1914 redux: Why the Left gets Hamas wrong . . . and U.S. imperialism too

Daniel Lazare

Platypus Review 171 | November 2024

IF TODAY’S ATOMIZED Marxist Left agrees on anything, it is the disastrous consequences of the Second International’s failure to mobilize against war in 1914. Instead of banding together against militarism, socialists rushed to defend bourgeois states they had previously pledged to destroy. They all had their reasons. The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands^[1] claimed to be fighting czarist tyranny. French socialists claimed to be fighting German militarism. The British Labour Party said it was defending “plucky little Belgium” against German troops trampling its neutrality underfoot. But it was all nonsense. Casting international working-class solidarity to the winds, the various parties put their own national interests first, not to mention their own imperial interests too.

The result was four years of industrialized slaughter in which 10 million people were killed, 14 million seriously wounded, and seven million permanently disabled — a slaughter so horrendous that anyone calling him- or herself a revolutionary Marxist vows never to fall into the same trap again. Yet that is precisely what today’s depleted Marxist movement is doing with regard to Gaza. The circumstances are different since imperialism has evolved in countless ways since 1914. But the political failures are the same: a surrender to national chauvinism, shallow partisanship, and an avoidance of anything resembling clear-eyed political analysis. So far, the Palestinians are mainly paying the price for this colossal blunder. But the wider the conflict spreads, the greater the likelihood that others will be dragged in as well.

Where has the Left gone wrong? Just about everywhere although Hamas is the most obvious place to begin. While hailed as part of the anti-Zionist “resistance,” it is playing the same game that far-Right Serbian nationalists played in 1914. These were the people who triggered World War I by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. For decades, international politics required that Germany and Austria take the lion’s share of the blame for the debacle, and so historians dutifully downplayed Serbia’s role while accusing Austria of attempting to bully its smaller neighbor into submission.^[2] This was also nonsense. In fact, the conspiracy reached into the highest levels of the Serbian government, mobs were cheering the assassination in the streets, and when the Austrians demanded that the Serbs come clean about their involvement, Belgrade brushed them off. The strategy of the Serbian ultra-nationalists was clear. After nearly doubling their territory in the Second Balkan War of 1913, their goal was to expand it even more by provoking a confrontation with Vienna that they thought they could win by bringing their fellow Slav, Czar Nicholas II of Russia, in on their side.

Christopher Clark’s 2012 best-seller, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, has done much to overturn this long-standing anti-Austrian consensus. His point was not that Serbs caused the war in any simple or straightforward manner since tinder had been piling up for decades. But they unquestionably lit the match. As Sleepwalkers puts it:

The Serbian state — or at least the statesmen who directed it — accepted responsibility for the eventual “reunion” of all Serbs, including those living within the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. This implied at best a limited acknowledgement of the empire’s sovereign rights within the unredeemed lands of “Serbdom.” Then there was the fact that the Serbian state under [Prime Minister Nikola] Pašić could exercise only very limited control over the irredentist networks. The interpenetration of the conspiratorial networks with the Serbian state, and the transnational affiliations of ethnic irredentism made a nonsense of any attempt to understand the friction between Serbia and Austria-Hungary in terms of an interaction between sovereign territorial states.^[3]

What this means in plain English is that the Serbian government could not control the ultra-nationalists because it ultimately agreed with their goal, which was to detach chunks of Austro-Hungary peopled by their fellow Serbs and add them to their own.

Fast forward to 2024, and we can see the same dynamics at work in Israel–Palestine. Instead of the ultra-Rightists of the “Black Hand,” the secret military society in Belgrade that masterminded the 1914 assassinations, we have the ultra-Rightists of Hamas. Instead of Russia, we have the broader Middle East, which Hamas is also seeking to drag into the conflict. In 1914, an international chorus was bent on whitewashing the Serbs. A Russian diplomat named Nicholas Hartwig assured his government that Austria was in the wrong, a leading French diplomat named Raymond Poincaré accused it of violating Serbia’s “human rights,” while “first sea lord” Winston Churchill denounced Austria’s call for an honest and objective inquiry into the assassination as “the most insolent document of its kind ever devised.”^[4]

Today, we have a similar chorus of tweeters, bloggers, peace activists, and the like accusing Israel of responsibility for much, if not most, of the atrocities on October 7 or, failing that, declaring that Israelis had it coming due to their country’s vicious ethnic policies. This goes even for the 364 young people whom airborne Hamas gunmen massacred at an all-night rave. As one apologist versified all too predictably:

Twerking outside the open-air prison.
Raving while Gaza asphyxiates.

Twirling glow sticks while a Final Solution is planned.
Just an innocent bit of fun.^[5]

They deserved it because they were dancing too close to the Gaza border. Or, as the anti-Zionist critic Norman Finkelstein put it a few hours after the killing spree, the victims were guilty of belonging to an unjust society and therefore had to suffer the wrath of the oppressed: “I, for one, will never begrudge — on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul — the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled. The stars above in heaven are looking kindly down. Glory, glory, hallelujah. The souls of Gaza go marching on!”^[6]

Bloodthirsty rhetoric of this sort is closer to fascism than to anything else. Instead of bourgeois governments, it blames the people — ravers, kibbutznikim,^[7] day laborers, etc. — who got caught up in the melee. But what was even more startling was to see revolutionary socialist parties that claim to have absorbed the lessons of 1914 echoing the same line. The Socialist Workers Party (UK), the largest self-described Marxist party in Britain, went public with a headline declaring, “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel,” and quoted an unnamed Gaza resident as saying: “All of us are proud. Today was a rewriting of history — our history. I can hear the bombing now. . . . We are watching what we thought would never, in our lifetime, happen. . . . But I think that for the first time in history — well at least since after 1973 — our fighters have taken the initiative. It proved and showed how weak Israel’s apartheid regime is.”^[8]

The World Socialist Web Site, which bills itself as “the most widely read Marxist-socialist internet-based publication in the world,” hailed October 7 as “an uprising of the Palestinian people against the violent and brutally oppressive Israeli occupation”^[9] and compared it to the Nat Turner slave uprising in 1831.^[10]

A leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain — which, despite the name, has no connection with the original CPGB^[11] — declared a day after October 7 that Marxists “side with” Hamas while another top member hailed Hamas as “heroic” in a private communication.^[12]

A group calling itself the Revolutionary Communist International,^[13] followers of the late Trotskyist leader Ted Grant, saluted Hamas for its derring-do: “From a merely military point of view, the attack was a success. The unexpected Blitzkrieg caught the much-vaunted Israeli intelligence services completely by surprise. Well-armed groups of commandos penetrated Israel’s defenses, breaking through what was supposed to be an impregnable line and inflicting severe losses on Israeli forces.”^[14]

All of which was either juvenile, misleading, or absurd. If the Grantites knew anything about military history, they would know that surprise attacks like October 7 are not uncommon. Pancho Villa caught the Americans flat-footed when he shot up a New Mexico border town in 1916, the Japanese did the same at Pearl Harbor, Egypt and Syria caught Israel short with a surprise attack in 1973, while Ukraine caught Russia off guard when it launched its Kursk incursion this summer. What matters in such operations is not what happens on day one, but what happens after — and from this perspective, given the subsequent devastation visited on Gaza, it is plain that Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation was one of the greatest military defeats in history, an “own goal” of unprecedented proportions.

As for Nat Turner, there is a vast difference between an uprising by slaves driven mad by oppression and a military assault by a modern political party flush with Persian Gulf cash. Describing October 7 as “an uprising of the Palestinian people” is dangerous because it equates the Palestinian masses with the actions of a Right-wing military elite, which is rather like equating the German working class with the SS. “Heroic” is also mistaken. The OED defines “hero” as someone “who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.” Yet the brutal gunmen of October 7 were no more noble than the hijackers of 9/11.

Not all Marxists got it wrong. A rival wing of the Ted Grant family, the UK Socialist Party,^[15] noted that Leftists “can give no support to Hamas and Hezbollah, parties which are based on right-wing political Islam,” and that the only way forward is “through democratically organizing mass struggle – a socialist intifada – based on the interests of workers and the poor.”^[16] The Internationalist Group, a branch of the Spartacist “family” here in the U.S., observed that “indiscriminate terror . . . is not striking at the Zionist occupation machine but a random assault on Israelis that undermines the defense of the Palestinian people. Such a jihad (holy war) is the method of right-wing nationalists and religious zealots, such as the Islamists of Hamas.”^[17]

A small and somewhat nutty Australian group known as the Workers League — part of the pandemic-skeptic Left, it opposes the lockdown and refers to COVID-19 as “an alleged illness”^[18] — has nonetheless been spot-on in explaining why Hamas was bound to fail:

Israeli workers must be convinced that Zionism is not, and can never, benefit them. Yet obviously, the taking of hostages, suicide bombings, and other purely military attacks are totally counter-productive and will only drive Israelis deeper behind their own government and their own state . . . To even begin to reach out to Israeli workers, Palestinians must reject Hamas and even dismantle it. In addition, all the armed groups which utilise innocent life taking terror – whether secular, Stalinist or Islamist – must likewise be disassembled. A military only strategy is one of total defeat.^[19]

Quite right. If international proletarian solidarity is the goal, then slaughtering hundreds of workers because of their religion or nationality is a less-than-ideal way of achieving it. All it does is arouse the fury of the Zionist war machine and unite the working masses behind it.

So how do we unpack the ongoing disaster that is Gaza? In classic Marxist fashion, it is by taking a page from Lenin and beginning with the problem of imperialism and its evolving nature. In 1914, Europe was divided up among a half-dozen imperial powers of roughly equal size and weight: Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottomans, who sided with the Central Powers. Today, there is only one imperial power, the United States, along with its subordinates in NATO and AUKUS.^[20] Opposing it to varying degrees are Russia, China, Iran, and a few others, a motley crew consisting of one deformed workers’ state (to use the classic Trotskyist classification) plus others that are neo-czarist, theocratic, Third World nationalist, or simply incompetent like the Maduro regime in Venezuela. But until recently, the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a part, was not among the “outs.” To the contrary, it worked closely with the U.S. during the Cold War in battling communists and radical nationalists like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, and, more recently, al-Assad’s son Bashar, the current Syrian president. It also maintained close relations with Turkey, a NATO member, and Qatar, a close U.S. ally that hosts the Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the Middle East.

But if anyone thinks that working closely with the U.S. somehow confers “moderation,” they should think again. Gilbert Achcar, a prominent member of a branch of the Fourth International known as the United Secretariat, pointed out in his path-blazing 2009 book The Arabs and the Holocaust, that that the “fundamentalist counterreformation” that culminated in the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 “was far more reactionary than its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic predecessor”^[21] — a pronouncement of fairly breathtaking proportions considering that the Catholic counter-reformation executed the free thinker Giordano Bruno in 1600 and silenced Galileo in 1633 for maintaining that the Earth revolves around the sun. In addition to Quranic literalism, the Muslim Brotherhood embraced anti-Semitism and the Third Reich. If Rommel’s Afrika Korps had broken through at El Alamein in 1942 and advanced on British-occupied Egypt, there is not the slightest doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood would have welcomed them as liberators.

Still, the U.S. needed the Muslim Brotherhood’s help in the 1950s and got it. So did Israel in the 1980s in its efforts to build up an Islamist counterweight to the supposedly more radical Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, had looked to European anti-Semites for assistance since they wanted Jews to leave just as much as he did. He thus wrote that quitting the Diaspora would mean not only liberating Jews from Christians, but liberating Christians too, “liberating them from us.”^[22] Herzl’s Israeli successors gravitated to anti-Semitic Muslim fundamentalists out of the same ideological affinity, which is why they allowed Qatar to supply Hamas with suitcases of cash. Besides, with the Palestinian National Authority, successor to the PLO, in control of the West Bank, bolstering Hamas in Gaza made sense. “Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” Netanyahu told a Likud gathering. “This is part of our strategy to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”^[23]

In 1988, Hamas released a “covenant” spelling out its views in detail. Jihad and anti-Semitism were front and center.^[24] It quoted classic Islamic hadiths, or sayings, calling for the destruction of the Jews and, like the larger Muslim Brotherhood, relied heavily on the notorious document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) for its description of Judaism as a force bent on world conquest.

“With their money,” the covenant declared,

they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution [and] the Communist revolution . . . With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. . . . They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state.^[25]

It was all there — Jews playing both sides of the net as capitalists and communists, controlling the press, running the banks, and so forth. But what was most striking was the covenant’s retrograde quality. Who in this day and age describes Rotary and Lions Clubs as conspiratorial agents? Who quotes a 19^th-century forgery that has been debunked a dozen times over? To be sure, Hamas issued a statement of “general principles and policies” in 2017 that struck a very different chord by declaring that Hamas’s “conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”^[26]

But it was still a muddle. If it were not anti-Semitic now, did that mean it had been in the past? Unfortunately, a senior Hamas official named Mahmoud al-Zahar added to the confusion by informing Reuters that the 1988 covenant was still valid.^[27] Hamas was now both pro- and anti-Semitic. Either it was lying or merely confused.

Hamas’s ideological shortcomings left it ill-equipped to deal with the complicated political battles ahead. Jihad was its be-all and end-all, the only thing it knew and the only weapon in its arsenal. After sending out dozens of suicide bombers between 1994 and 2005, it settled into a pattern of tit-for-tat violence in which it would fire off volleys of rockets, hunker down in the event of an Israeli counterattack, and then fire off still more. In November 2008, for example, Israel raided Hamas fighters in the town of Deir al-Balah as they were allegedly tunneling under the Israeli border a few hundred yards away. Hamas responded with rockets, which led Israel to launch a combined air-and-ground assault known as Operation Cast Lead that left as many as 1,400 Palestinians dead. After Hamas gunmen killed three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank in 2014, Israel rounded up hundreds of alleged Hamas operatives, leading to another round of Hamas rocket fire and another Israeli air-and-ground assault. November 2018 saw a botched Israeli raid that led to still more rocket attacks and more Israeli air attacks in response. Similar exchanges took place in May and November 2019.

Yet Hamas was losing. The casualty rate was running at better than a hundred to one in Israel’s favor while conditions in Gaza continued to deteriorate. In March 2019, Hamas security forces beat and tortured local labor activists trying to organize a “revolt of the hungry” against inflation and corruption — this while sending out thousands of unarmed civilians in a vain attempt to crash through Israeli border defenses merely so Israeli snipers could shoot them down by the hundreds.^[28] (Western peace activists cheered the phony theatrics of “the great march of return” while ignoring the labor protests.) By 2022, per-capita income in Gaza was 75% below that of the West Bank due to the economic blockade and the incessant warfare that Hamas was helping to promote.^[29]

Even worse was Hamas’s deteriorating position on the diplomatic front. Initiated by the Trump administration and carried on by Biden, the so-called Abraham Accords were an attempt to shore up U.S. control of the Persian Gulf, source of some 40% of the world’s fossil fuels. The goal was threefold: establish an axis of power between the U.S. and Israel on one hand and Saudi Arabia and other gulf states on the other; shut out Iran even more completely, and keep out China, which had alarmed the White House by brokering a Tehran-Riyadh rapprochement in March 2023. The goal was also to shut out the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas, the thoroughly tame head of the corrupt Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, might still have a say in matters if he continued to cooperate. But Hamas would not. The Abraham Accords were designed to allow Israel to continue raining down bombs on Gaza while selling arms to weapons-hungry Gulf states that claimed to have the Palestinians’ best interests at heart.

Holy war was Hamas’s answer to growing encirclement. Their hearts blazing with religious fervor, Muslims from throughout the Middle East would descend on the Jewish state and break the Zionist blockade once and for all. Or so Hamas said. As the 1988 covenant put it: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.”^[30] Yet here was Israel breaking free of its encirclement by virtue of its alliance with U.S. imperialism while Hamas continued to languish in its coastal redoubt. A strategy of endless warfare had come to naught.

This is why Hamas launched its October 7 operation, i.e., to bloody Israel’s nose and thereby spur the Muslim masses into action. But the strategy never had a chance. Not only were Hamas’s methods repellent, but it failed to reckon with Muslim exhaustion after a half century or more of war and economic failure. Lebanon, home of Hezbollah, is in an economic free fall, its GDP down a stunning 67% over the last half decade according to World Bank figures. Post-civil war Syria is in even worse shape with an even more catastrophic 87% decline in GDP since the violence began in 2011. Iraq is little more than an American satrapy thanks to the 2003 U.S. invasion while Iran — its economy down 36% since 2011 due to U.S. sanctions — is in no mood for foreign adventures. Neither is Egypt, which kicked out a chaotic Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013, nor Jordan, which, under the iron rule of King Abdullah II, expelled Hamas in 1999.

The broader Muslim population was in no mood to throw itself into the fire. “For Hamas,” the Palestinian-American political analyst Tareq Baconi noted, “success was thought to be predestined. The movement’s leaders believe that Hamas’s Islamic character would offer a robust ideological framework through which to offset the worldly pressures that had hamstrung the PLO before it.”^[31] Yet worldly pressures were bearing down regardless. Thanks to its backwards ideology, Hamas had badly misjudged the correlation of forces.

But this raises a question. Did Hamas really blunder on October 7? Did it really miscalculate in thinking the Muslim masses would rally to its side? Or did it deliberately launch a war it could not win out of a misplaced desire for martyrdom? The Muslim Brotherhood death cult has ample precedent. In the 1920s, Rashid Rida, a Syrian-Egyptian fundamentalist who became the Brotherhood’s ideological godfather, wrote that Zionists were at a disadvantage because they were too fond of life.^[32] In 2014, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told a Hamas rally, “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life.”^[33] (Israel granted Haniyeh’s wish by assassinating him in Tehran in July.) Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas politburo, added in a TV interview in Beirut a few weeks after the October 7 assault, “We are called a nation of martyrs, and are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”^[34]

Martyrdom was thus an asset, an instrument of conquest. But what precisely did Hamad mean about sacrificing martyrs — that Hamas was proud to sacrifice individual fighters or the nation as a whole? Hamad said in the same interview, “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. . . . October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 — everything we do is justified.”^[35]

What was the point of offering the Israelis a tailor-made justification for continuing their mass bombing campaign? Was Hamad seeking to buck up morale with a show of bravado? Or was he trying to egg Israel on to even greater heights of violence so as to fulfill the Palestinians’ destiny as a nation of martyrs? Did he want Palestinian suffering to continue, in other words, so as to inspire the larger Muslim masses?

If so, it’s hard to see how Hamas can be seen as a resistance organization at all. After all, what kind of resistance seeks to goad the enemy into raining down destruction on its own people?

Certainly, few regarded the Black Hand as part of the resistance during World War I since better than 50% of Serbia’s troops ended up dying as a consequence of the conflict it helped initiate along with some 27% of the Serbian population as a whole.^[36] That’s better than 16 times the current rate in Gaza. This is why the Pašić government wound up putting three of its top leaders up against a wall in 1917 and shooting them for treason. They had ushered in catastrophe and therefore had to pay the price.

Will Hamas suffer the same fate? Left-wing apologists for Hamas are on the wrong side of history. Instead of combatting national chauvinism, they are calling it progressive and lining up behind it. Not only are they covering up for Hamas’s crimes against Israeli civilians, they are covering up for its even greater crimes against Palestinians. 40,000 dead, millions made homeless, entire cities reduced to dust and rubble — these are all-too-predictable byproducts of Hamas adventurism.

Instead of Hamas, our heroes should be Dragiša Lapčević and Triša Kaclerović, Serbian socialists who voted against war credits as war was erupting in July 1914. “We are being called to war,” Lapčević told the Serbian parliament, “knowing that our government has failed to take the necessary measures to avoid it.” After its victorious war against Turkey in 1912, he went on, the government had failed to work for a united federation of Balkan peoples. Instead it had engaged in a fratricidal war against Bulgaria, suppressed Albanians, and drifted into “slavish dependence on St. Petersburg and the Paris stock exchange.” It had tolerated the intrigues of chauvinist secret organizations such as the Black Hand, which were responsible for killing the heir to the Austrian throne and thus generating the crisis. Lapčević reminded parliament of how the Austrian Social Democrats had fought in parliament and the streets in favor of Serbian independence and how they had protested “this very day as one man” against military conflict. “It is with pride and with full praise for the proletariat of Austria-Hungary that we Serbian Social Democrats here proclaim that there must be no war between the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Serbian people.” He and Kaclerović were the only two members of parliament to vote against mobilization.^[37]

These are people we should emulate, not paragliding thugs who shoot down innocent people at random. Israel and the U.S. are to blame regardless of whether the Gaza war ignites a wider conflagration or merely continues in a relatively limited fashion. But so are Hamas and its legions of western apologists. National chauvinism is even less excusable in 2024 than it was in 1914. |P

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^[1] Social Democratic Party of Germany.

^[2] Perry Anderson’s forthcoming book, Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War (London: Verso, 2024), is an interesting guide to the history wars.

^[3] Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Allen Lane, 2012), 456.

^[4] Ibid., 408, 456, 498–99.

^[5] Caitlin Johnstone, “Dancing Outside The Concentration Camp” (April 6, 2024), <https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/dancing-outside-the-concentration-camp-f4b302243acf>.

^[6] Norman Finkelstein, “John Brown’s Body—in Gaza” (October 7, 2023), <https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/john-browns-body-in-gaza/>.

^[7] [Hebrew] Plural of kibbutznik, a member of a kibbutz, a gathering, a community, etc.

^[8] Charlie Kimber, “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel,” and “Palestinian speaks out, ‘We’re rewriting history,’” Socialist Worker 2876 (October 11–17, 2023), 3–4, <https://socialistworker.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/issue2876.pdf>.

^[9] Alex Lantier, “Netanyahu regime staggered by Palestinian uprising,” World Socialist Web Site (October 7, 2023), <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/08/wkem-o08.html>.

^[10] Tom Carter, “Who is responsible for the violence in Israel and Gaza?,” World Socialist Web Site (October 10, 2023), <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/10/ytol-o10.html>.

^[11] The CPGB was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991. The current Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) was founded in the early 1990s, and publishes the Weekly Worker.

^[12] See Jack Conrad and Daniel Lazare, “Correspondence,” Weekly Worker, <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/assets/ww/pdf/lazare-correspondence.pdf>, and Daniel Lazare, “Criticise Hamas,” in “Letters,” Weekly Worker 1462 (October 12, 2023), <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1462/letters/>.

^[13] The RCI was founded as the Committee for a Marxist International, after breaking from the Committee for a Workers’ International in 1992; the organization was renamed the International Marxist Tendency in 2004, and renamed once more in June 2024 to its current name.

^[14] “Down with hypocrisy! Defend Gaza! – RCI Statement,” In Defense of Marxism (October 11, 2023), <https://www.marxist.com/down-with-hypocrisy-defend-gaza-imt-statement.htm>.

^[15] The Socialist Party is active in England and Wales. It was founded in 1997 after having been first Militant — a group within the Labour Party — from 1964 to 91, which became Militant Labour from 91 to 97. It is a member of the refounded Committee for a Workers’ International. It is not to be confused with the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

^[16] “Stop the Israel-Gaza war! For workers’ unity and struggle against national conflict and oppression,” The Socialist 1246 (October 12–18, 2023), 8–9, <https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/116365/09-10-2023/stop-the-israel-gaza-war-for-workers-unity-and-struggle-against-national-conflict-and-oppression/>.

^[17] “Defend the Palestinians Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza!,” The Internationalist 71 (June–October 2023), 1–5, <https://www.internationalist.org/defend-palestinians-against-israel-u.s.-genocidal-war-on-gaza-2310.html>.

^[18] “Exit the WHO!,” Red Fire (February 17, 2024), <https://redfireonline.com/2024/02/17/exit-the-who/>.

^[19] “Which Strategy for the Palestinian Resistance?,” Red Fire (October 23, 2023), <https://redfireonline.com/2023/10/23/which-strategy-for-the-palestinian-resistance/>.

^[20] A trilateral security pact between Australia, the UK, and the U.S, announced on September 15, 2021. Under the pact, the U.S. and the UK will assist Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, there will be rotational basing of U.S. and UK attack submarines in Australia, and there will be collaborative development of advanced technological capabilities.

^[21] Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 105.

^[22] Jacques Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 162.

^[23] See Joshua Leifer, “The Netanyahu doctrine: how Israel’s longest-serving leader reshaped the country in his image,” The Guardian, November 21, 2023, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-doctrine-how-israels-longest-serving-leader-reshaped-the-country-in-his-image>.

^[24] Hamas, “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement” (August 18, 1988), <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp>.

^[25] Ibid.

^[26] Hamas, “A Document of General Principles & Policies” (2017), <https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/hamas-2017.pdf>.

^[27] See Nidal Al-Mughrabi, “Leading Hamas official says no softened stance toward Israel,” Reuters, May 10, 2017, <https://www.reuters.com/article/world/leading-hamas-official-says-no-softened-stance-toward-israel-idUSKBN1862O4/>.

^[28] See “Gaza: Hamas must end brutal crackdown against protesters and rights defenders” (March 18, 2019), Amnesty International, <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2019/03/gaza-hamas-must-end-brutal-crackdown-against-protesters-and-rights-defenders/>, and Maram Humaid, “Gaza rights groups denounce Hamas crackdown on protests,” Al Jazeera, March 19, 2019, <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/19/gaza-rights-groups-denounce-hamas-crackdown-on-protests>.

^[29] See, “West Bank and Gaza: Selected Issues” (September 13, 2023), International Monetary Fund, <https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Issues/2023/09/12/West-Bank-and-Gaza-Selected-Issues-539154>.

^[30] Hamas, “The Covenant.”

^[31] Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of the Palestinian Resistance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 28.

^[32] Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, 116.

^[33] Baconi, Hamas Contained, xix.

^[34] “Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad: We Will Repeat The October 7 Attack, Time And Again, Until Israel Is Annihilated; We are Victims – Everything We Do Is Justified,” Memri TV (October 24, 2023), <https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-official-ghazi-hamad-we-will-repeat-october-seven-until-israel-annihilated-victims-everything-we-do-justified>.

^[35] Ibid.

^[36] See Biljana Radivojević and Goran Penev, “Demographic Losses of Serbia in the First World War and Their Long-term Consequences,” Economic Annals LIX, no. 203 (October–December 2014): 29–54, <https://www.ekof.bg.ac.rs/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Radivojevic_Penev_color-1.pdf>.

^[37] Julius Braunthal, History of the International 1914-1943, vol. 2 (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1967), 34.