The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All

David Vine

June 6, 2024

War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Or so the song lyrics go anyway.

 

But in the case of this country, war, it turns out, has been good for plenty of high-class Americans, especially our weapons makers. As TomDispatch regular David Vine and Theresa Arriola report today, the military-industrial-congressional complex (MIC) has proven to be a cash cow of the first order (though I hate to insult cows that way). In this century, the money has simply poured into it and yet, somehow, it never seems to be enough. Only recently, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell typically “ripped” President Biden’s request for $850 billion for the 2025 Pentagon budget as “inadequate” and demanded even more money for it. So, it goes — so, in fact, it has long gone.

And in a country in which the Pentagon budget and the far vaster national security budget only continue to rise, the oddest thing of all, it seems to me, is this: since the U.S. emerged victorious from World War II, no matter how much money it’s poured into the MIC or how many bases its military has established globally, in no significant war — from Korea in the early 1950s to Vietnam in the 1960s to the Afghan and Iraq wars of this century and the Global War on Terror that went with them — has this country ever (that’s right ever) emerged genuinely victorious.

Yes, the nation whose “defense” budget equals that of the next nine countries combined can’t win a war or stop pouring money into its military and the vast industrial combine that goes with it. Today, backed by an extraordinary set of original images related to the MIC that have never been published before (and can be seen in their original form here), Vine and Arriola offer a look at just what a disaster it’s proven to be for this country. ~ Tom Engelhardt

 

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All

by David Vine and Theresa (Isa) Arriola

We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.

Bombs also make people rich.

When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.

Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.

Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

The bulk of our taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As those companies have profited, the MIC has sowed incomprehensible destruction globally, keeping the United States locked in endless wars that, since 2001, have killed an estimated 4.5 million people, injured tens of millions more, and displaced at least 38 million, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

The MIC’s hidden domination of our lives must end, which means we must dismantle it. That may sound totally unrealistic, even fantastical. It is not. And by the way, we’re talking about dismantling the MIC, not the military itself. (Most members of the military are, in fact, among that the MIC’s victims.)

While profit has long been part of war, the MIC is a relatively new, post-World War II phenomenon that formed thanks to a series of choices made over time. Like other processes, like other choices, they can be reversed and the MIC can be dismantled.

The question, of course, is how?

The Emergence of a Monster

To face what it would take to dismantle the MIC, it’s first necessary to understand how it was born and what it looks like today. Given its startling size and intricacy, we and a team of colleagues created a series of graphics to help visualize the MIC and the harm it inflicts, which we’re sharing publicly for the first time.

The MIC was born after World War II from, as Eisenhower explained, the “conjunction of an immense military establishment” — the Pentagon, the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and others — “and a large arms industry.” Those two forces, the military and the industrial, united with Congress to form an unholy “Iron Triangle” or what some scholars believe Eisenhower initially and more accurately called the military-industrial–congressional complex. To this day those three have remained the heart of the MIC, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of legalized corruption (that also features all too many illegalities).

The basic system works like this: First, Congress takes exorbitant sums of money from us taxpayers every year and gives it to the Pentagon. Second, the Pentagon, at Congress’s direction, turns huge chunks of that money over to weapons makers and other corporations via all too lucrative contracts, gifting them tens of billions of dollars in profits. Third, those contractors then use a portion of the profits to lobby Congress for yet more Pentagon contracts, which Congress is generally thrilled to provide, perpetuating a seemingly endless cycle.

 

But the MIC is more complicated and insidious than that. In what’s effectively a system of legalized bribery, campaign donations regularly help boost Pentagon budgets and ensure the awarding of yet more lucrative contracts, often benefiting a small number of contractors in a congressional district or state. Such contractors make their case with the help of a virtual army of more than 900 Washington-based lobbyists. Many of them are former Pentagon officials, or former members of Congress or congressional staffers, hired through a “revolving door” that takes advantage of their ability to lobby former colleagues. Such contractors also donate to think tanks and university centers willing to support increased Pentagon spending, weapons programs, and a hyper-militarized foreign policy. Ads are another way to push weapons programs on elected officials.

Such weapons makers also spread their manufacturing among as many Congressional districts as possible, allowing senators and representatives to claim credit for jobs created. MIC jobs, in turn, often create cycles of dependency in low-income communities that have few other economic drivers, effectively buying the support of locals.

For their part, contractors regularly engage in legalized price gouging, overcharging taxpayers for all manner of weapons and equipment. In other cases, contractor fraud literally steals taxpayer money. The Pentagon is the only government agency that has never passed an audit — meaning it literally can’t keep track of its money and assets — yet it still receives more from Congress than every other government agency combined.

 

As a system, the MIC ensures that Pentagon spending and military policy are driven by contractors’ search for ever-higher profits and the reelection desires of members of Congress, not by any assessment of how to best defend the country. The resulting military is unsurprisingly shoddy, especially given the money spent. Americans should pray it never actually has to defend the United States.

No other industry — not even Big Pharma or Big Oil — can match the power of the MIC in shaping national policy and dominating spending. Military spending is, in fact, now larger (adjusting for inflation) than at the height of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, or, in fact, at any time since World War II, despite the absence of a threat remotely justifying such spending. Many now realize that the primary beneficiary of more than 22 years of endless U.S. wars in this century has been the industrial part of the MIC, which has made hundreds of billions of dollars since 2001. “Who Won in Afghanistan? Private Contractors” was the Wall Street Journal‘s all too apt headline in 2021.

Endless Wars, Endless Death, Endless Destruction

“Afghanistan” in that headline could have been replaced by Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, among other seemingly endless U.S. wars since World War II. That the MIC has profited off them is no coincidence. It has helped drive the country into conflicts in countries ranging from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Grenada, to Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and so many others.

 

Deaths and injuries from such wars have reached the tens of millions. The number of estimated deaths from the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen is eerily similar to that from the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia: 4.5 million.

The numbers are so large that they can become numbing. The Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama helps us remember to focus on:

one life

one life

one life

one life

one life

because each time

is the first time

that that life

has been taken.

The Environmental Toll

The MIC’s damage extends to often irreparable environmental harm, involving the poisoning of ecosystems, devastating biodiversity loss, and the U.S. military’s carbon footprint, which is larger than that of any other organization on earth. At war or in daily training, the MIC has literally fueled global heating and climate change through the burning of fuels to run bases, operate vehicles, and produce weaponry.

The MIC’s human and environmental costs are particularly invisible outside the continental United States. In U.S. territories and other political “grey zones,” investments in military infrastructure and technologies rely in part on the second-class citizenship of Indigenous communities, often dependent on the military for their livelihoods.

Endless Wars at Home

As the MIC has fueled wars abroad, so it has fueled militarization domestically. Why, for example, have domestic police forces become so militarized? At least part of the answer: since 1990, Congress has allowed the Pentagon to transfer its “excess” weaponry and equipment (including tanks and drones) to local law enforcement agencies. These transfers conveniently allow the Pentagon and its contractors to ask Congress for replacement purchases, further fueling the MIC.

Seeking new profits from new markets, contractors have also increasingly hawked their military products directly to SWAT teams and other police forces, border patrol outfits, and prison systems. Politicians and corporations have poured billions of dollars into border militarization and mass incarceration, helping fuel the rise of the lucrative “border-industrial complex” and “prison-industrial complex,” respectively. Domestic militarization has disproportionately harmed Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities.

An Existential Threat

Some will defend the military-industrial complex by insisting that we need its jobs; some by claiming it’s keeping Ukrainians alive and protecting the rest of Europe from Vladimir Putin’s Russia; some by warning about China. Each of those arguments is an example of the degree to which the MIC’s power relies on systematically manufacturing fear, threats, and crises that help enrich arms merchants and others in the MIC by driving ever more military spending and war (despite a nearly unbroken record of catastrophic failure when it comes to nearly every U.S. conflict since World War II).

The argument that current levels of military spending must be maintained for “the jobs” should be laughable. No military should be a jobs program. While the country needs job programs, military spending has proven to be a poor job creator or an engine of economic growth. Research shows it creates far fewer jobs than comparable investments in health care, education, or infrastructure.

U.S. weaponry has aided Ukrainian self-defense, though the weapons manufacturers are anything but altruists. If they truly cared about Ukrainians, they would have forgone any profits, leaving more money for humanitarian aid to that country. Instead, they’ve used that war, as they have Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and growing tensions in the Pacific, to cynically inflate their profits and stock prices dramatically.

Discard the fearmongering and it should be clear that the Russian military has demonstrated its weakness, its inability to decisively conquer territory near its own borders, let alone march into Europe. In fact, both the Russian and Chinese militaries pose no conventional military threat to the United States. The Russian military’s annual budget is one-tenth or less than the size of the U.S. one. China’s military budget is one-third to one-half its size. The disparities are far larger if you combine the U.S. military budget with those of its NATO and Asian allies.

Despite this, members of the MIC are increasingly encouraging direct confrontations with Russia and China, aided by Putin’s war and China’s own provocations. In the “Indo-Pacific” (as the military calls it), the MIC is continuing to cash in as the Pentagon builds up bases and forces surrounding China in Australia, Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia, Japan, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines.

Such steps and a similar buildup in Europe are only encouraging China and Russia to strengthen their own millitaries. (Just imagine how American politicians would respond if China or Russia were to build a single military base anywhere close to this country’s borders.) While all of this is increasingly profitable for the MIC, it is heightening the risk of a military clash that could spiral into a potentially species-ending nuclear war between the United States and China, Russia, or both.

The Urgency of Dismantling

The urgency of dismantling the military-industrial complex should be clear. The future of the species and planet depends on it.

The most obvious way to weaken the MIC would be to starve it of its lifeblood, our tax dollars. Few noticed that, after leaving office, former Trump-era Pentagon chief Christopher Miller called for cutting the Pentagon’s budget in half. Yes, in half.

Even a 30% cut — as happened all too briefly after the Cold War ended in 1991 — would free hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Imagine how such sums could build safer, healthier, more secure lives in this country, including a just economic transition for any military personnel and contractors losing jobs. And mind you, that military budget would still be significantly larger than China’s, or Russia’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s combined.

Of course, even thinking about cutting the Pentagon budget is difficult because the MIC has captured both political parties, virtually guaranteeing ever-rising military spending. Which brings us back to the puzzle of how to dismantle the MIC as a system.

In short, we’re working on the answers. With the diverse group of experts who helped produce this article’s graphics, we’re exploring, among other ideas, divestment campaigns and lawsuits; banning war profiteering; regulating or nationalizing weapons manufacturers; and converting parts of the military into an unarmed disaster relief, public health, and infrastructure force.

Though all too many of us will continue to believe that dismantling the MIC is unrealistic, given the threats facing us, it’s time to think as boldly as possible about how to roll back its power, resist the invented notion that war is inevitable, and build the world we want to see. Just as past movements reduced the power of Big Tobacco and the railroad barons, just as some are now taking on Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the prison-industrial complex, so we must take on the MIC to build a world focused on making human lives rich (in every sense) rather than one focused on bombs and other weaponry that brings wealth to a select few who benefit from death.

 

Facing war and incitement, is there any hope left for Palestinians in the Knesset?

Baker Zoubi

 

 MK Ayman Odeh attends a plenum session at the Knesset in Jerusalem, July 10, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The opening of the Knesset’s summer session last month has renewed a perennial debate among Palestinian citizens of Israel: whether or not there is anything to be gained from electing Arabs to serve in Israel’s parliament.

For Palestinian members of Knesset, the resumption of parliamentary business could not have come at a more challenging time. There has been almost wall-to-wall support among their Jewish counterparts for the Israeli army’s massacres in Gaza over the last eight months. Government ministers are competing over who can make the most racist statements. A McCarthyist crackdown on free speech since October 7 has seen hundreds of Palestinian citizens arrested for as little as “liking” a post on social media. All the while, the state’s inaction has led to record levels of violent crime afflicting Arab communities.

At the same time, global public opinion continues to turn against Israel, with large pro-Palestine demonstrations disrupting campuses and capitals worldwide. The first signs of real international pressure have also emerged: the United States and other Western states have imposed sanctions against violent Israeli settlers; more countries are recognizing Palestinian statehood; and the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has requested arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alongside three Hamas leaders.

Amid this political whirlwind, is there any space left for Palestinian Knesset members to make a meaningful difference? Or, as a sizable chunk of Palestinian society in Israel has long argued, is it better to boycott the elections altogether?

“There is no doubt that this Knesset session will be difficult and tense,” Ahmad Tibi, a long-serving Arab MK and chairman of the Hadash-Ta’al parliamentary slate, told +972. “Incitement [against Palestinians] has broken records. The killing, the bloodshed, and the war weigh heavily on each of us personally, as well as on the functioning of the Knesset. There are constant attempts to restrict the moves of Arab MKs — they are attacked for everything. Even if no reason can be found, [other Knesset members] invent one, especially the delusional backbench MKs in the coalition.”

Still, despite the rampant incitement against Arab MKs — who are regularly branded “terror supporters” by many of their Jewish counterparts — Tibi insists that they have a crucial role to play on behalf of their constituents. “It is important to be there despite the challenges — indeed, because of them.”

‘The master’s tools’

But there are plenty of Palestinians in Israel who disagree. Voter turnout in Arab localities was just over 50 percent in the last election of November 2022, compared to 70 percent nationwide, and some Palestinian groups are aiming to make sure it’s even lower next time around.

Louay Khatib is one of the leaders of Abnaa al-Balad (“Sons of the Land”), a political movement that has opposed participation in Israeli elections for decades. “For Israeli governments past and present, the purpose of having Arabs in the Knesset is not to help advance [Palestinian] rights, nor does it stem from a democratic outlook,” he told +972. “It is merely intended to improve Israel’s image in the world.

“We have no place as Arabs in the Knesset,” Khatib asserted. “The master’s tools were created to maintain the master’s house. The Knesset will not serve our existence or our goals.”

Khatib argues that contesting Knesset elections turns Palestinian politicians “into people without a backbone,” and weakens Palestinian society in Israel. He points to the example of Mansour Abbas, whose Islamist party Ra’am split away from the Joint List of Arab parties in 2021 to join Israel’s governing coalition — the first time in Israel’s history that an independent Arab party was part of the government. Abbas, Khatib noted, “has reached a point where he blames only Hamas and not Israel, despite the crimes it is committing in Gaza.”

Amid the war in Gaza, Khatib believes that the Palestinian presence in the Knesset has allowed “people who support them to choose a ‘soft’ path, to settle for a statement here or there, instead of protesting and raging.” By contrast, Khatib sees powerful shifts abroad: “Look at the demonstrations all over the world [for Palestine]. European countries recognize Palestine, Israel is becoming increasingly isolated, and we here are not doing anything significant, going on with life as usual.”

Khatib goes as far as to argue that Israel’s current far-right government actually serves the Palestinian cause. “Israel is isolated because the extremists are in power, and this is consistent with Palestinian interests,” he explained. “In the past, we had to work hard, but now [Itamar] Ben Gvir and [Bezalel] Smotrich did the work [for us]. They exposed the true face of Israel. If this government is replaced by another government that is more accepted by the rest of the world, Israel will return to its status as the world’s spoiled child.”

These discussions are not just taking place within Palestinian civil society. Sami Abu Shehadeh leads the Balad party, which fell just below the electoral threshold to enter the Knesset in the last election after more than two decades in parliament. According to him, the debate about electoral participation will come up at the party’s conference this weekend, as its membership considers how it can have the greatest impact.

“There are voices in Balad saying that it is clear that the right wing controls Israel, and therefore there is no point in even fighting it in the Knesset,” Abu Shehadeh said. “Other voices argue that this situation increases the importance of being present there.”

Either way, he noted that Balad has always been clear about the limitations of parliamentary work. ”The existence of an extreme right-wing government, or any other government, does not affect our vision as we do not expect much from the Knesset anyway.”

For Abu Shehadeh, various factors must be taken into account before arriving at a decision: the situation in Gaza, the political landscape in Israel, the problems facing Palestinians in Israel (from rising crime to an economic crisis), and whether or not there are “partners” for their agenda among Jewish-Israeli society.

Abu Shehadeh also leveled criticisms at the other Arab party leaders and their agendas. First, in a reference to Hadash head Ayman Odeh’s decision to break with decades of tradition by formally endorsing Benny Gantz for prime minister in 2019, he pointed to “those who began spreading the discourse of ‘influence.’” But he reserved stronger criticism for Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas: “He said he could only work inside the coalition. Now he’s in opposition — why isn’t he resigning?”

Ra’am did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article; nor did the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, which split from Ra’am in the 1990s due to the movement’s opposition to participating in Knesset elections.

‘We can’t create a political vacuum’

Yet Abu Shehadeh is in no hurry to give up the Knesset. “Despite the game’s limitations, our society has benefited somewhat from parliamentary work.” Moreover, he added, “we can’t create a political vacuum and leave Palestinian society to be led by a group of Arabs from the Zionist parties [i.e. with no independent Palestinian parties present]. Such a vacuum will open the way for all opportunists.”

Abu Shehadeh also sees the Knesset as enhancing Palestinian citizens’ visibility in both the local and international arenas. “As an elected leadership, the opportunity to deliver our messages is greater.”

In that regard, the Balad leader believes that the war in Gaza and the international community’s renewed search for “solutions” have elevated his party’s core demand: transforming Israel into a state with full national and civic equality between Jews and Palestinians. “People are returning to discussions about the possibility of the two-state solution, which brings back Balad’s discourse about a state of all its citizens,” he said.

Tibi, of Hadash-Ta’al, also believes that despite all the challenges and restrictions, there is still room for action and influence within the Knesset.

“I, personally, and the Hadash-Ta’al list generally, are among the leaders of [advancing legislation] in parliament. Although we are working against all odds, we have succeeded in some issues,” he added, pointing to his party’s thus far successful efforts to obstruct the government’s planned budget cuts to Arab localities, which has not yet been approved by the Knesset’s Finance Committee.

For Khatib, the war in Gaza has strengthened the arguments of Abnaa el-Balad and other groups that support boycotting the Knesset — but he also concedes that it could end up increasing voter turnout among Palestinians.

“People freaked out from Ben Gvir’s government and the extreme right,” he said. “This sense of fear and the fact that members of this government openly declare their racism will push more Palestinian citizens to participate in the next elections.

“But people have short memories. [Former Prime Minister Yair] Lapid and other politicians are no different from this government: they demand a deal [with Hamas] not to end the war or stop the massacres in Gaza but to bring back the hostages. The right-wing government is no different from other governments in Israel.”

 

Do you condemn Hamas?

James Ray

June 5, 2024

This question became seemingly ubiquitous following October 7. As Palestinians defied the imagination, breaking out of Gaza after over a decade and a half of living under total air, land, and sea blockade, many found themselves having to face this question.

 

 Rally on the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas, Gaza, December 8, 2012. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Whether it be from Zionists using the violence we witnessed on that day as a means of creating story after story of atrocity propaganda — to force well-meaning allies into a corner or even those who genuinely considered themselves pro-Palestine who struggled with the reality of decolonial violence — the question of whether or not Palestinian armed resistance factions deserved support or criticism became a major point of contention. It was easy for many to support the cause of Palestinian liberation when they viewed Palestinians as perfect victims, but when Palestinians fought back, suddenly the question of solidarity became muddled.

Months later, after tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza amid an ongoing genocide, and after thousands in the West Bank have found themselves imprisoned or under regular attack, sympathy for those resisting their own annihilation has grown, with the conversation becoming more clear than it was in the days proceeding October 7. As videos spread by resistance factions across Gaza and Lebanon find a regular and enthusiastic audience and chants in support of those putting their lives on the line take root in protests nationwide, it is clear many have grown to accept the necessity of armed struggle in the Palestinian context, though a true consensus has yet to be achieved.

To that end, the answer to the question “Do you condemn Hamas?,” particularly for those of us on the Left as we analyze the history of Palestine and why resistance occurs in a colonial context, should have always been clear.

A violent phenomenon

As Frantz Fanon’s oft-cited statement from Wretched of the Earth has made clear, national liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression — decolonization is always a violent event. Palestine is not an exception to this reality.

The colonization of Palestine by Zionists, like all colonialism throughout history, brought with it widespread and constant violence levied in all forms against the Palestinian people. This was by design, as the very nature of settler colonialism is a necessarily brutal one given the end goal of the wholesale elimination of the Indigenous population in all forms but nostalgia. This violence does not simply manifest itself through the military campaigns waged by Zionist settlers and the Israeli occupation army, but through every part of the colonial endeavor itself — an endeavor that can only be sustained through the suffering, exploitation, repression, and death of Palestinians and all else that the colony wishes to conquer.

Palestinians, whether in Occupied Palestine, in refugee camps in bordering nations, or in the diaspora around the world, are forced every single day to wrestle with the reality of this settler colonial violence. The very existence of the Zionist project poses an existential threat to the lives of millions, who have in some cruel twist of reality been deemed existential threats by the project for the simple reason that their existence undermines its legitimacy.

This violence does not occur without resistance. Throughout history, whether it be in Algeria, South Africa, Ireland, or Palestine, colonized people have risen up in the face of brutal violence to free themselves from the shackles of their own oppression. This resistance does not generally start as armed struggle, but through civil disobedience, protests, general strikes, and similar tactics. Yet when these tactics fail, as they often have, or when exceptional violence is waged against the people in response, armed struggle becomes a necessity.

The colonial power, its legitimacy owed solely to the force it undertakes to maintain its existence, creates the conditions for the resistance that will rise against it. The more violence and repression colonized people face, the more they resist. Violent resistance becomes mainstream out of sheer necessity given their material conditions. This creates a cycle of violence, one perpetuated first and foremost by the violence of the colonial entity itself.

Even before the official foundation of the Zionist project in 1948, this cycle was well established. The Balfour Declaration came into existence in 1917, signifying Britain’s official endorsement of Zionist aspirations. By 1929, a fifth of Palestinians found themselves landless. By the 1930s, many Palestinians found themselves unemployed and economically destitute, as Zionist capital, backed by favorable imperial British laws and treatment, began flowing ever more intensively into Palestine, according to Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal work on the 1936 Great Palestinian Revolt.

These factors spurred resistance of their own variety, including the Buraq Uprising of 1929, efforts by Palestinians to pool resources to purchase land, sporadic violence, as well as Palestinian notables lobbying for better treatment from their British overlords. This blend of violent and non-violent efforts would all be suppressed or ultimately met with limited success.

In 1936, when British forces murdered Syrian revolutionary figure Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Palestinian popular resentment turned into a general strike, and ultimately into popular revolt, which was put down brutally by Zionist and British forces by 1939. Only a few years later, Zionists would ethnically cleanse more than 750,000 Palestinians from upwards of 530 cities, towns, and villages and kill thousands more in what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or the “catastrophe”. These ethnic cleansing campaigns continue up to the modern day.

Palestinians would rise up as a result of the subjugation they faced, again through a combination of violent and non-violent struggle that would be met with even more violent oppression. When Palestinians waged cross-border raids into occupied territory, they were met with a Zionist invasion in Lebanon and massacres at Sabra and Shatila. When Palestinians rose up during the First and Second Intifadas, they were met with violent crackdowns, mass arrests, and widespread violence that would lead to the intensification of their own violent resistance efforts. When Palestinians in Gaza took to marching to the wall that surrounded them in the March of Great Return, hundreds were killed and thousands more injured by Israeli soldiers. The cycle of violence continued and intensified.

Fast forwarding to today, Palestinians continue to live in bantustans in the West Bank, and what could functionally be described as a concentration camp in Gaza, with Palestinians in the 1948 and 1967 territories living under brutal apartheid management structures. They have resisted every step of the way, each time seeing thousands imprisoned, murdered, displaced, and millions utterly subjugated and exploited as the Zionist project continues toward the ultimate goal of eliminating them in all forms but nostalgia.

When armed struggle becomes material necessity

In the face of all of this violence, armed resistance organizations have risen up and established themselves amongst the people, whether they be Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, or others. These groups, and the violence they employ, did not come to exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are the result of decades of brutal colonial violence, and the culmination of Palestinian efforts to liberate themselves from it.

The tactics they employ on the ground are the culmination of this same struggle. These groups chose to undergo operations they determined may advance their liberatory struggle. Many outside of Palestine, and even Palestinians themselves, may have disagreements with these tactics, or on a grander scale, disagreements with the core principles and ideologies of one or several of the groups deploying them. For those of us in the Western Left, however, removed from the reality of on-the-ground struggle, this cannot mean that we undermine the very legitimacy of armed struggle itself.

Hamas is a key example of this. Like them or not, the efforts they have waged and continue to wage have made more of a material impact toward the liberation of Palestine than anything any of us in the West will ever make. They are taking on the brutal violence of colonial power and waging a campaign of armed struggle that has, at the current moment, with coordination with other resistance factions, made the Zionist colony more of a pariah than it has ever been on a global stage and shattered the image of military invincibility and overall stability it has spent decades cultivating. Countless years of struggle have culminated in this flashpoint.

The path forward, as history has repeatedly shown, will be largely forged through the armed struggle of resistance factions on the ground. Their very survival depends on it, and it continues to challenge and erode the power of the Zionist entity itself.

Palestinian armed resistance has forced the Zionist project to wage an increasingly violent campaign that is sharpening contradictions in such a way as to lead to its continued unraveling. As the masses in the imperial core, specifically those of the United States, come to realize that their interests are at odds with the interests of the Zionist project and their government leaders who are sustaining the project’s ongoing genocide, the traditional support base the project relies on has eroded. In its place is an ever-increasing mass standing in firm support of Palestinians, rather than their colonizers.

In Palestine, the Palestinian struggle for liberation has developed what can be called a “Popular Cradle” of resistance — a state of unity and cohesion that has developed between the Palestinian armed resistance and broader Palestinian society. That “popular cradle,” as the Palestinian Youth Movement has so aptly described it, has worked as an organ of the liberation struggle by conceptualizing resistance as both a normal and necessary state of being. This has led to a reality where the resistance is sustained by the masses themselves, who support them and readily accept the consequences of their continued fight for liberation.

That armed struggle, a material necessity, is reaping material results, even in spite of mass violence, crackdowns, and a campaign of outright genocide. In Gaza specifically, that very struggle in no small part led to the withdrawal of Zionist settlers from the territory which forced Zionist planners to rework how they went about their occupation of Gaza. The struggle has kept Israeli Occupation Forces from entering Jenin and other refugee camps across historic Palestine without serious consequence. In many ways, the resistance struggle has been a key element of continued Palestinian survival.

Moving past the question

The question of whether we condemn Hamas is more than just a question of condemnation. At its core, we are being asked to disavow decolonial violence altogether — to support Palestinians only when they are perfect victims or only when the groups waging liberatory struggle align with the values of our ideologies and fraternal parties. It is a question that acts as a trap and misses the point entirely.

We cannot make the mistake of engaging seriously with such an obfuscation. It is on us, especially those of us on the Left, to understand that the core driver of the violence we are seeing is and always has been Zionist settler colonialism. This cycle of violence is perpetuated not by the colonized, as they seek to liberate themselves from the state of total subjugation and brutal reality of genocidal liquidation, but by the Zionist project and those advancing its interests.

The question we have to ask ourselves, and indeed answer, is not whether we condemn Hamas, but whether we condemn a settler colonial regime that makes armed struggle necessary for survival.