget about Palestine and will turn away to join the rest of the world in its collective amnesia and complicity. 

We have a ceasefire, but it is a ceasefire within the bounds of genocide. On the part of zionists and the imperialists which direct them, the point is still to make Palestine nonexistent, and to make the Palestinian people a bygone fact. Netanyahu tried to delay the ceasefire agreement — one of the many signs that the zionist entity is simply, by virtue of existence, incompatible with peace. And on the morning of January 29th, a zionist air strike murdered ten Palestinians in the West Bank, purportedly “militants.” Every Palestinian is a militant to the zionist entity because the Palestinians have dared to not be eradicated. 

It is being argued this ceasefire is an agreement the Trump administration helped push — this interpretation is incorrect. A certain use for this claim might be found as a jab at the genocidal Biden administration and the genocidal Democratic Party to show how, for all their supposed “progressivism” and “concern for human rights,” they did not stop the genocide or even bring about the ceasefire. Instead, they did the opposite. But this forgets what is crucial; the ceasefire agreed to was the same one the Palestinian resistance itself several months ago proposed, which the zionists initially rejected. When it comes to the ceasefire, one point must be borne in mind: the Palestinian resistance has forced it through political-military power. They have forced it through mortars and explosives, through liquidating tanks and by shooting back at zionist invaders. It was not the doing of any one person, but rather of the Palestinian resistance going on the offensive. The zionist entity spent 400 days fighting against the Palestinians for daring to refuse quiet submission to holocaust. The spirit of the Warsaw ghetto uprising existed within them, and all the passion went into fighting zionism. All the genocide, all the killing, and yet the Palestinian resistance has only become stronger. By the end of it, the zionist entity was simply losing, and they couldn’t possibly make it appear otherwise except to their most rabid supporters.

The zionists cannot win what they have already lost. They bombed all of Gaza, terrorized all its people but Hamas and Al-Qassam are still standing in Gaza today. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Al-Quds brigades are still standing. The PFLP and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades are still standing. And more brigades are emerging in the embrace of mass spontaneous demonstrations.

Marxists will always support armed resistance by Gaza and Palestine. “Well-meaning” young Marxists like to argue that zionists are first to attack in nine cases out of ten, and that in the case of October, the al-Aqsa flood, they had no choice; that the root cause stems back far before October. Perhaps in the context of talking to very confused people, this is sensible (hasbara monopolizes upon the insistence that there was no sign of this uprising coming and that it was some wanton act of violence), and most certainly this has to do with social context before October — but ideologically speaking, this is fundamentally not the point, because regardless of when the oppression began, Marxists support uprisings of the Palestinian resistance, supports national liberation wars, and supports them with utmost enthusiasm regardless of who attacks first, regardless of if it seems “unexpected” or not, regardless of whether or not it seems to have been timed correctly or strategically, regardless of all the ploys of the oppressor to placate the population and surrounding countries with deceptive promises and false peace treaties. With Palestine, the concern is not whether one side or the other attacked first. The concern is national liberation and the blow against imperialism and settler colonialism — an attack on capitalism itself. The violence of the oppressed is supported because it is scientific and a cleansing force against colonialism and imperialism.

All eyes must remain on Gaza because the zionists will violate the ceasefire again; it is not a matter of if but of when. It will come in the form of savage zionist terror that manages to surprise the entire world again and become even worse than before. 

All eyes must remain on Palestine, but also on Lebanon and Yemen, both of which the zionist entity will repeatedly aggress against regardless of this ceasefire agreement. 

And all eyes must remain on all the agents of terror who in one way or another perpetuated this genocide. They must not be allowed to sleep in peace. We shall swamp them with the irate and strenuously haunt them with the deceased. And when the ceasefire inevitably fails, it is they who will be at fault for all of the renewed suffering and the renewed terror.

Hanan, who grew up in a refugee camp near Bethlehem, won the award for her work supporting children traumatized by violence, a violence she knew all too well when her 9-year-old twins and 6-year-old son were shot at by IDF soldiers during the second Intifada. Only around 10 years earlier had her husband, a chemist, been released by Israeli authorities after a decade-long incarceration.

Violence targeting and affecting the educational infrastructure of the Palestinian State, specifically inside of the Gaza Strip concentration camp, is no outlier when it comes to the strategy of the zionist military. On the 10th of October, 2023, the IOF bombed the first university established in the strip, the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), destroying multiple buildings and disrupting the lives of thousands of students and faculty. Around the same time, Palestine Technical College announced two of their students had been killed in airstrikes, while a PhD student and his family on vacation in the strip were also victims of zionist air-to-surface missiles. What Palestinian students and teachers have been subjected to what can only be described as scholasticide, with most having not attended school for over a year under the relentless destruction caused by the invading forces of the zionist entity.

A Brief History of Higher Education in the Gaza Strip

Before 1967, no universities existed in either the occupied West Bank nor the Gaza Strip. Palestinian students, however, enjoyed free access to numerous Arab universities across the Middle East. Due to the fact that people in the West Bank were considered Jordanian citizens, most had direct access to the University of Jordan. Likewise, those in the strip could go to Egypt to complete their degrees.

This access was curbed when the zionists, after their crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War,  enforced their occupation, stiffening border security and harassing those leaving and reentering alike, making a trip abroad almost completely impossible. It was around this time that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) started to heavily consider independent higher education inside Palestine itself. By 1978, a few existing junior colleges had been expanded and two universities, the An-Najah National University in the West Bank and the aforementioned IUG, had been founded. 

The zionists, of course, could not handle what it saw as an attempt to subvert their authority, and began to burden the schools with numerous obstacles. Licensing was time consuming and strictly enforced on an annual basis, building permits were stalled and fought tooth-and-nail all the way to the Supreme Court, and military authorities illegally withheld tax exemptions on construction, materials, and books. Censorship of books and other written material on school campuses was regular under the pretence of “security reasons,” as was withholding work permits for international faculty and Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship. Yet more, this battle of red tape paled in comparison to the military-enforced shutdowns that schools were regularly subjected to, a sinister prelude to the scholasticide we see happening today. 

The State of Education in Gaza Today

Since the zionist onslaught on the Gaza Strip renewed in October, 2023, access to education has been reduced to nearly zero. What remains of structured education has been limited to rudimentary study groups within tents turned makeshift classrooms. Even this, as bare bones as it sounds, is regularly uprooted by constant “evacuation orders” and random airstrikes. The destruction of more than 378 schools and universities across the strip led to these conditions, and the pariah state of “israel” sees no reason to stop their crimes against humanity.

It is estimated that, at the very least, 11,500 students below the age of 18 have been murdered, along with 750 of their teachers as of September. Because of the lack of resources, finding a true body count is impossible at this stage, leaving the Ministry of Health and international organizations alike in the dark about any sort of real estimate. This inability to properly count casualties, of course, plays into the narrative that ANY number given is false and created by “Hamas” to discredit “israel”, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and also suggests that any official count is a vast underestimate. We can easily transfer this logic of an undercount to the official number of teachers and students who have been made victims in the year-long massacre, showing the extent of pure devastation that has been wrought on the education system of Gaza. There is a clear line between the targeted military shutdowns of the past to the genocide by air we see being committed today; it is clear that the zionist entity sees education, not only of the higher variety but of elementary and secondary as well, as a form of independence for Palestinian people that it just cannot let live, and a direct threat to the legitimacy of the ethno-state occupying Palestinian lands.

Scholasticide as an Imperial strategy

What we see in Gaza is an extension of imperial science; no cultural institution may get in the way of empire’s ambitions. If the institution, or even the subjects within the institution, start to fall out of line with said strategy, certain advantages once enjoyed by said institution can be readily taken away. An example of this is the spring and summer of 2024, when students across the United States and Canada rose up, occupying campuses and buildings alike in an attempt to force these imperial entities to stop supporting what the zionists’ genocide of Palestinians. What should have been accepted as a show of our great “first amendment rights” turned into a state crackdown, supported by both parties in the U.S. government and spurred on by President Joe Biden. What these crackdowns show is how easily the privileged status of colleges and universities can be revoked when the students and faculty take even one step out of the bounds set by the imperial masters, the status quo that reinforces the norm of violence unto those in the peripheries.

The zionists did not invent this strategy. The attacks being inflicted on vital Palestinian educational infrastructure is an age-old colonial tactic, one that must be combatted at all costs, with vehement opposition from those in the imperial core being used to amplify the voices of those within the periphery. Palestine must be free, and its education must be allowed to flourish to nourish a vibrant national identity. We in the metropole must do our part in aiding them in their valiant attempt to throw off their oppressors.

Education and National Identity

The removal of education – already established as a fundamental strategy of the IOF in Gaza – can be seen as an extension of the goal the entity has had since even before the Nakba of 1948: the total elimination of a Palestinian nationality. Strong national ties to a state’s higher institutions have helped cultivate the culture and language of any one given region, giving certain peoples a “permission to narrate” their own story as said by Edward Said. Imagine England without Oxford, Germany sans Heidelberg, and the United States itself without its precious prodigious Ivy League schools. To have these is to have a certain authority, one which, despite the myriad mistakes and problems within them as they exist at present, lends a certain credence to the people associated. Criticisms aside, academia has the unique ability to assist the progression of a group, especially when academics stay within their locales. Cuba, despite crushing sanctions on the tiny island, has produced, beyond its limits, world-class doctors. These doctors have, to the chagrin of many Western nations (specifically the U.S.) elevated the status of the country. If a region does not suffer a brain drain, these college educated people can lead to a drastically more self-sufficient society.

The zionists know this, and they may have discovered it after they created their own so-called “problem.” As noted before, Palestinians were only able to leave to get any higher education. The West Bank alone was Jordanian territory. Israel itself created the conditions that led to the establishment of universities after their 1967 victory, isolating Palestinians to the Gaza Strip and the aforementioned West Bank, which no longer fell under Jordanian jurisdiction. Only after this isolation from other Arab states forced upon them by the occupation did the PLO even consider the need for higher learning within Palestinian territory. A reliance on Arab nationalism may have stifled any ideas for this before, but now there was a necessity. 

The establishment of universities in 1978 coincided with the slow movement of the Palestinians away from strict Arab nationalism and into a homegrown identity of those still within the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. By the late 80’s and the First Intifada, most of the leadership of the PLO had not stepped foot into Palestine proper in decades. The rise and subsequent popularity of Hamas thereafter shows a clear split from those abroad and those within the territories actively under occupation by Israel.

Doctors and researchers were not absent; in fact the lack of mobility actually led to the majority of educated people in Palestine to stay there, to foster their skills and use them to full effect. This has led to highly skilled, highly motivated, and, to the zionists’ dissatisfaction, a highly homogenous populace. Those in Gaza and the West Bank aren’t, for a lack of a better word, stupid, nor are they confused, unfocused, helpless refugees. Palestinians have, despite everything stacked against them, fostered a deep academic tradition that has ushered them out of the PLO years where they relied heavily on their Arab siblings. When that reliance failed, they, undeterred, set out to carve their own path. Resolutely and unabashedly, the people within Palestine did what zionism could not bear; they chose to take back their permission to narrate, their ability to tell their own story with their own words, and become self-reliant within and despite the structures of occupation that hang over their heads decade after decade. 

Zionism cannot let such things persist, because if they do, if a single school still stands, that means, with their settler-colonial mindset, Palestine as a people, as a nation, still has hope. For zionism to survive, this hope must be snuffed out at all costs. Zionism must block the light that is a Palestinian tomorrow.