Al Aqsa Flood: Full Spectrum
Introduction
In December 2024, after a year-plus of direct confrontation between the Zionist entity and the Axis of Resistance (the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, the Popular Mobilization Forces, the Palestinian resistance factions, and, formerly, the Syrian Arab Republic), the imperialists and their media apparatus moved into triumphalist mode, declaring victory on account of two major developments. The first was a Zionist assassination wave targeting the Lebanese Hezbollah’s veteran leadership, including military advisor Fuad Shukr, Radwan Force commander Ibrahim Aqil, and General-Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. The second was the fall of the Syrian Arab Republic to the reactionary forces of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham. Indeed, these were major developments advancing the strategic position of the US empire in West Asia. The assassinations were likely necessary conditions for the overthrow of Syrian Arab nationalist republicanism, a long-standing goal of the United States and the Zionist entity. But those seriously engaged in the struggle against Zionism, and against the imperialist system more broadly, understand that setbacks are inevitable, and that setbacks are not tantamount to defeat. The Axis of Resistance itself proceeds on the basis of lessons accumulated from prior setbacks and waves of counterrevolution, and always those setbacks, from the June of 1967 to the 1991 destruction of Soviet power, were accompanied by media triumphalism. The term “Six-Day War” to refer to the June War is itself a stroke of Zionist triumphalism. Conversely, the imperialists and their media do not often demonstrate an understanding that the very nature of the Zionist settler-colony–violent, expansionist, and supremacist–prevents its normalization among the masses of West Asia and North Africa. And so the struggle continues: as the lyrics of an old Irish republican anthem said regarding the British Empire, “We fought you for 800 years, and we will fight you for 800 more.” Indeed, the Gaza ceasefire agreement of January 2025 proves that the Palestinian resistance remains plenty capable of making strategic counter-advances. While the actual implementation is open to doubt–several times in history have the US imperialists lent Israel permission to break ceasefires pursuant to smash-and-grabs of land and water–the discursive terms of such agreements set political precedents for the future, and in that regard the Palestinian resistance has elicited several major guarantees, such as the release of prisoners (including high profile revolutionaries) and the lifting of the blockade on Gaza.
Serious study into the underlying weaknesses leading up to the fall of Syria, and its multitude of consequences for regional resistance, is forthcoming. But just as important, especially for the sake of refusing internalization of defeatism the imperialist media aims relentlessly to impart, is to gather the lessons of the past year, including anti-Zionist achievements and breakthroughs. The following contribution towards that goal argues that the crowning accomplishment of the past year above all others has been to shatter the myth of invincibility the US empire has projected in West Asia–its ideology of uncontested domination–since the destruction of the Soviet Union. It further argues that the strategies and tactics used to attain that goal are based on a corpus of knowledge accumulating (tarakum) at least since the founding moments of the Zionist state in historic Palestine. The conclusion examines the gravity of the Zionist state’s pursuit of genocide as a counterinsurgency strategy, as well as the imperative for resistance forces to develop strategies addressing Zionism’s real source of strength, US imperialism.
Acts of Return: How the Al Aqsa Flood Shattered the US Fantasy of “Full-Spectrum Dominance”
In April of 2001, the Pentagon altered its Field Manual operational approach from “AirLand Battle,” established in 1982, to “Full-Spectrum Dominance,” a move intended to address the nature of threats to US power as they emerged in the 21st century. The overthrow of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991 opened the floodgates for this new doctrine in which the US military pursued, in the words of its own handbook, “dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains and information environment (which includes cyberspace) that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.” The 1990s saw several US initiatives aimed at the political neutralization of organized resistance to total US control. The 1993 Oslo Accords propped up a compliant capitalist class within a Palestinian nation newly deprived of the global counterweight of the USSR. Oslo’s domestic accompaniment, the 1996 Foreign Terrorist Organization List, sought to isolate further leftover “radical” elements of the Palestinian national movement. The events of September 11, 2001, occurring only five months after the initial promulgation of “Full-Spectrum Dominance,” provided the Pentagon an ideal pretext through which to expand the credo militarily. The resulting “War on Terror” began as an Executive Mandate discursively bulldozing the concept of national sovereignty. In practice, a new era of “mega imperialism” emerged, forged through land invasions, kidnappings and assassinations, including of critical journalists, and extreme torture, all unrestrained by borders, international law, and basic diplomatic norms. In more direct language, “Full-Spectrum Dominance” represented a bid for control so totalizing it could, drone-like, creep into psyches and shatter any psychological recalcitrance. On the military level, this doctrine sought to deny the very possibility of guerrilla warfare, “the basis of the struggle of a people to redeem itself.”[2] On the civil level, it expanded on decades of Pentagon Thought equating protest and organized dissent with military insurgency.
The Zionist siege of Gaza began in 2007 as an attempt to compensate for defeat. Unable to secure military bases in Gaza from resistance attacks, the Zionist entity vacated Gaza in 2005, hoping to redirect and redouble resources towards the colonization of the West Bank. This US-funded siege ultimately developed into a novel experiment in “Full-Spectrum Dominance,” testing how far a modern empire could go in perfecting physical enclosure, round-the-clock surveillance, strategic deprivation, and psychological defeat against a resistant population. Watchtowers, satellites, sensors, and snipers sought to turn Gaza from what resistance forces referred to as muharrarat, or liberated zones, into a concentration camp.[3] Imperialism’s resistors, it seemed, could be tucked away, hidden, contained–the Palestinian people of Gaza appeared to be trapped in a walled corner of the Mediterranean basin, forgotten by far too many. The Al Aqsa Flood operation of October 7, 2023, ushered in a new epoch. In a surprise organized to coincide with the Arab nationalist memory of the joint Egyptian-Syrian strike on Israel in the fall of 1973 to regain sovereignty over the Occupied Sinai and Golan Heights, Palestinian military resistance factions led by Hamas burst through the “security perimeter” of the Gaza Strip to launch an attack. Hamas’s al Qassam Brigades, along with the al Quds Brigades of Palestine Islamic Jihad, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the PFLP, and the National Resistance Brigades of the DFLP, eluded 24-hour GPS surveillance and sensor-powered machine gun turrets to overrun roughly 30 strategic Zionist locations, including military bases, police intelligence stations, and several kibbutzim dotted throughout the Gaza envelope. On the other side of the Al Aqsa Flood operation, a new thesis emerged: there are limits to imperial control. The Palestinian resistance overthrew US dominance in two key aspects: the psychological-ideological dimension; and the subterranean dimension. US imperialists see genocide – the planned, systematic, and technocratic elimination of the Gaza population – as the necessary strategy to restore their fantasy of “Full-Spectrum Dominance.”
The Accumulated Lessons Leading to Al Aqsa Flood
The year 2023 marked the return of the feda’i, defined as the displaced peasant capable of moving into and carrying out operations within stolen territories, thus going on the offensive for the liberation of land. Fateh named the military wing responsible for its first official feda’i operation on January 1, 1965, al-’Asifa, “the storm”; October 7 brought the flood after the storm. The basis for the victory of the Palestinian resistance over US imperial doctrine therefore began with a limited, eminently practical goal: to return to “Israel” - the territories pilfered from them at gunpoint, ruled by the military entity serving as the cornerstone of the US’s West Asia strategy. The successes of the Al Aqsa Flood operation, and of the subsequent military campaigns the broader Axis of Resistance have waged, depend on a long history of lessons accruing at least since the foundation of the Zionist state in 1948. Immediately following the IDF’s organized depopulation of southwest Palestine between 1947 and 1949, refugees in Gaza attempting to return home detected the immense psychological impact of their “infiltration” on the Zionist settlers residing in the frontier kibbutzim. Sometimes arms were not even necessary to elicit a sense of hysteria from the settler populations seeking racial quarantine. Zionist historian Benny Morris’s book Israel’s Border Wars: 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War documents how these early encounters began with what the Zionist authorities called “economic infiltration”: starving Palestinians who had been removed to areas such as Beit Hanoun and ‘Abasan walking their way back to their old (stolen) fields and groves for food. Morris writes: “The [Zionist] officials–especially those connected with the agricultural and settlement sectors–were particularly fearful that continued infiltrator attacks would undermine morale and precipitate individual or mass flight.” Elsewhere, a Zionist regional council complained that Palestinian “infiltration” was “sapping settlers’ will to stay”–particularly in the frontier kibbutzim, which held an essential place in Zionist state strategic planning.
When armed raids from Gaza began to be launched, it was initially a protective measure against the IDF’s “shoot-to-kill” policy against refugee “infiltrators” along the Zionist state’s frontier. The military aims of these guerrilla operations evolved in tandem with the Zionist entity’s attempts to use its frontier kibbutzim as quasi-military posts, their settlers serving as armed watchmen and women and as a layer of military interference–effectively as “human shields.” The political purpose of the frontier settlements was to expand the Zionist zone of control and prevent the right of return: “The new settlements,” writes Morris, “were regarded as a necessary measure in the struggle against a possible Palestinian refugee return… the settlement of the sites would stymie infiltration by individual refugees bent on… cultivating and harvesting individual crops.” Several of the kibbutzim the Palestinian resistance raided on October 7, 2023, were founded with explicit military intent. Kibbutz Be’eri was, according to the Time of Israel, “established in 1946 as part of a strategic plan to help the future state withstand an invasion from Egypt.” Nahal Oz was, according to Ha’aretz, “the first settlement to be set up by the Nahal Brigade, an army unit that combines military service with civilian settlement activity. Ultimately, the military outposts created by Nahal are converted into civilian settlements.” When Nahal Oz was erected in the 1950s, its women settlers were anointed as “Minutewomen,” armed militias dedicated to catching and killing “infiltrating” refugees from Gaza.[4] Settlers of Kfar Maimon have provided essential force multiplication for the final colonization of Gaza, going so far as to march into Gaza in 2005 and clash with Zionist soldiers and police in defiance of Ariel Sharon’s so-called “Disengagement Plan” (the transition from settlement expansion to siege).[5]
Amid such appalling conditions, it should go without saying that the refugees of Gaza owed the Zionist project nothing. Settlement expansion resulted in their starvation and destitution by destroying the Gaza region’s agriculture centered on barley and oranges; and when refugees dared to return to idle crop fields to re-cultivate them, the Zionist military captured these “infiltrators,” tossed them onto crowded trucks, and hauled them to concentration camps where they were often tortured. It was in response to border “infiltrations,” and not actual feda’yin raids, that the Zionist entity initially began its practice of “reprisal attacks,” targeting the entire villages of refugees who dared wander beyond the camps.[6] The restoration of Palestinian dignity therefore required return, and return required dismantlement of the frontier settlements which the Zionist entity erected to prevent it. In other words, it was the Zionist entity that gave their frontier settlements a military role, one which any serious Palestinian commando operation would have to address. It is why the resistance factions claimed footholds in the frontier settlements on October 7, seizing them as forward bases and staging grounds until the Apache helicopters and tanks of Israel arrived to fire missiles and shells at the fighters as well as the settlers.
Those early “infiltration” episodes of the 1940s and 50s were often experimental in nature. Their lessons would eventually be codified as part of a comprehensive military strategy long predating October 7, 2023. The 1971 pamphlet “Military Strategy of the PFLP” argued: “On the psychological level, the Israeli military always aims at reassuring the Israeli citizen that it is capable of protecting him, his life, his survival and his economic advancement through the suppression of any enemy.” The post-1967 “infiltrations” of the feday’in into Israel – which the PFLP specified as acts of return – deprived the Zionist entity of “the fruit of victory–peace of mind…” The PFLP understood that the psychology of the settler is characterized by ruthless aggression, underlying which is an impossible quest for purity and invincibility so obsessive that it can paradoxically breed a demobilizing fear. It is this very psychological weakness that serves as the mooring thread of the “spider’s web” to which Hassan Nasrallah famously compared Israel in 2000. Hamas tapped into this essential insight throughout the Second Intifada, before the formal siege policy on Gaza began in 2007. Throughout the fall of 2004, for example, Qassam Brigades commandos, amid routine Zionist rampages against Jabalia and Beit Hanoun and Rafah, “infiltrated” (returned to) the Kfar Darom settlement and Nahal Oz.
In fact, many military tactics Palestinian feda’yin attempted during earlier episodes of struggle that might have appeared as failures at the time, including many led by Marxist-Leninists and Maoists, have today become rather successful with the benefit of improved technology and command-and-control capabilities. The first Katyusha rocket attack from Lebanon on the Kiryat Shmona settlement occurred on January 1, 1969. In 2023, Hezbollah, after opening up a “support front” for the Gaza resistance on October 8, evaded Israel’s Iron Dome using low-flying anti tank missiles to target military locations throughout Northern Palestine. The barrages effectively caused settlers to abandon Kiryat Shmona and a number of other settlements in the area, turning what was in the 1960s an experimental and scattershot form of attack into a sustained, concerted strategy to apply pressure on the Zionist entity. In the 1960s, the Palestine Research Center published studies such as Atef Suleiman’s “Israel and Oil” (1967), which mapped out Zionists’ limited energy supply locations, verifying the entity’s status as an “electricity island” without a depth of energy support in the broader West Asian region, as Khaled Barakat recently wrote. Hezbollah continued and operationalized the tradition set by this mode of research by geographically mapping out Zionist military and energy infrastructure, as revealed in every new release of “Hudhud” drone surveillance footage.
The list of long-studied, hard won tactics goes on, all channeled into a strategy of attrition. Ansar Allah uses its endogenously-produced drone collection to pursue Zionist-linked tankers troughing through the Red Sea, a technologically updated version of an “External Operation” against sites of world imperialism, expanding on Wadi’ Haddad’s doctrine: “Chase the enemy everywhere!” In Gaza, the Qassam Brigades blast invading infantry with roadside Improvised Explosive Devices, recycling the weapon from previous experiences of guerrilla resistance in the Arab region: against the IDF in South Lebanon (1982-2000); against the US military in Iraq (2003-present); and again, against the IDF in Gaza (2014). The Al Aqsa Flood Operation gave way to the Al Aqsa Flood Battle in which Qassam ground troops coordinate sniper strikes against loitering invaders; emerge from and recede back into tunnel openings to ambush and retreat; maneuver through mouse holes punctured through the concrete remnants of collapsed and hollowed buildings; and, with help from the Yassin 105 RPG, ignite into flame and ashes the Merkava tanks of the occupiers, exploiting a weakness the Egyptian Army discovered with its own RPGs and SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles) during the October 1973 offensive into the Sinai. “Hit-and-run” is the creed: “The fundamental characteristic of a guerrilla band is mobility.”[7] Fighters of the resistance as a whole–of Qassam, Al Quds, Abu Ali Mustafa, and Omar al-Qassem–continue to display these capabilities throughout the north and south of Gaza, in every region, from Beit Hanoun to Rafah. Over a year into the Gaza battle, no matter how brutally the Zionists assault a neighborhood, or how certainly they proclaim a sub-region under total control, resistance operations re-emerge to re-affirm that Gaza has not been defeated.
US-Zionist dominance over the skies–a key tenet of the US’s “Full-Spectrum Dominance” and of Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge,” functionally an extension of the US doctrine–faces unprecedented challenges. From the ballistic missiles of Iran to the Samad drones of Yemen’s Ansar Allah, aerial projections evade the expensive, top-heavy Iron Dome and David’s Sling air defense systems. Mastery of the underground belongs without question to the resistance: tunnel systems decades in the making snake and wind beneath the flatlands of Gaza and the mountain ranges of South Lebanon, the earth’s crust providing a protective shell over command-and-control bases. Tunneling has a long history in the annals of combat against the superior airpower of the US empire, notably within the underground facilities, weapons storage units, and offensive tunnels heralded by the North Korean People’s Army beginning in June of 1950. Palestinians adopted these models to their own terrain. Mohammed al-Aswad, known as “Guevara of Gaza,” was a key innovator, designing tunnels in the early 1970s through which fighters could maneuver house-to-house undetected. These innovations in hybrid war, combining guerrilla infantry with quasi-state weaponry, subvert and ultimately prevent the US from achieving “Full-Spectrum Dominance” in a region (West Asia) and subregion (Palestine) that, before 2023, appeared to be a relatively strong link in the chain of its empire. The Axis of Resistance, with the resistance in Gaza and South Lebanon serving as its heart and soul, has prevented US-Zionist imperialism from seizing “the fruit of victory–peace of mind,” to reference the PFLP’s words once more. The US-Zionist counter-measure enacted to restore full-spectrum dominance – namely genocide – has given way to a “race against time” for both major blocs of the war.
The US’s Attempts to Restore “Full-Spectrum Dominance” through Genocide
The battle of wills over the region between the Axis of Resistance and the US-led imperialist bloc presents two competing gambles for which time is the essence. The Axis of Resistance bets that a strategy of gradual attrition (harb al-instinzaf, literally “war of draining”), designed to compensate for extreme military asymmetry, will gradually lead to the implosion of Zionist state and society. That is, the perpetual concerts of rocketry over Zionist settlements; the draining of Zionist infantry into land invasions costly in terms of life, limbs, and psychological well-being; the armed sanctioning of the entity’s commercial partners in the Red Sea and elsewhere; the global diplomatic and popular censure of the entity for its atrocities; and the enduring memory of October 7 itself would cumulatively spiral into irreconcilable internecine distrust and civil conflict, along with irrevocable net emigration of Zionist settlers and corporate divestment from Israel. This implosion of the Zionist project then could shift US imperialism’s cost-benefit analysis regarding its support, especially if and when the US decides to invest more elsewhere–in the South China Sea, for example. For the past 15 months, the forces of US imperialism and Zionism bet that they could successfully commit genocide and mute resistance–for them, two sides of the same coin–before their internal crises become unsustainable.
It is not quite accurate to say that the US and the Zionist entity pursue genocide in Gaza in lieu of a military strategy; rather, the genocide is their military strategy. By making Gaza “unlivable”–or what US Army strategists have taken to calling a “feral city”–the Zionist military hopes to render Hamas’s guerrilla capabilities moot. Asymmetrical military resistance depends on and serves a popular cradle.[8] After all, the very first “infiltrations”–a form of resistance par excellence–came not from organized armed bands, but from assorted homeless refugees, more so grown Handalas than Mohammed al-Aswads. Even Zionist journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who plays an essential role in Anglophone media helping US liberals to justify the Gaza genocide to themselves, spoke aloud about a fundamental problem with the “Gaza population” beyond Hamas, namely the ideas that might exist in the people’s heads. When pressed about Israel’s war methods involving apparently indefinite occupations and endless population removal schemes, Gur gave a rationalization perhaps more revealing than he intended: “When you remove Hamas, half of the population is under 18. And Hamas ran the school for 18 years. The idea of removing Hamas from Gaza, it is a much deeper and more profound problem... Hamas produced a situation in which getting it out requires essentially this kind of war... There isn't fundamentally a different kind of war if you want to remove Hamas from Gaza... To a lot of Gazans who hate Hamas, there is also a deep appreciation of [their] story of dignity."
On this conception, that the people of Gaza constitute their greatest obstacles, the US-Zionist military objectives in Gaza were methodical from the very beginning, as it were. Right away, the first week following the Al Aqsa Flood, Israel cut off food, water, and fuel to Gaza. On October 27, 2023, the invading forces pursued bifurcation of the Strip, targeting key camps at the north point (Beit Hanoun) and the center (Bureij) of the main thoroughfare, Salah al-Din Road. From there, Zionist ground forces fanned out in three locations in the northern half of Gaza–Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and Juhor ad-Dik–in a flanking maneuver designed to surround and then empty a significant mass of its population into the southern half, below Bureij. To supplement the mass dislocation stage of the genocide, the Zionist Air Force struck with blitzkrieg fury at sites of civil infrastructure throughout the Strip, an attempt to collapse social reproduction altogether: al-Quds Hospital (October 29), a UN school in Jabalia camp (November 4), Nasser Children’s Hospital (November 4 and 6), al-Shifa Hospital (November 11-23), al-Rantisi Hospital (November 13), Indonesia Hospital (November 20). That sample comes only from the first month of the invasion, well enough on its own to establish the pattern. Since then, every major hospital and university has been either attacked or destroyed, to say nothing of the destruction of hundreds of religious and food distribution sites.
Bifurcation was secured with Israel’s October 30 blockade of Salah al-Din Road. This move prevented Palestinian travel between the Northern and Southern halves of Gaza, packed a million additional people into makeshift tents in the South, and served as the basis of the “Netzarim Corridor,” a central occupation zone named after a former Zionist colony in Gaza. The mass displacement proved to be entrapment for the purposes of mass murder when, in May of 2024, occupation forces attacked with fire and fury the tent dwellings at the southernmost end of Gaza in Rafah. Remote control demolitions have taken out entire neighborhoods and apartment blocks in all parts of Gaza. In October of 2024, occupying troops attempted to vanquish the popular cradle that remained in the North, starting with a re-invasion of Jabalia, the historic stronghold of Gaza resistance since the founding of the Zionist state. Methods used there were consistent with the invaders’ behavior throughout their city-by-city, stronghold-by-stronghold advance on the strip, including two previous offensives on Jabalia: airstrikes on crowded areas; siege, followed by sniper shots fired at any civilians seen criss-crossing the streets; the burning of civil institutions such as schools and sports clubs; and the kidnapping of men to be detained in concentration camps such as Sde Teiman, where sexual torture and medical experimentation are rife. (Shades of Auschwitz inescapably loom over every step of these operations.) Children, the symbol and wellspring of any society’s future, have been especially targeted for murder and mutilation, confirmed in even the most mainstream of US press by “65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics” who testify that Zionist soldiers routinely shoot children in the head. Again, note the pattern.
Not only does the US provide the weapons, it often provides coordinates of targets. A Politico disinformation report from November 2023 gives the game away, asserting that the Biden administration provided to Israel “GPS coordinates of a number of medical facilities and information on movements of aid groups in Gaza,” ostensibly in order to “prevent strikes,” even though Israel continued to bombard these targets. The obvious conclusion to be reached by the facts alone–just the facts, that is, without the administration’s editorial spin which Politico all-too-dutifully repeats–would be that the US provides them so that they will be struck. That bit of disinformation points to another indispensable role that the US has played in the genocide: its containment of public outrage through use of endless discursive smoke screens. The main domestic challenges to the central role of US imperialism have come from Arab diaspora communities and the student movement, both of which find themselves subjected to a range of evolving counterinsurgency tactics, including police beatings, arrests, Brownshirt violence, and sanctions. The US ruling class sought to contain these internal challenges long enough to enable a Zionist final solution to its “Gaza problem.”
One discursive smokescreen of the Biden Administration was the manufacturing of a Biden-Netanyahu, US-Israeli contradiction that did not in fact exist. Insofar as any such contradiction did exist, it was merely over the fact that the Al Aqsa Flood operation transpired in the first place, and the administration’s frustration that the Zionist entity proved derelict in the duty for which the US handsomely pays it, which is to keep the Palestinians of Gaza caged and forgotten so that the region can move toward a new commercial order (e.g., the Abraham Accords) with minimal resistance. Over a year of persistent and expanding genocide shows remarkable congruity between the US and Israel regarding the appropriate counter-measures to restore the total enclosure of any remaining people in Gaza. Put plainly, genocide is not a policy with which the US administration reluctantly goes along, haplessly hamstrung by a bellicose Netanyahu; genocide is the US policy.
Another such smokescreen has been to drown the media in a sea of euphemisms: “humanitarian crisis”; lamentations, expressed in the passive voice without naming the perpetrator, that “too many civilians have been killed”; the cold, mechanical description of the burning alive of hospital patients as “missile strikes”; or repetition, over a year later, of the old storyline from October 8 that the Zionist mission in Gaza was to “rescue the hostages.” All of these euphemisms cast a reverie that US-Zionist murder is a matter of “collateral damage” accidentally committed during nobler pursuits. They overall add to the racist imperialist impression, so crucial to US society’s idea of itself, that while the Sinwars and the Nasrallahs of the world are motivated by evil and malice, the Bidens and Harrises would never harm by intention. US state and society have resorted to such ideological chicanery many times before. Throughout its war on Vietnam, US military and intelligence terrorized the people of the countryside as a matter of systemized policy ordered from above. The military and the press successfully used the US public’s scandalization over the 1968 My Lai massacre to mythologize it as an exception, and the “lone wolf” scapegoat for official policy, Lt. William Calley, as a rotten apple. This mythology became canon history in the US, a way to forget and bury that the Vietnam War was but a long succession of My Lais.[9]
Conclusion: The Limits of Imperial Power
While the Al Aqsa Flood has exposed “Full-Spectrum Dominance” as an impossible fantasy, US support for Israel nonetheless proves to be the most vexing barrier to the Resistance Axis’s strategy of attrition. US air defense production and supply lines do have finite limits, but it is not clear whether the two major confrontation fronts in the world–West Asia and Eastern Europe–will be enough to break them decisively. Also unclear are the limits of US financial support to Israel as it endlessly compensates for the Zionist economy’s shortfalls. Over the past 15 months, Israel played a very important role for the US by fronting its own war against regional West Asian resistance, absorbing the brunt of its social, political, and economic contradictions. What would become of the US relationship to Zionism if the latter could no longer fulfill this purpose? It is no coincidence that the negotiating position of the Palestinian resistance appeared to have been strongest when the US was absorbing losses directly–when its own soldiers stationed in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria were returning home in coffins. In February of 2024, Hamas confidently issued maximal demands with a three-phase truce plan. That same month, attacks on US bases abated, followed by a year of US-Zionist obstinacy during negotiations that caused Hamas to withdraw from talks in August. Those strikes on US bases came from Iraqi militias and swiftly provoked a renewed series of US attacks on Iraq and Syria. The urgency with which the US administration and military leadership acted in that brief flash of time when its regional installations were under direct attack suggests that an expanded Americanization of the Resistance Axis’s strategy will prove vital to their long-term attrition war.
Without more direct sustained pressure on US assets, the US and Israel’s ultimate acceptance of a three-phase proposal, which preserved several of the core conditions from the spring of 2024, took nearly another year’s time and a transition in US presidential administrations. The decision to accept was ultimately compelled by a cold reality imposed by the steadfastness of the resistance forces, as US intelligence assessed that Hamas had recruited 10,000 to 15,000 new members since October of 2023. That intelligence report must have made for a disquieting read among US war financiers and architects, who threw nearly every variety of chemical and fire in their empire’s techno-supremacist arsenal at nearly every square inch of Gaza for a period of fifteen months, only for resistance militia to keep their numbers and fighting capabilities firmly intact. Only a month into the assault on Gaza, the tonnage of bombs dropped already translated to the equivalent of two nuclear bombs. If the US and Israel have been testing how completely genocidal annihilation of over two million people can be accomplished in the 21st century, the survival of the people of Gaza augurs hope for the global majority; and the preservation of Gaza’s armed self-defense capacity through it all puts the Al Aqsa Flood Battle on par with Soviet defeat of Nazism and the Vietnamese victory of US imperialism in terms of its historic import. What alternative paths to pacification will the Trump administration, which is as organically bound with Zionism as any US administration, now pursue?
“US imperialism is the highest enemy of the Palestinian people,” an old slogan goes, words that remain true. A defeat of “Full-Spectrum Dominance” means the prevention of total control; it is not the same as the defeat of US imperialism itself. Moreover, the December overthrow of the Syrian Arab Republic occurred against the backdrop of decades of escalating US sanctions grounding down and hollowing out the state, proving that imperialism is capable of carrying out its own “wars of draining.” Yet, the United States’ “New World Order” proclaimed in 1991 still appears more delicate today than at any point since the overthrow of the Soviet Union. The contours of the new world being born are unclear, but the old world’s passage is a necessary condition for Palestinian liberation. When a one-armed Yahya Sinwar, a child of al-Majdal forcibly relocated to Gaza, faced down a Zionist drone in the husk of a dilapidated building in southern Gaza, he perhaps symbolized what the PLO called the essence of Vietnam’s victory over US imperialism in a prior era: the “victory of humans over machines,” and specifically the global inequality, high-tech holocausts, and attempts at totalizing control that machine represents. Perhaps more precisely, Gaza resistance factions demonstrate military technological innovations that, while backstopped by state power in various locales (in Iran, Yemen, China, the North of Korea, formerly Syria), emerge from and make possible rudimentary forms of sovereignty–machines engineered towards the goal of human survival rather than extermination.
To restore total control, US imperialism threatens to expand its Gaza holocaust into regional and world wars, but Palestinians in Gaza had already endured hell for decades before 2023. Palestinians’ sin is that they disagree with “Israel,” the instrument, agent, and symbol of their dispossession, while US power very much needs Israel to project military superiority in West Asia on its behalf. The unprecedented resources commanded by the modern Euroamerican world were therefore amassed into a massive conspiracy against the people of Palestine, dedicated first to their removal and dislocation, second to their perpetual imprisonment behind wire fences and iron walls, and third to their starvation and periodic execution (“mowing the lawn”). Their revolt began in essence as a class struggle, of dispossessed peasants-turned-slum dwellers seeking to overcome their conditions, in order to achieve the humble goal of returning home. They shake the very foundations of the world-system as a corollary. More raw violence will not overturn the weight of history to convince Palestinians of the wisdom or necessity of “Israel.” With the Al Aqsa Flood, the Palestinian resistors dared to embrace George Jackson’s famous calculation: they will have their freedom “even at the cost of total war.”
[1] AISC editors highly recommend reading two earlier pieces by Patrick Higgins for further background context on several of the themes covered by this piece: Patrick Higgins, "Gunning for Damascus: The US War on the Syrian Arab Republic," Middle East Critique, vol. 32, no. 2, 2023, pp. 217-241, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19436149.2023.2199487, and Patrick Higgins, "The War on Syria," Jacobin, August 2015, https://jacobin.com/2015/08/syria-civil-war-nato-military-intervention/.
[2] Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1969), pg. 3.
[3] Thanks to Naye Idriss for bringing my attention to this formulation.
[4] Thanks to Samar al-Saleh for digging up the old The New York Times article which documented this history.
[5] See: Anat Roth, “The 2005 Collapse of the Preconception regarding the Settlers' Struggle against the Disengagement Plan,” National Resilience, Politics, and Society Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2019).
[6] One such early reprisal was a mortar attack against the people of ‘Abasan, which occurred on October 7, 1949. For Palestinians, this date is a day of terrorism among countless others, not fit for the 9/11-esque appellation of “10/7” the Western press offers the State of Israel.
[7] Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1969), pg. 12.
[8] As Mary Turfah writes: “The fighter fights for the future of their loved ones. When their loved ones are killed, it undercuts the possibility of this imagined future. This sows hopelessness and makes them question what they’re fighting for.”
[9] Credit here must be given to Donald Freed for his brilliant formulation: “Lee Harvey Oswald was to Dallas as William Calley is to Vietnam.”