09/24/2024
In a recent interview with Glenn Greenwald, Norman Finkelstein argued something which should have been completely obvious: Israel has effectively won in Gaza. Yes, they haven't achieved their stated objectives, but anyone who has been paying attention knows that their stated objectives are a smokescreen. Their real objective, as we all know, has had nothing to do with Hamas. Their objective has been to commit genocide against the population of Gaza, to make Gaza uninhabitable. This, they have achieved.
This is a dose of reality, I think. The methods which have been utilized, in the US, so far have not been effective to say the least. The UK's Palestine Action movement has been far more active than ours, and we basically have been bungling it so constantly that we're going to end up at a point where a huge civil war is required just to get the US out of a major supporting military role in the 3rd front of Israel's middle east Holocaust. We can't prance around mincing words, even the smallest acts of non-violent sabotage, so long as they disrupt the flow of cash from banks, arms manufacturers, complicit media, etc. are absolutely necessary. If you're too scared, I'll do it for you, I don't see any value in fearing what I have to lose if the tradeoff is I get to passively help Hitler 2.0 do it again to another group. There's a much more frightening world created from the crime of knowing what is necessary and refusing to undertake it for fear of being ostracized and demonized by mass murderers.
Violence itself cannot, ethically, be ruled out by any means - violence undertaken against arms factories, and individuals who own them should be embraced where it can be of strategic value. This, though, is a lofty consideration - in the US, we have not even exhausted our non-violent options. Wells-Fargo, the same company which has been ripping Americans off, stealing, causing financial crises, and getting bailed out by the state for decades, also gave Elbit Systems a $500,000,000 loan - why not just go out one night and destroy a bunch of their ATM screens? All it would take would be like 10 people doing it to several ATMs each in a single night, and that would be much better than not doing it.
Serious actions need to be taken to stop this, we need to confront the failure of our previous tactics, and we need to act and admit what we need to do to stop this before it gets even worse. There is no other way around this. We have failed, and unless we fight and take real, bigger risks then we will continue to fail. No matter what we do, we will be slandered, so we must be true to the real urgency of the situation, to the material reality, or we will only be more deserving of the lies.