Arab Revolution, Palestine National Liberation, and Anti-Imperialist Struggle, Part 2

Editorial Note: The following is the second part of an interview with AISC member Patrick Higgins by the French-language magazine QG Décolonial. Part 1 appeared in the previous blog issue and can be found here .

QG Décolonial: The term “anti-imperialism” is often emptied of its substance today. What do you see as its historical and strategic conditions of validity?

Patrick Higgins: The validity—the necessity, I argue—of anti-imperialism in the 20th century derived from the phenomenon of unequal and uneven world-capitalist development, a problem which accelerated the inequalities produced by prior centuries of colonialism. This problem of global inequality did not begin in the 20th century; rather, as a result of colonialism, the deepening inequality of nations was endemic to the advancement of the capitalist system on a world scale. There was a phenomenon in history of liberal anti-imperialism, which largely presented a moral case, but the most enduring and militant and theoretically rigorous forms were propounded by Marxists who realized that the exploitative relationship between richer and poorer nations presented a colossal obstacle to socialist revolution and a communist society. Marx himself only made beginnings on this issue, but he very clearly detected the problem in his writings on Ireland, observing that “the English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland [as a colony].” Lenin’s writings on imperialism emphasized that the global nation-state system was a creation of and conduit for capital accumulation, especially useful for dividing the working class along national lines, as he called “the connection between imperialism and… social-chauvinism” the “fundamental question of modern socialism.”

This realization essentially animated the central debate of the first successful socialist revolution, often distilled in its essence to the “Trotskyist” and “Stalinist” lines: “permanent revolution” or “socialism in one country”? Put simply, a single socialist nation, limited by its particular resources, its geographic location and climate, its agricultural possibilities, and its population size, cannot provide for the whole of its people all basic necessities, and is therefore dependent on world trade within a global system dominated by capitalist relations and, more than that, is vulnerable to hostile nation-states actively attempting to encircle and destroy it. What then should a revolution, limited to one particular country, do: immediately export the revolution to other countries, despite finite resources and a tenuous grip on power, or build up defense capabilities within one country to protect the national revolution in the immediate term and turn to world revolution later?

Thus, for Marxist-Leninists, anti-imperialism was initially an internationalist duty, necessary to achieve world communist revolution. What is interesting to me about the 20th century national liberation movements is that they often reversed this order: socialism became a means to secure anti-imperialism. For example, the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party understood nationalization of industry as the available means by which the people remove national assets from foreign (capitalist) control. The late Domenico Losurdo articulated this difference as a schism between Western and Eastern Marxisms, the former starting from the universal aspiration to internationalism and latter from the particular standpoint of nationalism. These two positions should work to understand each other for the sake of realizing a substantive anti-systemic internationalism, one not co-opted by or harnessed towards the aims of imperialism in its (now dying) phase of neoliberal globalization, which has in practice turned so many national liberation movements into ash and ruin.

When I use the phrase “national liberation”–and national liberation movements were in the 20th century the living soul of anti-imperialism–I am thinking of Amilcar Cabral’s definition in “National Liberation and Culture”: a definite historical phenomenon, the “organized political expression of the culture of the people” as they seek to free national productive forces from foreign domination. Cabral’s definition implies here that the process of national liberation continues well after the moment national independence is achieved. In his 1966 address to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana, Cabral argued explicitly that newly independent states had only two available paths forward: either “the creation of socialist states” or neo-colonialism, defined as recolonization by proxy through “the local pseudo-bourgeoisie,” which, unable direct the development of the productive forces, could never actually be a true national bourgeoisie. The left in the West largely defected from their commitments to national liberation struggles in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but that does not mean that national liberation ceased to be relevant as a concept.

Imperialism has not gone anywhere. In fact, US-led imperialism in the 21st century, unrestrained by the nuclear counter-deterrent of the Soviet Union, has only become more violent towards the smaller nations of what was once called the “Third World,” and global inequality has consequently widened with increasing numbers of proletarians becoming refugees and migrants, treated as superfluous to accumulation and therefore deemed ineligible for basic political and human rights. These “surplus” populations are created by US-led attacks on post-independence states, on national liberations both in and out of state power, covertly in the form of death squads and overtly in the form of sanctions and bombings and direct military invasions. These attacks obliterate the very right to revolution while maintaining the cycle of waste accumulation that ensures Washington’s military dominance. The existence of this perpetual threat clarifies that struggles for national sovereignty are, as per Cabral, struggles to protect the national productive forces from foreign domination–or destruction. The difficult truth is that there can be no socialist development without a military defense capable of arresting US military aggression.

The Palestinian cause exists at the intersection of all these problems. The Zionist invasion of Palestine marked the bridgeway for the continued existence of colonialism in its most direct form–settler-colonialism–into another century. The resulting Nakba created millions of refugees in West Asia, a disaster for the Palestinians themselves, but also a bellwether for what the US-led system had in store for humanity later, this mass-production of stateless persons. Palestinian revolutionaries showed the way forward by defining the right of return–in essence, the right to the land–as a national right. This is why Palestine so acutely encapsulates the continued relevance of national liberation in the 21st century, a picture only made clearer as refugees’ desire to return to their land is met with concentration camps and novel methods of extermination. Under such conditions, in which the majority of Israeli society endorses or actively assists the genocide, who dares to continue suggesting that Palestinians shed the national dimension of their class struggle, or give up their arms or their claims to the land?

I ask that question rhetorically, but I admit I have come across the backward suggestion that it is the Palestinian insistence on armed struggle which has brought the genocide upon them, apparently without considering that any state which seizes an opportunity to commit genocide already harnessed the intent. On the contrary, Gaza gives us confirmation that what Palestinian revolutionaries theorized about the nature of the Zionist project was true the whole time, that it is a settler-colony eliminating the existing peasant population to seize their land. That is the ugly truth that the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation exposed to the world, just as it continues to expose the role of the United States and the European Union as they mobilize mind-boggling proportions of their respective societies’ resources to maintain the genocide. Unions in Spain, Italy, and Morocco, which have successfully organized to block the passage of Israeli weapon parts through their ports, clearly see–and demonstrate–the continued relevance of anti-imperialism to the cause of labor. They are blocking the shipments of weapons made from their class’s own labor, being used to maim and destroy their class’s very lives.

QDG: You show that the fedayīn implemented a strategy of people’s war, but also armed themselves with intellectual tools. What does it mean, politically, to “put the rifle under the command of politics”?

PH: A People’s War consists of much more than violence. It requires a vanguard party capable of executing operations–of guiding violence–towards specific tactical and strategic goals. Political organization can prevent the outbreak of violence from descending into warlordism, defined by petty feuding over fiefdoms, a situation which tends to prove useful to imperialist extraction. For example, in Syria we see a scenario in which the country fractures along sectarian lines while Israel, more or less uncontested, exercises de facto sovereignty, controlling airspace at will while swallowing up more and more land. By way of contrast, a People’s War is a way to build what Lenin called dual power, to build popular sovereignty by way of arms, to begin the work of constructing the new socialist society before taking state power. In my dissertation, I cite William Hinton’s classic work Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village for offering a clear historical example of how a People’s War creates and spreads cultural revolution during the anti-colonial war. The armed cadres in China, that is, the party members, spent a massive amount of time protecting and directing agrarian reforms in the areas over which they gained control, supervising the peasant committees, granting them the opportunity to rule politically over their former landlords and to gain experience surveying land values and pooling together agricultural tools, livestock, crop yields, etc. During this period, the Party was built methodically, its members in each locality chosen carefully according to their level of discipline and commitment, their exhibition of virtue and record of service to the people. Once the peasants saw and felt the transformations the revolution could make in their lives, they became deeply invested in its success. One quote from the book has long stayed with me, from a house laborer who had once been forced to sell her son and twice sell herself into serfdom whose life had then been remade by the revolution: “It seems as if I have moved from Hell to Heaven.”

Al-Hadaf regularly transmitted, sometimes through translations and sometimes through original pieces, analysis, storytelling, and theory about the Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese People’s Wars in accessible, clear language. In Issue 70, Al-Hadaf published a comparative analysis of the US “Special War” versus the Vietnamese People’s War. The article listed the three essential elements of the success of the latter: armed struggle; popular political struggle; and “continuous pursuit of the enemy and incitement among his ranks,” going so far as to say: “Because the political struggle is the basis of everything, we must study it first.” The political struggle included demonstrations, strikes, demands, and sometimes clashes with the police within the US’s own proxy stronghold in Vietnam, where, as early as 1957, Ngô Đình Diệm declared that he sat upon a “volcano” of discontent. The people’s protests, their constant pursuit of the occupiers and vocal sloganeering against them, was determined to have significantly hampered the US-South Vietnamese military effort.

On the basis of these studies, Palestinian parties of the 1960s and 1970s learned they could not “wait” to capture state power before changing society. They succeeded in some respects and failed in others. In Jordan between 1968 and 1970, they were able, for a time, to centralize anti-monarchy activity under the emergency political command of the PLO. They temporarily brought together the various factions of the PLO, their respective militias, the labor unions, the women’s committees, and the trade associations. Through these links, threaded throughout the fabric of Palestinian society in Jordan, they conjoined military activity strategically to protest activity (e.g, student strikes and mass demonstrations), launching a diversity of tactics that brought the Jordanian monarchy, and even the US imperialists who backed it, to a crisis point. On August 16, 1970, nearly 1,000 students, led by uniformed Palestinian feday’in, set fire to the US Information Center and stormed the US Embassy. Their purpose was to protest the visit of Joseph J. Sisco, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, who had to cancel his planned visit, the point of which was, in essence, to liquidate the Palestinian armed struggle. The US withdrew Sisco and soon enough, a month later, sent over aircraft carriers instead.

In short, the feday’in successfully created basic infrastructure for a People’s War. But, according to the critique of left factions, they failed at meaningfully integrating the East Bank population (the “Jordanian” population) into their project, of offering those populations tangible and material changes, thereby allowing the King to step in with demagogic appeals. As the DPFLP noted, this propaganda carried weight because many rural farmers in the East Bank still relied on the monarchy for irrigation. The DPFLP criticized “Palestinianization” of the revolution that made it seem like the Palestinian destiny was separate from the Jordanian one; a deeper entrenchment among the Jordanian working class was required. So, at base level a People’s War is a banner of class struggle and is in origin and essence a Communist theory. This does not mean elements of People’s War cannot be adopted by non-communist formations. For example, the rank-and-file of the Qassam Brigades in Gaza belong by destiny to the proletariat and peasantry–the word “refugee” in this context largely stands for a peasant alienated from their land. By fighting for liberation and return, Palestinian refugees are fighting for their right to cultivate the earth, to grow watermelons and oranges and olives and tomatoes, which became increasingly impossible in a ghettoized and enclosed Gaza “strip” deprived of water, fertilizer, and nutrients. In many ways, Qassam are more successful militarily than the feday’in of old. But one point I tried to emphasize in my recent essay “Acts of Return : How the Al Aqsa Flood Shattered the US Fantasy of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’,” is that there has been transmission of knowledge between the old left-wing formations and the current Islamic groups such as Hamas, Ansar Allah, and Hezbollah. The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation and the ongoing Al-Aqsa Flood Battle would be unthinkable without the left’s earlier innovations. This is one reason why I oppose the politics of melancholy and nostalgia on the left: did the Arab left “fail,” or did it simply fail in some respects and succeed in others? The answer depends on when one closes the timeline and how closely one bothers to follow the trajectory of the Palestinian and Arab national movement as a whole. The struggle continues.

My intention in pointing out these links from past to present is not to conflate the Marxist-Leninist and Islamic projects. Ultimately, the People’s War intends to pave a path to the anti-imperialist socialist republic. Here, labor unions and peasant cooperatives are not simply to be regarded as nice things to give to the population; they are fighting organizations that teach the people the art of organization. As a mode of social organization, the Marxist-Leninist Party is to hold and protect the state on behalf of the unions and collectives. It does so by commanding the people’s army to carry out key nationalizations of industry; arming and training the cooperatives to prepare for a possible fight against the restorationist bourgeoisie and imperialist powers; leading education on the ground and through media organs; centrally planning the distribution and use of state resources, including land, accomplished with the aid of localized appointed Party committees; and setting class restrictions on elections by administering a people’s assembly. The local party committees are to vote for a Central Committee responsible for appointing the General-Secretary, the head of the military, an arrangement designed to subordinate military power to Party leadership. By the time national sovereignty has been achieved, these essential functions will have already been developed throughout the national liberation war. Of course, the PLO, as a “government-in-exile,” was not a Marxist-Leninist Party, but as an umbrella body, it included Marxist-Leninist parties as participants in its elected legislative branch, the Palestine National Council. The disagreements that ascertained between parties over the political direction and very structure of the PLO undoubtedly contributed to the lack of wartime coordination emphasized in self-criticisms of some of the factions.

QGD: You mention internal contradictions within the U.S.-Israel alliance. Are these real fissures, or overstated?

PH: The short answer is that those fissures are overstated. I will say a few words about how this topic is discussed as a historical point in my dissertation, and then offer some thoughts on what is happening in the world at this moment.In the fifth chapter of my dissertation, “‘All Power to the Resistance’: People’s War in Jordan, 1968-1972,” I describe the situation in 1970 when the United States was saddled with a major war in Vietnam. The People’s War in Jordan pushed US hegemony to the limit, testing how much pressure it could sustain at a given moment. The US required Israel and, much more crucially at that moment, the reactionary regime of Jordan to carry out a war on its behalf against a revolution. As the result of what I was reading about the year 1970 and what was happening in the year 2023, a question then opened in my mind: what if a situation came about wherein the US could no longer rely on Israel or Arab reactionary regimes to crush revolutions in West Asia? What would become of US support for Israel in such a moment? To help me think through this question, I studied Arghiri Emmanuel’s article “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” drawn conceptually from the implications of his magnum opus, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. This article was a rare attempt to theorize settler-colonialism’s purpose for the modern imperialist system. Although Emmanuel mentioned Israel, his essay was largely abstracted from the case with which he was directly familiar, the Congo. His argument was that in the Congolese case the monopolies were sufficiently opposed to the nascent hardline protectionism of the settler-colonial stronghold of Katanga that they mobilized, through the United Nations and other supranational institutions, to support the anti-colonial independence movement–at least temporarily, until Patrice Lumumba grew too close to the Soviet Union. Could such a contradiction eventually lead to Israel’s undoing? A basic contradiction does exist within Israel and the United States about the strategy forward: attempt to save what is left of Israel’s international standing and global trade relations, or rapidly accelerate the naked aggressions and land grabs? You see debate play out as Netanyahu’s invokes the autarkic idea of Israel becoming a “super-Sparta,” to which Yair Lapid replied “isolation is not fate,” or when The New York Times, many of whose upper level employees have direct ties to Israel, publishes similar lamentations about the doors shutting on Israel’s “fantastic bet on globalization.” But it should nonetheless be clear by now that the unique closeness Israel enjoys to the United States, combined with the unique power the United States wields today, casts doubt on the relevance of Emmanuel’s schema.

In delineating the bases of Zionist power, the PFLP, in a formulation that has not since been improved upon, specified four organically linked entities: Israel; the World Zionist Movement; World Imperialism “led by the United States of America”; and Arab Reaction “represented by Feudalism and Capitalism.” We need “clear sight of all parties of this camp,” while recognizing that, in light of the “connections which bind them together, it becomes clear that our strongest enemy, the real and main enemy, is world imperialism,” of which Arab reaction is an offshoot and Israel is a base. What this means is that while each of these elements are interconnected and interdependent, world imperialism ultimately binds them together. I make this following point based only on my partial and anecdotal impressions, but I think the anti-Zionist left has too often moved away from this understanding over the past two years, perhaps because of the extreme over-the-top pageantry of Zionist repression and the seeming refusal of Washington, D.C. to put any limits on Zionist annihilation plans, all of which might make it seem as if “Zionists” have at some point “hijacked” US policy. But I think if we examine the United States through the longue duree as a settler-colony in its own right, one unique among settler-colonies for becoming a world empire, we can explain both of those phenomena while maintaining the core understanding that US-led imperialism is the “strongest and main enemy” in Palestine.

At this point in history, Zionism is a common point of consensus and reference for the planners of US-led imperialism. As I put it in a lecture I recently delivered as part of the Palestinian Youth Movement-NYC’s “Understanding Zionism” course (see: Class 3) at the People’s Forum, the “organic unity” of US imperialism with Zionism is such that to be US imperialist is to be Zionist, and to be Zionist is to be US imperialist. There does not exist today an imperialism outside of Zionism. There are hopes and fantasies about the prospects for such an imperialism, often favored by right-wing critics of Zionism and Israel, but such a thing does not exist as an actual reality. Let us briefly survey some of the history of the US. It began as a land empire, its founding settlers agitating for frontier expansion. From the moment of foundation, the US has always resolved its internal crises by searching for new frontiers. The worldview of the early northeast settlers was steeped in Protestant Zionism, shaped in Europe by the propaganda of the Crusades, so that the Indians of the Americas became the new Saracens. After World War Two, in accordance with a new global situation, the organs of Jewish Zionism grew in size and influence in the United States. In brief, when the US empire increasingly relied on the World Zionist Movement and Israel to launch aggression and open new frontiers in West Asia, more and more resources were directed towards Zionist figures and institutions in all forms, Jewish, Christian, and otherwise, and an ever increasing proportion of the ruling class began to view their fate as bound to that of the Zionist project.

A few points arise from these observations. First, the settler core of the US project itself, historically predisposed to Zionism, constitutes something much more substantial than a mere lobby: their Zionism is the “authentic” ideological expression of the founding class of the United States, of their political and oftentimes literal familial descendants. Second, as prospective frontiers for US capitalist expansion began to close in the 1970s, particularly in East Asia as the result of Communist revolutions, the US increasingly invested into Israel and Zionism to create a unique settler-colony-as-military-base capable of forcibly opening new frontiers. That is a task for which Israel is still paying dividends, by the way. Look at what recently happened to Syria after years of attritional Zionist attacks on the country. The takeover of Syria not only cracked open new markets; it also opened up airspace for US-Israeli attacks on Iran. And outsourcing West Asian operations to the Israeli command structure frees up the US military to pursue its own campaigns in the Western Hemisphere, starting with its current attacks on Venezuela and Haiti.

These historical trends explain well enough the current ruling class hysteria over growing anti-Zionism. Think of Israel as their property and one can see how divestment becomes an act of expropriation and anti-Zionism becomes a revolutionary position. All of this indicates that Zionism and Israel have become a zero-sum, all-or-nothing proposition for the United States empire. In short, any US divestment from Israel will likely coincide with a broader military withdrawal from the entire region, which very likely would spell the end of the world empire. The imperatives arising from such a conclusion are easier to postulate than execute. Globally, the battle fronts will have to multiply. Clearly, that is already happening.