CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Resistance Fights On, as the Cowardly Crusaders Flounder

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

With a fictional ceasefire in place, Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, just in a lower gear. The people of Gaza are still living each day amid the chaos and terror brought by Israel. And Israeli leaders are still making crystal clear their intentions to destroy Palestinian society and erase from collective memory the fact that Palestinians ever existed.

Meanwhile, the armed resistance groups in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon carry on toward their common goal: to drive Israeli occupation forces out of their respective homelands and end the slaughter, displacement, and dispossession of their people. They’d rather be living a normal life. They wouldn’t be firing a single rocket, shell, or bullet if Israelis were not constantly committing atrocities in an effort to seize all of Palestine, southern Lebanon, and lands beyond.

Palestinian and Lebanese armed resistance to Israeli occupation is justified under a large body of international law. Israel’s declarations of genocidal intent and its genocidal actions of the past 31 months have strengthened the case for armed resistance even more. And the abject refusal of the US, EU, and UN to sanction and disarm Israel has sharpened the existential necessity that Palestinians engage in armed self-defense.

It’s All the One Long Struggle

In March, with the US and Israel having launched their unprovoked war on Iran, Wissam Charafeddine of Dearborn Blog wrote against the kind of “realism” that pundits always use to justify the initiation of such illegal military conflict—lame arguments that, he wrote, go something like this: “Yes, there is aggression, but what about Iran? Yes, there is an illegal war, but what about the regime?” Of course, he noted, this illogic is routinely applied to Israel’s long history of aggression against the Palestinians:

The obsession with false balance has done enormous damage in our part of the world. Every time an existential threat becomes visible, some commentators rush to flatten the hierarchy of dangers. The occupier and the occupied. The invader and the invaded. The empire and the state under bombardment. Everyone gets blended into one gray puddle. Then we are told this is maturity.

Ramzy Baroud, editor of The Palestine Chronicle, made a similar point regarding Palestine in an April essay, arguing that too many Americans who claim to be anti-war or even pro-Palestinian

. . . acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism.” They oppose Israeli policies yet insist on distancing themselves from Hamas and the others, as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza can be meaningfully compared.

. . . acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism.” They oppose Israeli policies yet insist on distancing themselves from Hamas and the others, as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter........

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