Fuck a ceasefire, END APARTHEID!
This is and I mean this with love what Lenin was criticising when he called left communism an infantile disorder
you can’t just yell “revolution now” and think that accomplishes something. A ceasefire is the necessary first step on the road to Palestinian liberation and it does no one any good to signal that you are more correct and distract from the actual necessity of ceasefire
the good Vladimir Lenin would have called everyone in this room a liberal
I’m inclined to agree with you.
But on the other hand, you will never get what you actually want unless you articulate what that is. What good is a ceasefire if it never leads to the end of Israeli apartheid?
Another argument for demanding what you ultimately want to achieve is that it makes the ceasefire position appear to be the moderate position, which worked well in the civil rights movement in the US. When the black power/BPP started organizing it made MLK look moderate and helped him win concessions from the government.
But yes my post was meant as a provocation to start a discussion.
What good is a ceasefire if it never leads to the end of Israeli apartheid?
well if you get a ceasefire your demands change, since you presumably got it by creating a very powerful movement that is now able to ask for more. One school of thought would have you make transitional demands which both materially improve people’s lives and build class consciousness, so that they can escalate as the movement builds momentum and achieves demands.
A indefinite ceasefire - like the DPRK and South Korea have, I’ll point out - is one step closer to a two-state solution. Lots of possibilities from there.
You are presupposing operation Al-Aqsa flood was intended/believed to be the initiation of decolonial people’s war. The intention of Hamas was to 1) interrupt normalization, 2) terminally undermine internal and international confidence in Israel, and 3) force the world to witness Israeli genocide which it had been pointedly blind to before.
These goals are largely met, there is not momentum or preparation for wider armed struggle, and so a ceasefire and two-state is the immediate demand. In no world does Hamas believe that a two-state solution with Israel in control of >80% of historical Palestine is correct or the final goal.
No.
Subordinate your position to the line of the organisations in leadership. Support for Palestinian resistance IS supporting the line that they themselves have, and in the current moment they were calling for a ceasefire. Organisations are better placed to make correct decisions on strategy.
If calling for a ceasefire does not require you to express your position on support for or against the resistance then you should utilise whatever position works best in whatever context you have in order to call most strongly for that ceasefire. Compromising your calls for ceasefire by taking up a position on the resistance that doesn’t suit the context doesn’t really help them.
But also yes, end apartheid.
Yeah, resistance to apartheid would be cool, awesome, and good, but if you and yours aren’t the ones to fight, then it’d be weird if the would-be combatants don’t want to fight. Violence fucking sucks. It’s not fun, it’s not glorious, and even when your enemy is wretched, it doesn’t feel good to snuff out their life. Even the Japanese in WW2 were convinced to stop in the face of overwhelming violence when, before, they had elements in power saying they’d rather be exterminated than give up.
I’ll keep yelling into the void about how unpleasant it would be if you were in a grappling match with a hobbyist BJJ player who was being rough with you as a benchmark for a violent altercation. Then go on about how much worse it would get when the person’s intentions get meaner, their training increases, and their weapons get larger. Not to mention the collateral damage of having family members die pinned by the debris of a fallen hospital. I wouldn’t want to risk the violence befalling my loved ones which is Israel’s modus operandi. Calling for more of it is like being Eren Yeager. It’d be a perfectly sane position for a Palestinian to not want more bloodshed. In the pure world, the land of the free would pursue justice for Palestine having seen the insanity of Israel and seek the unraveling of the apartheid regime.
Even the Japanese in WW2 were convinced to stop in the face of overwhelming violence when, before, they had elements in power saying they’d rather be exterminated than give up.
I heard they actually were just insisting the soviets be at the treaty negotiations so they didn’t have to negotiate two peaces
I’m ready to believe that. A source would still be nice.
I would also put forward that overwhelming force, even without an atomic bomb, was enough to convince people who beforehand would have preferred that the island be exterminated.
Agreed, had a fellow protester try to start a chant about supporting resistance fighters and hang gliders or something at the last action I was at. I’ll be the first to say individually that I do support them, but it was obvious the chant was rubbing people the wrong way and would detract from the wider ceasefire message at the gathering.
Almost seems like leftist virtue signaling, it is only for you and not helping any other part of the movement
That’s kinda funny because all the protests I’ve attended the speakers have started intifada and revolution chants which shocked me also because of the contradiction with demands. The crowd is totally into it though which is cool
I’ve heard “there is only one solution / intifada revolution” but not “they have tanks we have hang gliders” (which is funny) irl.
I was amused with the tanks and hang gliders, that’s for sure
The Intifada one didn’t show up for a few weeks at mine, the only one solution made me feel a bit off at first, but overall I don’t mind it as much.
After reading the other poster’s reply here, I do see the point about contradiction with what the PFLP have asked for. Perhaps I see it as a way to tie together struggle and revolution in Palestine with how protests and organizing in your location can also be the solution.
I think it’s important to say that what matters is not what “the message” is that was intended and some sort of distractions/people disagreeing. That all must be subordinated to the actions/line of the party familiar with the conditions. It would be correct to ‘rub the wrong way’ if that were the line of PFLP. We dont subordinate to what is popular unless that is what is advantageous. Palestinians wanted a ceasefire and asked for westerners to support it, and that’s why it’s the correct line
Thanks, that is well articulated
I mean let’s be honest a ceasefire is just a good demand tactically. The 2014 BLM movement shot itself in the foot by demanding police abolition since that’s just not a policy that can be enacted. Unrealistic demands just stifle movements and lead to burn out.
BLM is more complex. That movement fundamentally couldn’t have kicked off the way it did without being radical, the very moment you switch to “make the police better a little bit” you’d have sucked all wind out of the movement because black people who have suffered at the hands of the police would not have participated, they hate them and do not see it as fundamentally repairable. And they’re probably correct because the country isn’t reformable and was built upon a fundamental foundation of their repression.
You’re right about burn out eventually setting in on movements that can’t achieve their goals. But this is where zooming out and looking at things hollistically is necessary, the act of performing struggle caused a great deal of cultural change in attitudes to the police. It should be viewed as one of many battles in a string of battles that leads to something eventually rather than a failure in isolation.
I mean, it’s not because of the demands that blm failed, with all the moderation in 2020, they got equally dicked in concessions
Listen to and follow the people who are actually leading the struggle and the ones that are directly affected and concerned
Every leading Palestinian Western org afaik is requesting a ceasefire
Hamas themselves are asking for a ceasefire. They’re not even asking for a unified Palestine.
They’re willing to accept a 2 state solution on 1967 borders
Also, assuming you’re in the West
What does a call for supporting the resistance mean? It’d be asking your government to support Palestine and all of its liberation groups politically, financially, and possibly even militarily
Never going to happen. Complete waste of time
A call for ceasefire means asking your state to stop actively supporting Israel in the conflict. Still maybe impossible tbh but not completely out of the question, especially if you will accept < national scope as wins
Imagine calling Hamas “liberals.” Could never be me. Luckily our opinions here are irrelevant, I support the decisions of those who do the fighting.
I’ve just rang up Mr Hamas and told him that online leftists will call him a lib if he continues calling for ceasefire
There’s some value in calling for a tepid compromise and shining a spotlight on the psychotic response. Zionists have overextended their hand by relentlessly attacking calls for a ceasefire, revealing themselves to be bloodthirsty colonizers.
On the other hand, there’s only so much value in pointing out hypocrisy. It doesn’t really weaken the Zionist position to reveal them as monsters.
So basically idk
Yeah, I think the problem with winning a moral or propaganda victory with the West is that in 6 months the attention of the average Westoid will be drawn to the next global incident and by the next genocidal flareup you’ll have to start from zero again with most Westoids.
That being said, I feel like there’s some sort of change coalescing in the Global South, spurred on in large part by blatant Israeli hypocrisy in opposing a ceasefire.
A true propaganda victory in the West is hard to imagine, yeah. Maybe it’ll be possible to make a sustainable change in attitudes towards Israel, but even if that happens the Western governments have shown how little public sentiments matter to them anyway.
Oh! Another benefit is this demoralizes the occupation forces. Soldiers are less likely to volunteer for a war they consider pointless and cruel, which could result in personnel shortages. Also, you know, fragging
… Maybe? idk
If the public sees that their sentiment doesn’t affect anything then they will be more likely to be radicalized. We get closer to revolution.
People will remember if it’s Israel Palestine again. The public patience for individual wars isn’t infinite
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Hamas themselves called for a ceasefire, guess they’re liberals too.
I stand with Brace and the Chapo boys that the US should perform a humanitarian intervention and invade the US. Especially troubling that the Israeli regime has illegal WMDs that they refuse to allow UN inspectors in to assess
The US has both invaded and coup’d itself in the past, what more do they want?
Remember how alll these recent candidates had a mysteriously erased / missing foreign policy tab in their campaign issue pages?
I think we need to make it clear across the spectrum Zionism is no longer a viable political position.
Whatever is the most effective method to weaken the Israeli and American war machines, that is the correct position. Sometimes you push broadly popular things like ceasefires because it causes more widespread disruption. I’ll support whatever call the Palestinian resistance make, I’m not going to say they are Liberals for not fighting a doomed battle into oblivion if they feel they should negotiate - I’m also not going to say they are extremists or adventurists for taking radical actions like Oct 7th. They know their conditions, they know the weak points of both sides and the current balances of power. They make the calls, we aren’t there
I support an immediate ceasefire to stop the killing of Palestinians, but the destruction of the Israeli apartheid state is obviously necessary in the longer term
of course, we (those of us in the west) should support a ceasefire, and never overstep what the resistance/Palestinians/etc want BUT it is also our duty to call for a long-term actual PEACE settlement, which is only possible by dismantling the Israeli state (or otherwise significantly changing it from what it is now). if there’s anything missing from the discourse in the west, that would be it.
no one should believe that this whole thing is over after a “ceasefire”- the israelis certainly don’t, I’m sure they’re going right back in as soon as they can with their bombs and tanks, and the resistance also knows this
The ceasefire has allowed for [some] aid to get through.
I support a permanent ceasefire in the sense that the Resistance marching on the streets of the city formally known as Tel Aviv counts as a permanent ceasefire.
