Means and ends in Gaza: A note on the morality of the October 7 massacre
James Robb
Platypus Review 170 | October 2024
IN EARLY MARCH 2024, two photos, each of a disturbing leaflet produced and circulated in Times Square in New York ostensibly in support of Palestinians, began circulating widely on X/Twitter.[1] On each leaflet, superimposed over the Palestinian flag, was a slogan: “Rape is resistance” on one, and “Babies are occupiers too” on the other. “Free Palestine,” the subscript read, “by any means necessary.”
Despite calls for other images of the leaflets to establish their origins and authenticity, only these two have appeared. This would surely be unusual if flyers or stickers with such repugnant messages had actually been distributed in New York City. No one has come forward to claim responsibility for the posters or declare their support for the slogans they bear. There have been many claims that this is a false-flag operation carried out by the pro-Israel camp, aimed at discrediting the Palestinian movement by association with such objectionable ideas. Others have claimed that, since the photos of the leaflets were circulated widely by the Israel supporters expressing their outrage, they were designed to discredit that camp by building outrage on images which would later be revealed to be fake. Either scenario seems plausible: the posters have a certain whiff of fakery about them.
Fakes or not, they succinctly pose some important moral questions in relation to the Hamas-led war in Gaza that are worth discussing.
It cannot be denied that the leaflets express ideas frequently voiced by some who claim to support the Palestinian struggle. Hamas itself, which, along with Islamic Jihad, carried out the atrocity of October 7, 2023, not only declares its agreement with the slogans openly, but acts on them: in a video originally posted by Hamas supporters on social media in the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, a woman’s semi-naked body, mutilated and abused, was paraded around Gaza in the back of a truck. She was identified as Shani Louk, a 23 year-old German-Israeli who was abducted from the Nova music festival during the Hamas rampage.
The most shocking thing about this video is not just the abuse and murder of a woman — heaven knows, such horrors are common enough everywhere in this world — but the cries of jubilation in celebration of that crime, the shouts heard in the recording, that this is God’s work. At one point, a child leans over and spits on the body. If this video doesn’t demonstrate the slogan “rape is resistance” in action, I don’t know what would.[2]
Hamas spokesperson Ghazi Hamad defended the October 7 pogrom in an interview a few days after the rampage, explicitly supporting all the actions of that day.[3] “We are the victims of the occupation. Everything we do is justified,” he declares.Everything, including rape, gang rape, rape of corpses. Everything, including gunning down hundreds of defenseless young people at a music festival; everything, including the murder of children and infants. Even investigators for the United Nations — no friends of Israel, to say the least — were eventually obliged to admit, six months later, that “sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im. In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two incidents relate to the rape of women’s corpses.”[4] Their report continued: “The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations. Although circumstantial, such a pattern may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”
Without question, October 7 was deeply connected to the whole history of Israel and Palestine. But there were also aspects of the attack that were qualitatively new. One of these departures was that on that day the means to an end — killing Jews and terrorising the survivors — became the end in itself for the Hamas combatants and others who got drawn into participating in the pogrom.
Ghazi Hamad is not alone. Kuwaiti scholar and leader of the Muslim brotherhood Tareq Al-Suwaidan can be seen arguing the same line in a November 15 podcast.[5] No Israeli woman is innocent, he says, adding, “who owns the money and the media? The Jews.” The government of Iran takes a similar line. These are the coarse voices of unashamed misogynists and Jew-haters. But the same ideas are also expressed in the more soft-spoken tones of academia, voiced by Jews and others who deny that they are Jew-haters; by those who recoil in horror from the idea that “rape is resistance”; by those who speak as feminists; by those who insist that the “rape is resistance” posters must be fakes. In these cases, the same ideas [1] appear in slightly more disguised, but still recognizable, forms, often concealed behind deliberately vague slogans, euphemisms, and circumlocutions.
On March 3, 2024, prominent academic and Palestine supporter Judith Butler spoke on a panel in Paris hosted by the French YouTube program Paroles d’Honneur, where she argued that the atrocities of October 7 constituted armed resistance.[6]
Butler is important both for who she is — the doyenne of liberal academia as well as prominent long-time leader of the Hamas apologists in “Left” academia[7] — and also for what she actually says here. As the high priestess of postmodern obscurantism, Butler’s usual method of “argumentation” is to pile up questions, one on top of the other, without attempting to answer any of them, while dropping broad hints about the desired “conclusion.”[8] In this video, however, she is uncharacteristically lucid.
Butler even indicates the reason for her clarity on this occasion: she explains that she “got in trouble” for an article published in the London Review of Books a couple of weeks after the atrocity, in which she stated that “nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated.”[9] (With whom did she “get in trouble” for expressing such an apparently reasonable opinion? One wonders.) Here, she attempts to explain that despite her initial “anguish” she remains a defender of Hamas and of the atrocity: “We can have different views about Hamas as a political party,” Butler says in the video. “We can have different views about armed resistance, but I think it is more honest and historically correct to say that the uprising of October 7 was an act of armed resistance. It is not a terrorist attack and it’s not an anti-semitic attack.”
So, Butler declares the Hamas pogrom to be “armed resistance” — and by this simple act of re-labeling, by this magic incantation, the pogrom becomes “not anti-semitic” and “not terrorist.” She thereby exonerates it from all moral constraints and all responsibility, just as she had previously argued should not happen. Her expressions of “anguish” only strengthen the case, implying that even someone who recoils from the horrors of October 7 can still defend them in the context of armed resistance, as she does. It is “more historically accurate.”
In a sense, this is a case of the end justifying the means. The “end” — resistance — justifies the “means” of random violence. But like Ghazi Hamad, Butler goes even further, all but removing the “end” from the formulation altogether. Simply being the victim is sufficient to grant license from moral constraints. “The violence done to Palestinians has been happening for decades,” Butler says in the video. “This was an uprising that comes from a state of subjugation and against a violent state apparatus.” This has become the constant refrain, by means of which the coarse Jew-hatred of Ghazi Hamad reaches a wider public in liberal circles in imperialist countries.The connection between these two groups, the key political bridge over which they cross from academic liberalism to support for reactionary Islamism — and back again, as circumstances require — is precisely the moral one, encapsulated in the slogan stolen from Malcolm X: “By any means necessary.”[10]
Malcolm’s slogan has a genuine appeal to radical-minded youth who are disgusted by the hypocrisy of bourgeois moralizing. Malcolm used the slogan “by any means necessary” to declare his rejection of ruling-class morality, and in particular, the moral stricture of “non-violent means,” which the rulers, their religious leaders and the big-business media sought to impose on the Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm, in response, asserted that black people have the right of self-defense against violent attack. “I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time,” he explained. “I’d say, okay, let’s get with it, we’ll all be nonviolent. But I don’t go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody’s going to be nonviolent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I’ll be nonviolent. If they make the White Citizens Council nonviolent, I’ll be nonviolent. But as long as you’ve got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don’t want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.”[11]
The slogan became a common refrain in his speeches, and was also the motto of his own organisation, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, at whose founding rally, Malcolm X stated:
We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary. We don’t feel that in 1964, living in a country that is supposedly based upon freedom, and supposedly the leader of the free world, we don’t think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a President from Texas in Washington, D. C., to make up their minds that our people are due now some degree of civil rights.[12]
He continued: “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”[13]
It was a profoundly revolutionary, liberating slogan.
Do not the dispossessed and displaced Palestinian people also have the same right to armed self-defense? Certainly they do! But Malcolm never advocated or defended the rape of women, mass terror against a civilian population, or other such barbarities as a means to win freedom, justice, and equality. He advocated the use of any means necessary.
Hamas and its apologists forget the word “necessary.” Wanton violence against innocent non-combatants and the methods of indiscriminate mass terror are not necessary to an oppressed people fighting for its liberation — on the contrary, these methods are obstacles. Nor is this problem resolved by clumsy attempts to abolish the category of “innocents” among the Israeli Jews through branding the entire population of Israel as “occupiers.” Nor by Tareq Al-Suwaidan declaring that since all adult Israelis are liable for military service, “there are no civilians in Israel — neither men nor women . . . we are talking about soldiers here, not about innocent people.”[14] Such efforts only reveal the Jew-hating character of the violence even more clearly. October 7 was not a case of accidental civilian deaths incurred in the course of a justified action against a military target; the civilians were the target, killing Jews was the “end.”
Hamas thus steals Malcolm’s revolutionary slogan and invests it with an opposite, utterly reactionary content. In the mouths of Hamas, the meaning of the slogan is “by whatever means we choose.” On the plane of morality, Hamas is the mirror image and counterpart of the reactionary government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Revolutionaries who have been required by circumstances to engage in armed struggle have paid close attention to such questions. Fidel Castro’s Rebel Army faced a dictatorship every bit as vile as Netanyahu’s[15] — any Rebel Army soldier who fell into the hands of the Batista’s thugs knew the latter carried out eye-gouging,[16] castration,[17] and other grisly tortures before hanging up their victims’ corpses in public as a deterrent to others. Fidel nonetheless insisted on the highest standards of moral conduct from his fighters. Soldiers of the dictatorship captured by the rebels were given the same medical treatment they gave their own wounded, and then released. On the few occasions when Rebel Army soldiers violated this code and mistreated prisoners, or engaged in looting the property of peasants or raping them, they were court-martialed and shot. Fidel understood well that only in this way could he gain the trust and support of the peasants among whom the Rebel Army moved and depended upon for their generosity and courage. Fidel’s morality was drawn entirely from the needs of the struggle. He continued to rely on this “moral armor” to shield the revolution from its enemies long after the victory over the dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks too, drew their moral code from the laws of the class struggle in the period of the Civil War of 1917-21. Lenin, basing his position on Engels’s writings on morality in Anti-Duhring (1877),[18] explained the Bolshevik attitude to morality in a speech to the Youth Leagues:
Is there such a thing as communist morality? Of course, there is. It is often suggested that we have no ethics of our own; very often the bourgeoisie accuse us Communists of rejecting all morality. This is a method of confusing the issue, of throwing dust in the eyes of the workers and peasants. In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality? In the sense given to it by the bourgeoisie, who based ethics on God’s commandments. On this point we, of course, say that we do not believe in God, and that we know perfectly well that the clergy, the landowners and the bourgeoisie invoked the name of God so as to further their own interests as exploiters. Or, instead of basing ethics on the commandments of morality, on the commandments of God, they based it on idealist or semi-idealist phrases, which always amounted to something very similar to God’s commandments. We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is deception, dupery, stultification of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landowners and capitalists. We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle. Our morality stems from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.[19]
The accusation of Bolshevik amorality was hurled even more forcefully two decades later. The context on this occasion was the Moscow Trials, the most monstrous frame-up of revolutionaries in history. The targets of the accusation were the few surviving Bolsheviks, relentlessly slandered and persecuted by the Stalinist prosecutors; the moral accusers were petty-bourgeois former sympathizers of Bolshevism, now retreating in fright before the onslaught of reaction. Their general line of attack was to accuse the Bolsheviks of operating by the maxim “the end justifies the means.” The goal of this moral crusade was to demonstrate that the Stalinist police state was the natural outgrowth of Bolshevism.
When Trotsky, the chief defendant in absentia of the Moscow Trials, protested the Stalinist persecutors’ practices of shooting the children of the accused and taking family members hostage in order to force dissident Soviet diplomats to return home, the petty-bourgeois moralists responded, “the detention of innocent relatives by Stalin is disgusting barbarism. But it remains a barbarism as well when it was dictated by Trotsky (1919).”[2] This was a reference to a 1919 decree by Trotsky[3] , then commander of the Red Army, which mandated the taking hostage of family members of czarist officers drafted into the Red Army as insurance against their betrayal in combat. In the early days of the Civil War and imperialist encirclement, the Bolsheviks needed to rely heavily on the military expertise of these former czarist officers — many of whom were politically hostile to the Revolution — in building the Red Army and defending the Revolution. Hostage-taking was also ordered in a few other instances during the war, particularly to combat sabotage by rich peasants of grain requisitions.
Trotsky responded to the accusations of the moralists in a 1938 article entitled “Their Morals and Ours,”[20] and a follow-up the following year entitled “Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism.”[21] These two articles are among Trotsky’s most brilliant writings, and some of the most incisive statements on morality by any Marxist: “Only that which prepares the complete and final overthrow of imperialist bestiality is moral, and nothing else,” he declares. Trotsky accepts responsibility for the hostages decree:
We will not insist here upon the fact that the Decree of 1919 led scarcely to even one execution of relatives of those commanders whose perfidy not only caused the loss of innumerable human lives but threatened the revolution itself with direct annihilation. The question in the end does not concern that. If the revolution had displayed less superfluous generosity from the very beginning, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. Thus or otherwise I carry full responsibility for the Decree of 1919. It was a necessary measure in the struggle against the oppressors. Only in the historical content of the struggle lies the justification of the decree as in general the justification of the whole civil war which, too, can be called, not without foundation, “disgusting barbarism.” . . . A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains — let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality![22]
Is Trotsky’s stance indistinguishable from that of Hamas, then? — That in pursuit of a just cause, “everything is justified”? Not at all. There is a dialectical interdependence between means and end, Trotsky explains:
A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man. “We are to understand then that in achieving this end anything is permissible?” sarcastically demands the Philistine, demonstrating that he understood nothing. That is permissible, we answer, which really leads to the liberation of mankind. Since this end can be achieved only through revolution, the liberating morality of the proletariat of necessity is endowed with a revolutionary character. . . . It deduces a rule for conduct from the laws of the development of society, thus primarily from the class struggle, this law of all laws. “Just the same,” the moralist continues to insist, “does it mean that in the class struggle against capitalists all means are permissible: lying, frame-up, betrayal, murder, and so on?” Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it flows that not all means are permissible. When we say that the end justifies the means, then for us the conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it by worship for the “leaders.” Primarily and irreconcilably, revolutionary morality rejects servility in relation to the bourgeoisie and haughtiness in relation to the toilers, that is, those characteristics in which petty bourgeois pedants and moralists are thoroughly steeped. . . . Dialectic materialism does not know dualism between means and end. The end flows naturally from the historical movement. Organically the means are subordinated to the end. The immediate end becomes the means for a further end. . . . Seeds of wheat must be sown in order to yield an ear of wheat.[23]
By these criteria, Hamas’s means, and the October 7 attack in particular, are indefensible. They demobilize and sideline the Palestinian masses; disunite, terrorize, and scatter them. The Hamas actions of October 7 and in the months since have left the Palestinian masses defenseless, both militarily and politically, atomized and left to fend for themselves in the face of the Israeli onslaught. They have been barred from taking shelter from the bombing in the Hamas tunnel network, and have been used as human shields: their only value to Hamas — their only historic mission — is as martyrs. Over many years prior to that, they have been trained in dependence, looking to outside saviors — to military aid from Iran, monetary aid from the United Nations, European Union, and Qatari billionaires, and political aid from boycotts and worldwide protests — all manner of substitutes for their own organized strength. These are precisely the means and methods the working class rejects.
For the working class, support for the liberation struggle of an oppressed nationality is not the end in itself, but the means to a greater end. Freedom for an oppressed people, by overcoming national inequalities, unifies and strengthens the working class for the task of overthrowing imperialist bestiality. Hamas’s end is not Palestinian liberation, but Islamic rule and a Palestine without Jews. It means setting one section of the working class against another, Palestinian worker against Jewish worker, and this is its greatest crime.
“They do not understand,” wrote Trotsky about the petty-bourgeois moralists, “that morality is a function of the class struggle; that democratic morality corresponds to the epoch of liberal and progressive capitalism; that the sharpening of the class struggle in passing through its latest phase definitively and irrevocably destroyed this morality; that in its place came the morality of fascism on one side, on the other the morality of proletarian revolution.”[24]
90 years later, as the class struggle begins to sharpen as it did in the 1930s, the destruction of that democratic morality is all but complete. Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois moralists are conspicuously absent from the discussion. The proletarian morality of Trotsky, Lenin, Fidel Castro, and others has hardly drawn its first breath, and the liberal academics are too remote from the working class to have any sense of proletarian morality of their own. The readiness of Judith Butler and broad middle-class liberal forces to concur with Hamas’s claim that “everything we do is justified”, including even the atrocious acts of October 7, signals a new stage in the decline of democratic morality. It binds Butler and her ilk to the capitalist descent into depravity. Fascist morality beckons to them. |P
[1] This article first appeared on A Worker at Large (April 20, 2024), <https://convincingreasons.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/means-and-ends-in-gaza-a-note-on-morality-of-the-7-october-massacre/>.
[2] Further evidence of the use of mass rape in the atrocity of October 7 is documented in the film Screams Before Silence, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAr9oGSXgak>.
[3] See <https://x.com/MEMRIReports/status/1719662664090075199>.
[4] Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, “Following visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank . . .” (March 4, 2024), <https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/press-release/israel-west-bank-mission/>.
[5] See “Kuwaiti Islamic Scholar and Muslim Brotherhood Leader Tareq Al-Suwaidan Discusses October 7 Hamas Attack . . .,” Memri TV (March 25, 2024), <https://www.memri.org/reports/kuwaiti-islamic-scholar-and-muslim-brotherhood-leader-tareq-al-suwaidan-discusses-october-7>. I am relying on the subtitled translations in these videos. But in the millions of times they have been viewed, I have never seen the accuracy of these translations challenged. The speakers have no wish to dispute them.
[6] “Judith Butler: ‘October 7 was an act of armed resistance,’” Middle East Eye, <https://youtu.be/wFjYFonN3ZI>.
[7] See “Judith Butler and the Normalization of Hamas and Hezbollah within Progressive Social Movements,” The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (October 18, 2023), <https://isgap.org/post/2023/10/judith-butler-and-the-normalization-of-hamas-and-hezbollah-within-progressive-social-movements/>.
[8] See, for example, the second paragraph of Judith Butler, “The Compass of Mourning,” London Review of Books 45, no. 29 (October 19, 2023),
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning>.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Morality is not the only bridge between academic liberalism and support for Hamas. It should also be noted that the “decolonization” perspective that has long dominated historical and political discourse at Western universities, with its associated culture of victimhood and its backward-facing orientation of undoing the historical crimes of colonialism, dovetails neatly with the Hamas vision of a Palestine free of Jews. In particular, the emphatic assertion that Israel today is a colonial-settler state, long after it has evolved into a modern capitalist state, serves this purpose. But to explore these aspects of the question is beyond the scope of this article.
[11] Malcolm X, “To Mississippi Youth,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989), 138, <https://web.mit.edu/21h.102/www/Primary%20source%20collections/Civil%20Rights/MalcolmX.htm>.
[12] Malcolm X, Speech at the founding rally of the OAAU (June 28, 1964), in By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews and a Letter by Malcolm X, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 37, <https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity/>.
[13] Ibid., 56.
[14] “Tareq Al-Suwaidan Discusses October 7.”
[15] Insofar as such things can be measured, the Batista dictatorship was probably even more vile. Certainly, the impassioned campaign to paint the Israeli regime as “apartheid — but even worse than South African apartheid” is deeply connected to the quest to find justifications for the crimes of October 7.
[16] See Fidel Castro, “History Will Absolve Me” (1953), <https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm>.
[17] See Elio Delgado Legon, “Massacres During Batista’s Dictatorship,” Havana Times, January 26, 2017, <https://havanatimes.org/diaries/elio/massacres-during-batistas-dictatorship/>.
[18] See Friedrich Engels, “Morality and Law. Eternal Truths,” in Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1877), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch07.htm>.
[19] V. I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues” (1920), in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 283, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/oct/02.htm>.
[20] Leon Trotsky, “Their Morals and Ours,” The New International 4, no. 6 (June 1938): 163–73, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm>.
[21] Leon Trotsky, “Moralists and Sycophants against Marxism: Peddlers of Indulgences and Their Socialist Allies, or the Cuckoo in a Strange Nest,” The New International 5, no. 8 (August 1939): 229–33, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/06/moral.htm>.
[22] Trotsky, “Their Morals and Ours.”
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
