Justice for Palestine

What's going on in Palestine is wrong, but so is the larger geo-political argument trying to justify it—what is, quite simply, genocide for the same old reasons: bourgeois hegemony. The Imperial Core of the Global North sanctions, funds and incites genocide to enrich the elite, including the one occurring right now in Palestine at the hands of the state of Israel and its war criminals (Bad Empanada, "Israeli ETHNIC CLEANSING of Gaza Begins - 1 MILLION Expelled in Another Nakba," 2023). This is entirely wrong on every conceivable register (and demonstrates how nation-states exist purely to serve the profit motive). Palestine is in the right, Israel is not; even when Hamas becomes indiscriminate in their killings of Israeli citizens, you must remember that said citizens are occupiers of stolen land taken through lies and by force—i.e., the ethnostate using its own women and children as human shields during an unlawful occupation that has been ongoing for over seventy years (with the United States' financial backing and geopolitical support). It's a cruel but effective trick: Place the targets of state violence in a ghetto, endlessly kettle them, then ruthlessly punish them when they invariably snap. It is reactive abuse enacted through a settler-colonial model that has evolved into itself over centuries—a business utilized through state mechanisms and capital the likes of which Britain introduced, America perfected, and fascists around the world forever seek to emulate in defense of capital (fascism is a false revolution, vis-à-vis Michael Parenti).

To be clear, these are not new tactics; the establishment are employing tried-and-true maneuvers to move money through nature (vis-à-vis Raj Patel and Jason Moore): infinite military conquest through fascist rhetoric bolstered by centrist dogma. It's Manifest Destiny by another name, amounting to apartheid/ethnic cleansing with more steps by persons within Pax Americana forever seeking the perfect victims to feel sorry about but also superior to as things carry on much as they always have. While the rabid war dogs in Israel (and elsewhere) are bad enough, the core problem is actually the systemic enabling of them by the same old white moderates: a neoconservative ("peace through strength") mantra conducting of the same-old business-as-usual. Regardless of where it occurs, war is an enterprise without end; for the state, war is a means to an end. Instead of a presence of positive peace through actual justice and degrowth, there is merely a negative peace through an absence of tension (vis-à-vis Martin Luther King Jr.); i.e., a lack of conscious class character challenging the day-to-day operations of the great war machine. Except the sheer availability of unfiltered information online makes this a paradox, all the more impossible to be achieved through the cognitive dissonance that results. Yet, people also forget that "absence of tension" is class function, not cultural sentiment as a whole; provided society at large (that of the colonizers) exhibits an inability to meaningfully fight back or challenge the state, pacification—for all intents and purposes—has been achieved and the killings will continue unabated much as they have for decades upon centuries

History continually repeats itself because the material factors that lead to its production and cultural endorsement in the minds of the public—the Base and the Superstructure—shape and maintain each other within said public. Historical materialism, then, is the predication of recorded history on those conditions; i.e., through the machines of war as guided and operated by the same old proponents benefitting from their giant gears turning inside the Imperial Core. The state and the establishment are the enemy. If you doubt my words, look to the response of the leaders of the free world. All they've ever done with their expanded power is conduct Imperialism (the highest form of Capitalism, according to Lenin, 1916): carve the world up and generate pockets of privatized war and frontier Capitalism; i.e., settler-colonialism.

Palestine is no different, but it is far from the first. As the colonial machine rapes a given land mass (generally in the Global South) for its resources, the incessant copaganda and Military Industrial Complex form a terrible bond unto themselves: to make war a business through its operation on all registers; i.e., not just the raw materials harvested, but the war materiel and propaganda attached to them that are made at home then go overseas, but also live in the hearts and minds of the public from moment to waking moment. The genocidal apologia of both sides of the American establishment is merely Imperialism come home to empire, Malcolm X's proverbial chickens roosting in the usual hearts and minds. And so-called "progressives," wanting to perform but not function as better than their prescribed enemies, cannot reconcile this truth.



The waffling "both sides" rhetoric of American liberals is further proof of that—Howard Zinn's words about the American middle class' Faustian bargain with the colonial elite coming to pass, time and time again:

"What made Bacon's Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces [...] Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality" —A People's History of the United States (1980).

In turn, the re-liberalizing of the market (neoliberalism)—specifically of deregulated markets through the abuse of state power and lies—has led to the predictable expansion of nation-state practices and modern war as spreading across the entire globe. Both in theatrical and actual forms, war and genocide have only increased since the so-called economic "end of history" in 1991; and with the socio-material conditions that enabled them, the usual benefactors have, time and time again, looked the other way or jumped through the same old hoops of Capitalist Realism: there is nothing but what currently is and anything else is the end of the world. This model is untenable as is, but the mental gymnastics required to fulfill its continuation must be exhausting. Capitalism alienates, and those who feel nothing for the Palestinians or otherwise stand idly by and say nothing are, in some shape or form, complicit in their annihilation (and the annihilations of all peoples living in the Global South).

I, for one, will not stand idly by while the same old proponents of Imperialism make the same old tired arguments to serve the elite. These are people's lives, ground into dust by the great machine of capital as having become an ever larger and more fearsome monster as time goes on. Even if those in the present fall into the state of exception, targeted for termination inside state-manufactured prisons by old ghouls like the American establishment (the mother territory) and her allies, we should not be silent as they siphon all life from the land and its peoples, places and ecosystems; the elite and their supporters need to be exposed for what they are: the Great Destroyers of our age, the ultimate threat to all life on the planet purely to enrich the smallest number of persons they can. In line with today being Friday the 13th, think of the elite (and nation-states) as the undying slasher that both never seems to die but is always in decay. Israel is fascist, and fascism is Capitalism in decay. American Liberalism and the neoliberal market demand eternal crisis that leads to decay that must be aided and supported. To that, the Israeli state is the 21st century version of the Nazi war machine (echoing Hilter's beerhall putsch [and later his war into Poland and Russia appeased by Britain and America] as they shove into Gaza). War pimps and jailors speaking pretty words, the enablers of Israel are little more than murderers who come to you with smiles. They will destroy the Global South and then set their sights (and mercenaries) on the Global North (which is already a police state rife with fascism) as the Imperial Boomerang sails home. Fuck them.

The West and its supporters are the enemy of all that is good and right in the world. Justice for Palestine.



Persephone van der Waard is an anarcho-Communist, sex worker, genderqueer activist and Gothic ludologist. She sometimes writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun; or does independent research for her PhD on Metroidvania and speedrunning every now and again. She's also an erotic artist and a writer. If you're interested in her work or curious about illustrated or written commissions, please refer to her website for more information.