Jewish “Anti-Zionists” – Stop Throwing the Palestinian Armed Resistance Under the Bus

By Amanda Gelender, a Jewish anti-zionist writer from California based in The Netherlands, who has been part of the movement for a free Palestine since 2006.

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As U.S./Israel’s bloody colonial holocaust in Palestine continues unabated, it is deeply disappointing and frankly unconscionable how many Jewish “anti-zionists” still refuse to openly and unapologetically support the Palestinian armed resistance.

Palestinian freedom fighters, suffocating under Zionist colonial occupation, risk their lives everyday to defend their people and homeland from complete annihilation. They build homemade weapons under siege and face down a nuclear-powered military force amidst the dilapidated ruins of their bombed neighborhoods. This is not just a holocaust, it is an anti-colonial freedom struggle. It is not your right as Jewish “anti-zionists” to sanitize and defang the struggle by throwing the resistance under the bus to assuage the liberal sensibilities of your members, donors, families, and followers in a way that suits your philosophical debates, fragile egos, guilt, and comfort as well as the empty darkness of your own conceits.

Despite plastering the Star of David on their tanks and uniforms, it is without a shadow of doubt that in this instance it is Palestinians who are David facing Goliath in every conceivable way.

Palestinian resistance fighters evoke the spirit and lessons of anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, Haiti, Kenya, and Vietnam. They conjure the Nat Turner Rebellion and the Warsaw Ghetto Intifada. They are Indigenous land defenders throughout space and time who will not go gently into that good night. We respect their sacrifices now, always, and forever, as we bear witness to them teaching us how they sever the suffocating noose of colonial control around their necks, rejuvenating and cleansing this cold austere world with warm blood still pumping through their veins to fire back.

Many of you are directly paying for the 2,000 pound bombs ripping through Palestinian tents, beheading Palestinian children in the name of “Jewish safety”. Hedging, both-sidesing, two-facing, ignoring, or outright condemning the people who defend their families against Israel’s “final solution” is an unprincipled betrayal that we must reject out-of-hand.

As we play our role to confront U.S./Israel’s relentless settler-colonial death machine from within the belly of the beast, resistance fighters on the front lines in Palestine deserve our full solidarity as they shake off the shackling chains of daily, century-long colonial subjugation. 

Lecturer and analyst Abdaljawad Omar teaches us how Palestinian anti-colonial resistance can open up the revolutionary horizon. How resistance in Palestine is born from the material reality on the ground, with the binary of armed and unarmed resistance being imposed from the outside. He emphasizes how Palestinian resistance is often built through cultivation of friendships, and can function as an act of hope toward a liberated future or reclaiming the manner in which one dies, under a colonial system that is already killing you, your friends, and your loved ones. 

Soon after the strategic and valiant Al Aqsa Flood operation on October 7 in which Israel murdered scores of its own people, many prominent Jewish “anti-zionist” individuals and organizations had the unscrupulous audacity to condemn the resistance. They joined a chorus of voices who spread Zionist propaganda about both Hamas and the events of Al Aqsa Flood which had the military goal of a ‘prisoner’ exchange to free Palestinian hostages from Zionist torture chambers and gulags. These initial condemnations, smears, and distortions were a betrayal that helped provide protective cover for Israel to begin its accelerated genocidal assault in Gaza - one in which U.S./Israel has likely slaughtered more than 335,000 Palestinians in less than a year. 

While Israel is exceedingly skilled at destruction, sadistic torture, and mass murder, armed with the world’s most expensive imperial death toys, they are a militarily inept fighting force, consistently being bested in Gaza by Hamas’s Al-Quassam brigades and the coalition of resistance forces on the ground. Palestinian fighters under brutal siege are waging an astounding battle against the enemy invader and are still going strong after 350+ days of fighting under starvation and incessant bombardment. This is not to romanticize the resistance or downplay the tremendous struggle of being a fighter under ruthless military occupation and siege: Rather, it is to honor the martyrs, their families, and the generations of sacrifices made in pursuit of a coming liberated future that they may or may not live to see.

I feel grateful, honored, and humbled to be a student of the Palestinian freedom struggle.

Palestinian resistance fighters conjure the spirit of our Jewish ancestors who resisted fascism by any means necessary and any means available.

Unlike Zionists who seek a false sense of “Jewish safety” under the wing of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy, Jewish anti-zionists align ourselves with the oppressed peoples of the global majority. We don’t side with colonizers just because they are Jewish. We are fundamentally uninterested in maintaining settler futurity. Rather, we back and stand alongside colonized people in their freedom struggles, recognizing that “colonialism only loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat” (Fanon).

The tenets of anti-zionism are set by Palestinians in Palestine (the Thawabet, for instance) — not by Jewish anti-zionists. As Leila Shomali, Lara Kilani, and other members of the Good Shepherd Collective often crucially teach us, anti-zionism is material. It is not symbolic, rhetorical, or abstract. It is not “critique” of Israel, co-existence, liberal state maintenance, “peace” or offloading the rotten roots of Zionist settler-colonization onto mere branches like Netanyahu, AIPAC, or West Bank settlers. Anti-zionism is about Indigenous people getting their stolen land back. 

This requires contending with the illegitimate and fascistic settler-colonial structures at hand, with the liberation of Palestine being inextricably linked to the liberation of Turtle Island, as articulated by Dr. Mohamed Abdou and Dr. Linda Quiquivix. Anti-zionism necessitates being clear-eyed and principled about what is required for colonized people to reclaim sovereignty from the clutches of US settler-colonial empire that the Israeli entity models itself after. It is Indigenous people building liberated futures on the entirety of their ancestral homelands, without an inch of settler-colonial control.

The possibility of these decolonized futures are only birthed through the bloody canal of armed struggle. The colonizer sets the standard of violence and the response to that violence is self-defense. Armed resistance is a tactic within a broader movement, based on the material conditions of subjugation. If it solely required asking colonial powers nicely for land back to materialize, the world would look much different than it does now. There is no way around this violent reality, and the demonization and distortion of the Palestinian resistance by Jewish so-called “anti-zionists” (liberal Zionists) is both harmful and ahistorical.

Decolonization is an inherently violent act (Fanon) and armed decolonial resistance is not some thought experiment for those of us living comfortably in Euro-America — it’s life and death under barbaric military occupation. As living dead, Palestinians have been articulating these concepts through decades and decades of struggle. Freedom fighters in Palestine are doing more for Palestinian liberation than you could ever do in a thousand lifetimes: Have some respect, and learn to appreciate saying “enough” as our ancestors said “never again.”

The 4th Dimension by Islamic magical realism artist, Safia Latif

Palestine is not your charity case, it is an anti-colonial freedom struggle. Refusal to acknowledge and appreciate the role of the armed resistance is a form of saviorism and moral cowardice on the part of Jewish “anti-zionists.” You are fundamentally more comfortable displaying mangled and murdered Palestinian corpses than you are supporting Palestinians who take up arms to resist their genocidaires. You dehumanize in your words and your silence. You strip Palestinians of their revolutionary agency by reserving solidarity for Palestinians construed as passive “perfect victims” in Euro-America (those who do not fight back). 

Euro-American propaganda about the resistance is unrelenting and reflects what a deep threat they pose to the powers that be. While you don’t know the stories of resistance fighters from every walk of life under occupation, you most certainly know the Zionist lies about them. Mass rape, beheaded babies, human shields are all completely debunked fabrications to manufacture tacit consent and cognitive dissonance for settler-colonial genocide. 

As Ali Abunimah states in his throrough journalistic debunking of Israel’s mass rape hoax, “The idea that Indigenous, Brown, Black, and enslaved men are sexual predators towards white or settler women is as old as colonialism itself. This lie has been used as justification to murder, lynch, exterminate and control colonized men for centuries.” Zionists’ insidious, racist, Islamophobic propaganda about the resistance continues to fuel U.S./Israel’s propaganda campaign or their “civilizing” colonial murder campaign across occupied Palestine.

Resistance fighters should not have to spend their time on this earth repelling invaders. They should be able to live and pursue their passions in peace. But violence comes to the doorstep of colonized people and resistance as a response becomes a moral and ethical necessity.

Palestinians are up against the full might of the U.S. empire: The greatest terrorist organization in the world and an illegitimate settler-colony itself built on the ongoing genocides of Black and Indigenous people.

As James Baldwin said, “A terrorist is called that only because he does not have the power of the State behind him — indeed, he has no State, which is why he is a terrorist. The State, at bottom, and when the chips are down, rules by means of a terror made legal.”

Even though the right to wage armed struggle against their occupier is enshrined into international law, the liberal Zionist “anti-zionist” ecosystem treats the topic of armed resistance like the third rail. The structure of NGOs, Democrats, and (neo)liberal fundraising cycles keeps mainstream Euro-American Jewish “anti-zionist” advocacy safe, electoral, photo-ready, and palatable to donors, boards, and their mostly white liberal/progressive base. They pour money, time, and resources into campaigning for liberal Zionist “progressive” politicians who slander Palestinian grassroots organizers, uphold U.S. imperialism globally, and maintain the settler-colonial structure that continues to kill not only Palestinians but so many others “at home” and “abroad.” Electoral politics are a complete and total waste of resources: Decolonization is currently playing out by the resistance on the battlefield, not at the U.S. ballot box. 

In Palestine, we are witnessing the naked face of Zionism, and of U.S. and Israeli settler-colonialism: Rotten, irreformable, and fascistic to the core. In defanging, blunting, and distorting the roots of the injustices in Palestine, liberal Zionists masquerading as anti-zionists reify the settler-colonial status quo and divert revolutionary energy into symbolic “wins” that sound nice in an end-of-year fundraising email.

As Nada Chehade writes, “Some people want freedom without the freedom fighters. A revolution without revolutionaries. Change without sacrificing a single thing. You are weak and a danger to liberation.” Do not undermine the crucial work of the resistance with flaccid both-sidesing, false equivalencies, pearl clutching, smears, and condemnations. 

Liberal Zionists often de-center land back, prop-up settlers, and normalize the Zionist entity with language like “a future for Israelis and Palestinians.” They were quick to condemn the valiant Al Aqsa Flood military operation on October 7 and regularly parrot slanderous propaganda about the armed resistance. In so doing, liberal Zionists set boundaries of conditional solidarity that they have no right to set. We wouldn’t accept that denigration and erasure for our ancestors’ righteous resistance against fascism and we don’t accept it for Palestine. This behavior from Jewish “anti-zionists” is cowardly and light-years away from the unapologetic anti-transactional and anti-utilitarian solidarity energy coming out of the global South in places like Yemen for instance, where the undying solidarity with Palestine is searing, spiritual, material, and unconditional. 

This is a holocaust in Palestine and as the gas chambers churn and burn flesh, most Jewish people identify with blood and soil Nazis. We are witnessing Jewish history being written in real time, with rivers of Palestinian blood. The name “Sde Teiman” will ring out like Auschwitz.

In just over a century, the fascist ideology of Zionism has almost completely usurped and swallowed Judaism whole. It requires an astronomical level of entitlement for Jewish “anti-zionists” to condescendingly tell the people being branded with Stars of David and systemically raped in U.S.-sponsored torture camps how to get free. Jewish anti-zionist opinions on the ideological structures of Palestinian governance are not wanted or needed. We have more than enough work to do to dismantle and create alternatives to Zionism in our own Jewish communities than to weigh in on how people under the fascist boot of the so-called “Jewish state” choose to organize, govern, or resist. 

Jewish anti-zionists have an urgent responsibility to tear down Zionism in the Jewish community and reclaim and rebuild a Judaism liberated from the ashes of Zionism — a pursuit only possible thanks to the Palestinian resistance who, in setting their own people free, also sets Judaism free from Zionism.

This is a gift most Jewish people do not yet understand or appreciate. Quite the opposite. But a tremendous and unpayable infinite debt is owed. Eradicating the fascist ideology of Zionism and its settler-colonial roots is the only path forward. 

There is no going back to the way it was before October 7, 2023. To the “peace” a liberal Zionist seeks: A muted sniper. A quiet scream. A slower genocide. Mass graves and a fresh news cycle. We are grateful to the land defenders who risk their lives to crack open the revolutionary horizon and usher in this critical moment of toppling, unmasking, and liberatory possibility. The last thing imperial and colonial powers want is for colonized people to feel empowered to seize their own futures and demand land back. And yet they must. And they are. Palestine is. 

The Palestinian resistance is forever a thorn in the side of white supremacist liberal and conservative enemies, and that defiance unflinchingly moves me. It is life insisting upon itself — catapulting itself from death traps into livingness. Amidst the relentless depravity of this holocaust, resistance is the only antidote to despair. Never capitulating, never kneeling, fighting against all odds, until victory.

The resistance doesn’t need validation by law or by you or by me. Call them terrorists. Call them whatever you want. We won’t be dissuaded an inch from our position. We will not wait for history to redeem Palestinian resistance for us to proclaim our support for them: We honor them now, and proudly, in life and in martyrdom, while gas chambers are still burning, air still coursing through their lungs, when it counts.