THE GAZA GHETTO UPRISING
2

TO THE HEART OF IT: Gaza has been afree kil zone, a “death world,”
long before October 7. The most radical position comes directly from
the simplest question: Are Palestinians human beings? If your answer
is emphatically yes, unambiguously and without reservations, then
you are alost cause to Zionism. Gaza, this place created by colonial
policy, this black box, this holding pen, or concentration camp for
refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine - can we think
of its people s we think about ourselves, imagining being enclosed,
imprisoned, in a smal stretch of land forever, for no reason other than
being born into a specific ethnicity? A place that has been cut off
from the world to varying degrees since 1948. And a place that since
at least 2003 has experienced multiple devastating large scale
military operations. Gazans had survived twelve of these since 2003,
with a death toll of over 8,000 people, before October 7. Since then,
that number has grown by over 40,000. And every minute there's a
new update of more deaths from Gaza, from Israeli bombing, but
now also from starvation. No fuel, no food, no water, no medicine.
Whatever is coming in is like *a drop in the sea” to quote UN officials,
inaplace that these officials had already declared “uniivable,” unfitfor
human life,in 2018, and that has been experiencing what llan Pappe
called “an incremental genocide” already in 2006.

Thisis the context that we need to have in mind when thinking about
the attack on Oct 7. And then ask ourselves, what would we do i that
situation? Do you acquiesce and die? O do youfight?

Andif you fight, then how? George Orwell wrote about Gandhi being
asked this question about the Jews in Europe in 1938, before the
Holocaust. Gandhi said that the Jews should stage a kind of collective
mass suicide to show the world the brutality of the Nazis,
and then the world would have to intervene. [1] Orwell thought this
was unhinged. But the Palestinians, in fact, kind of did this in 2018- 19,
during the period of the Great March of Return, the Palestinian
equivalent to the salt march in India. On the first day, about thirty
thousand Palestinians marched towards the fence, and this unarmed
protest was gunned down by lsraeli snipers. Thousands of people
were injured and over 60 people were kiled, just on the first day. And
the world did nothing. Liberal politicians extended some vague
condemnations, often against violence on both sides. Imagine looking
atthat and condemning violence on both sides.

So what would you do? Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak -
the architect of the 2007 siege, considered a liberal Zionist -
answered this question himself in 1998, saying he would have joined
‘armed Palestinian resistance had he been born on the other side.

We think of Gaza, we Israelis, think of Gaza as a place that
‘warehouses violence. It contains the refugees who must hate us so
badly for what we did to them. This is also how Americans think of
prisons, as this place that warehouses violence, contains it so that we.
don't have to think about t. But actually,the prison produces violence,
andit flows out of the prison and into our seemingly removed lives.

That's why moralistic questions of violence are beside the point. As
for what happened on October 7, Il try as much as possible to stick to
verifiable observations based on fact. It's very easy to fall into
moralistic analysis, and we obviously can't avoid it right? I've already
done some of that, but we should try to understand what physically,
historically, actually occurred. And what happened, as far as we're
able to gather within the sea of misinformation and disinformation
and whatever kind of psychological operations are

1] George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” Partsan Review, 1940
happening. . . What happened, gathering from GoPros, surveillance
footage, first person accounts on both sides of the fence, as well as
me reading obsessively everything | could put my hands on: military
analysts, testimonies, media from both sides of the fence. What
happened was that armed resistance factions in Gaza - not only
Harakat al-Mugawama allslamiyah, the Islamic ~resistance
movement, Hamas, most prominently, but also the Palestinian Islamic
Jinad (P, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),
which is a revolutionary socialist organization, and other factions ~
they launched a meticulously executed guerrilla operation, as well as
popular insurrection, against military bases and settlements
surrounding the Gaza Strip.

Around 6 am. local time, the resistance [2] deployed a wide array of
forces - totaling about 3000 fighters ~ on sea, land, and air and
underground. They started with what Israelis call a “diversion,” by
launching an unusually extensive missie strike, targeting the so-
called Gaza Envelope and the coast, up to Gush Dan (the Tel Aviv
metropolitan area). Simultaneously, they attacked lsrael's panoptic
surveillance systems and their cameras above and around Gaza, with
what appears to be relatively cheap commercial drones with DIY
explosive capacities. And then they approached and breached the
fence with multiple guerrilla army units, blowing up the fences around
Gaza at many points with specialized explosives for fences, and
laying down metal raiings over which armed motorcyclists in groups
of two could ride rapidly. Then heavy construction equipment like
bulldozers and front-end loaders would move in to expand the
breaches such that pickup trucks and sedans could drive through,
carrying more armed fighters. With these forces they completely
overwhelmed lsraeli defenses across many locations simultaneously,
taking over the Erez Crossing - whichisthe main

121 By “the resistance” 1 mean the plurality of factions and unaffiliated individuals

opposing lsracli sige, apartheid, and colonization in Palestine and outside of i
checkpoint separating Gaza from the world (alongside Rafah, which
separates Gaza to the south, with Egypt) - catching soldiers in their
underwear in the bases, taking over entire settlements, kiling many
hundreds of lsraeli soldiers and civilians - the death toll currently
stands at 11563 - killing and capturing high-ranking army officials,
killing one mayor, too, the head of the municipal authority of the Gaza
envelope, and kidnapping over 200 people into Gaza.

To qualify this: These figures come largely from lsraeli government
sources. Without a fully independent investigation, we will probably
never know what exactly happened in those first few hours. While
there is video evidence of a few instances of Palestinians kiling
unarmed Israelis and foreign nationals who were hiding or fleeing, we.
do not know the full extent of the phenomenon. Israel claims that all
the hundreds of civilians killed on Oct 7 were “murdered by Hamas,"
but Israeli publications have confirmed that dozens of them were
killed by Israeli fire. Again, with Israel aggressively rejecting an
independent investigation, the full extent of ts kiling of its own
civilians remains unclear. It is evident, too, that unaffilated Gaza
residents joined the attack and also kidnapped some lsraelis. What
happened after the fences were breached, after the gates were
opened, was that then thousands of Gaza residents, or inmates,
joined the assault in what became a

5] Due to the complicated process of identifying hundeds of corpses disfigured by
indiscriminate IDF fire i the Gaza envelope that day, Israeli officials have slowly revised
the number down from 1,401

and Haaretz military journalist Amos Harel now says
lrael’s Army Makes Headway in Gaza, but Ha
Surrender Is Far from Imminen,” Hoaratz, November 14, 2023, sc. sracl Nows,

ost 1.

0. Amos Harel,

Bitps://wiew. hasretzcom/isasl-news/2023- 11-14/ty-article/premium/israels-mi

ary-is-
from-imminent/000001 8b-ca6f-

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d87-a50b-df6£80560000,

t-hamas-surrender-is f

prison break and an uprising. And you can see some of the footage
where people from Gaza walk out, kiss the ground, and turn around
to go back inside. And then others on bicycles and crutches, or
however they could, there's one man you see on crutches, kept
going. They looted military bases and settlements - expropriating
miltary vehicles and even a horse - and some participated directly in
the attack, with children throwing stones on IDF outposts next to
fighters attacking the posts with light arms.

In my binge-reading, | came across one account where this Israel
Haaretz journalist went to one of the hotels to which residents of the,
Envelope were relocated by the Dead Sea, and spoke to people,
asked them what they saw. One person taked about seeing
teenagers with stones and machetes next to well-equipped
uniformed Hamas fighters. fm not sure i this s true, I've never seen a
machete in Palestine. Another thing we saw was fake news coming in
from other places around the world, including Latin America. |
specifically remember one terrible 2013 video of a woman burned. So
it's possible that this person too was confusing this with a video from
Latin America with machetes. But we do know that there was this
element as well of a popular insurrection once the gates were
opened, This reminds me of other rebellions, slave rebellions, really,
where there's an organized vanguard or an organized underground
that leads the attack with the intention of opening the gates, taking
over an armory, arming the populace, and letting the spontaneity of
the masses take over. Fanon talks about this, in the second chapter of
Wretched of the Earth, about launching the spontaneity of the
masses, which is uncontrollable. [4] Once the rage of the
dispossessed is unleashed, you don't know what's going to happen,
and some of it might be horrendous, right? It might. And it's
something we have to grapple with, without falling into a knee-jerk
panic reaction that justifies genocide.

4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, 1063).
7

We can think of Nat Turner. We can think of John Brown, where the
idea was to take over the armory at Harper's Ferry, and then free
slaves, kill slave owners, arm the slaves, and start a rebelion that
would bring down slavery in the South. Some people saw this as a
kind of general rehearsal for the Civil War. But it failed, and John
Brown was executed, and a lot of brutal kiling happened. Stil, the
‘way we remember it now is certainly not how people talked about it
back then. | just want to challenge readers to think about their own
knee jerk reaction to seeing news from Oct 7, and how these
reactions would be seen historically.

Another case that is especially important to me as a Jewish person,
having studied our history of persecution and rebellion, is the Sobibor
Uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is of course the most famous,
Jewish revolt of that era, and many people made the analogy,
including Refaat Alareer, a Gazan poet who generated controversy
for drawing this comparison on BBC, and who was murdered by
Israel as a possible consequence. The Sobibor revolt, while much less
known, is more of a success story. It was a concentration camp
where, in 1943, realizing they were all going to get killed, a small
group of maybe 20 people, some of them prisoners of war,
organized in secrecy, came up with a sophisticated plan to kill high-
ranking SS officers, sabotage the electricity and communications
infrastructure, take the guards’ weapons, loot the armory, arm the
other inmates, open the gates and let people escape and join the
partisans. Launched on Oct 14, 2023, it worked, to an extent.
Approximately half of the camp escaped. But only about 50 rebels
survived the war. Stil, it's a much higher percentage than would've
survived otherwise. And of course, infinite differences between these
cases, but to me, linstantly thought about it when | saw the news from
my sister, who lived in one of the settlements of the Envelope until
Oct 7,in the family Whatsapp group, saying that their power went out,
that there was some kind of sabotage of the electricity infrastructure
inthe Oct 7 operation.
There was also this element of short-circuiting lsrael's surveillance
capacities, creating the mirage that Hamas was deterred from
confrontation with Israel, and that it had no plans to attack. According
to Israeli and American sources, there were multiple gatherings of
forces in the lead-up that were framed by Hamas as harmless training
exercises. There were phone call conversations among Hamas
officials, supposedly - again, according to Israeli sources - saying
that they had no interest in any confrontation with Israeli forces.
Apparently, Egyptian and American intel was delivered to the IDF, but
they waived it away as something familiar and unconcerning. This
short-circuiting of surveillance was also long term: in the previous few
months, Israel moved entire divisions from Gaza to the West Bank,
assuming that Hamas was contained, banking on technological
surveillance and enclosure systems, like smart fences and robotic
sentries, to keep Gaza pacified.

‘THE ISRAELI RESPONSE: A MASS HANNIBAL

The lsraeli response to al this hadn't materialized untillater in the
morning. It took the IDF a few long hours to understand what at al
was going on. And when they finally responded, they basically
implemented the Hannibal Directive, as attested by Israeli Air Force,
Colonel Nof Erez who said on the Haaretz podcast on November 9,
that October 7 *was a mass Hannibal.*

The Hannibal Directive is a kind of scorched earth response to
kidnapping attempts. Mondoweiss ran an important piece about this
early on. Kidnappings have been an extremely effective way for
Palestinians to generate leverage against Israel for decades,
culminating in the Gilad Shalit deal in 2011, when Israel exchanged
1,027 Palestinian poliiical prisoners, including Hamas head in Gaza
Yahya Sinwar, for one soldier. The Hannibal Directive is this army
procedure where the idea is to prevent something like that by al
means necessary, even at risk of kiling the kidnapped soldier or
soldiers, which almost always winds up happening, as with Israeli
soldier Hadar Goldin and othersin 2014.

So,0nand since October 7, this was Israel's logic. The Israeli Air Force
was utilized to bomb lsraeli miltary bases and settlements, as well as
dozens of cars moving i the Envelope (the leaing Israeli newspaper
Yediot said *70 vehicles® were bombarded without confirming who
was inside, in an article by Ronen Bergman, who is a staff writer for
the New York Times, which apparently decided that this story didn't
warrant an anglophone audience). There’s a witness account where
an Israeli citizen, while locked in his safe room, describes getting a
phone call from an IDF helicopter operator who asks, *Are there,
terrorists in your home? If so, I'm blowing up the house.”

In Sderot, which is a working class town, not a gated, fenced-in
kibbutz ke most of those settlements, Palestinian fighters were able
to take over the police station and barricade themselves inside with
hostages. The IDF did not negotiate with them; they systematically
destroyed the whole reinforced building and killed everyone inside

Haaretz journalist Amos Harel, who is seen as perhaps the most
moderate and collected lsraeli military analyst, though he too has
been spreaing fallacies concocted by the IDF Spokesperson's unit
about beheadings and sexual violence, reported honestly that the
south district division was “compelled to request an aerial strike
against the base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.”

In one interview on lsraeli radio, a survivor of the attack describes
being treated *humanely” by her Palestinian captors, and recounts
how over fifty people were killed in *heavy, heavy crossfire. and
10

by tank shells, not by Gaza fighters, all while the Israeli radio host tries,
togoad her otherwise.

In footage published by the biggest Israeli news site Ynet (Yediot) as
well as by Israeli Channel 12, you can see Israeli helicopter operators
opening fire on what they estimate as “300 targets’ that day,
including on people fleeing from the dance party, while they admit
being unable to differentiate partygoers from Palestinian miltants,
saying Hamas operatives were instructed “to walk, in order to
confuse” the lsraeli Air Force, and that they were ‘in a dilemma, not
knowing who to shoot, because there were somany.”

The same logic has been applied in Gaza itself: catastrophic shelling,
an unending slew of war crimes enacted unapologetically, and utter
disregard for human lfe, abducted Israeli citizens included.

Most mainstream media have been compiicit with the erasure of this,
reality, silencing the Israeli hostages themselves, as with Yocheved
Lifshitz, an 85-year-old woman who was released from captivity, who,
insisted on telling people at a press conference in an Israeli hospital,
surrounded by journalists and Israeli officials, that she was treated
very kindly while in captivity. And still CNN, BBC, New York Times,
almost every one of these respected, so- called dependable news
sources omitted her words and quoted her out of context to imply
otherwise.

From the very beginning, srael has been unable to achieve its military
goals, so it responded by attacking and massacring civilians,
murdering over 12000 chidren and counting. The fighters
themselves, meanwhile, are underground when the bombing occurs,
and emerge as close to the enemy as possible for attack. Similar
tactically to Chuikov's *hugging of the enemy” in Stalingrad. And
Israel knows this very well - when there's bombing, the insurgents go.
underground, same s in Vietnam and
1

elsewhere in the Middle East, into a very intricate network of tunnels.
Israel is aware of this happening, but it stil bombs the civiian
population to smithereens, in what is, truly, “a textbook case of
genocide” [5] as claimed already early on by Israeli historian Raz
Segal. Clear intent to commit genocide, complete with blood libel

Blood libel is a term I'm taking, again, from my study of my own
ancestral history. Its a term that specifically hearkens to the
genocidal lie that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make
their matzah for Passover as a justification for pogroms and worse.
So similarly, we're seeing lies about the beheading of children, the
tossing of babies into ovens, necrophia, reiterated made-up stories
on sexual violence, the circulation of horrendous older photos of
sexually violated Kurdish fighters as if they're Israeli women, and so
onand so forth. Al of this appeared starting the very first day and has
been gradually debunked, [6] but it keeps resurfacing periodically. [7]
‘The White House walked back on Biden's outright lie

5] Raz Sege
itps:/fjewisheurronts.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide.

"A Textbook Case of Genocide,” lewish Currenis, 2025,

16] And here's a partial st of the debunking: hitps://wurw. yesmagazine.org/social-
Justicer2024/03/08/isea
itps:/iheintercept com/2024/02/28/new-york-times

mas-octT-report-gaza

chwartz-october-7/
itps://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/cnn-report-claiming-sexual-vi

lenca-on-october- 7-relisd-

‘on-non-credible-witnesses some-with-undisclosed-tis-t vt/

ck-of-evidence-allegations-of hamas- mass-

-gaza/ hitps://mondoweis.net/2023/12/zakais-not-a-
trustworthy-source-for-

legations- of-sexual-violence-on-october-7/
itps:/Imondowelss.net/2024/01 family-of-key-case-in-new-york-times-october- T-sexual-
Violence-report-senounces:story-says-reporters-manipulated-them,
itps:/Imondowelss.net/2023/12/how-human-rights-organizations-are-aiding-the- sracli-
assault-on-gaze/

itps://wew. youtube.com/watch?y-pMARKSLpCyd
itps:/twittercomyzei_squirrel/status/ 75181 230955767038

7] "CNN Report Claiming Sexual Violence on October 7 Relied on Non-Credibie Witnesses,
Some with Undisclosed Tiesto Isracli Govt,” Mondorweis, December
12

that he's seen photographic evidence of children being beheaded,
the LA Times pulled out an unsubstantiated quote on sexualviolence,
the New York Times has had an internal firestorm over its own
publication of atrocity propaganda, but mainstream media remains,
fully complicit, continuing to pump out unsubstantiated claims by
Israeli spokespeople. It’s almost like the IDF spokesperson sits with a
button that they can press to get another bogus NY Times story
whenever they need an extra push of legitimacy for their genocide.
This atrocity propaganda has been the narrative engine of this
genocide. As shown by Frank Luntz - who wrote the confidential
2009 Hasbara manual - and his comprehensive polling, audiences
respond to claims of *Hamas rape and massacre® more than anything
else. This while Israeli soldiers clearly showcase not only their
genocidal intent but also their intent to commit rape in Gaza.
Internationally, at least n the anglophone world, I'm getting the sense.
that the lsraeli atrocity narrative is falling apart. The damage it has
inflicted, however, both on the struggle against sexual violence writ
large with its overshadowing of actual cases of rape of Palestinian
women by the IDF, and by giving the West a reason to greenlight the
genocide, cannot be overstated.

At this point, we're still seeing liberal Zionists, people who think of
themselves as progressives, reiterating these stories. For me it's
particularly tragic, because it's also my family, even Israeli activists or
lefty writers who | had looked up to when | started getting
disillusioned with Zionism. In 2018-19, with the Great March of Return
protests on the fence, the liberals were uncomfortable with the
massacre of unarmed protesters. But now we're not seeing any
discomfort. The Israeli public is totally prepared for this, across
political ines.

2. 2023, hitps://mondowsissnet/2023/12/cnn-eport-claiming:sexual-violence:- on-
october-7-relied-on-non-credible-witnessss-some-with-undisclosed-ties-to- israsli-gov’
13

The dehumanization of the entire population of Gaza continues.
Minister of Defense Yoav Galant now-infamously said they're beasts,
*human animals.” In Hebrew, its hayot adam, which actually is like
saying they're beasts, animals, monsters. That would be the idiomatic
translation. So theyve created this zero-sum game, like it's either us
or them, which is genocidal thinking. All the way throughout history, in
very different conflicts, we see the creation of this false narrative that
people of different identities cannot coexist. It's either us or them, and
they need to be annihilated.

RIVAL TENDENCIES: THE DIFFERENT FLAVORS OF GENOCIDE

Haaretz, the liberal Zionist newspaper considered ‘the Israeli
newspaper-of-record” just continues spreading blood libel, no
problem. Butt's still behind a ifferent idea of statesmanship than the,
majority of the Israeli public. Tareq Baconitalks about this, and, by the,
way, everyone should just stop listening to me and go read Tareq
Baconi. He wrote an excellent book called Hamas Contained, which
doesn't romanticize Hamas, doesn't glorify it in any way at al, it's
critical of Hamas, but at least sees it for what it is and discusses it
openly. [8] There's an excellent interview with him on Unsettied
podcast that people shouid listen to from 2021. Since Oct 7 he's been
courted by mainstream English platforms, including the New Yorker,
‘where he mentions how Netanyahu basically had no strategy. | think it
was a strategy, but one that was doomed to fail the moment that the
status quo got disrupted. And it has failed the

5] Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance,
Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societls and Cultures (Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 2013).
13

moment that Al Agsa Flood was launched successfully on October
7th. Elsewhere | talked about Sun Tzu's hierarchy of warfare: Fist,
youattack the enemy on the level of strategy. [9] Hamas did that right
away. And that strategy was Netanyahu's ‘manageable conflict”
approach, this idea that every couple of years you could go into Gaza
and “mow the lawn” with relatively few losses on the Israeliside. This
is a term they used, ‘mow the grass” Any kind of military capabilties
that the Palestinian resistance built up, you just mow it down
periodically. Kill a few hundreds, maybe thousands - in 2014, it was,
thousands - and just sort of continue living like this indefinitely while
building up your technological capacities. This is how Netanyahu
sought to create *a durable peace.” which is the title of his book,
which, his aides say, he stil leafs through for his speeches. [10]

This strategy has failed. And who knows what will happen with
Netanyahu now? He's stillvery popular. But, with his approach failing
sospectacularly, there are competing visions for an Israelifuture. One
of them is just total genocide, full-fledged, ot even pretending to
only go for Hamas, just eliminate Gaza off the map. Also very popular.
It's shared by major military and political leaders currently in office.
Smotrich, who is the finance minister, is considered one of the key
figures of this tendency simply because over the past decade he laidl
out amore or less comprehensive plan called “the decisive plan” that
is essentially a genocidal transfer idea. And against this genocidal
view, there's a kind of “two states™ism, which maybe isn't called “two
states” in Israeli society anymore as it has no popular base
whatsoever, but it comes out of that tradition. This is more aligned
with counterinsurgency, more sophisticated. And this is a view that is
much less popular, butis

0] Sun Tzu, Sun T2u On The Art OF War, trans. Lionel Giles (Routledge, 2013).
110] Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durabie Peace: Isracl and s
York: Warner Books, 2000).

ce among the Nations (New

15

very, very strongly pushed by the US, which is extremely involved, a
ot more than in the Ukraine, sending aircraft carriers and top- level
military and political leaders almost daiy. The US is pushing for
counterinsurgency, learning from its miltary failures in the Middle
East over the past couple of decades. Counterinsurgency is
contingent upon dividing populations, isolating insurgents, controlling
space, and, perhaps most importantly, appointing a government that
would be working for “USG interests,” US government, and here 'm
quoting from the US Army’s counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-
24, [1f] The counterinsurgents are not concerned about the well-
being of Palestinians, but they're trying to think in a more
sophisticated way about how to achieve the state’s goals effectively,
and the brute force approach, they argue, might, in the long-run,
generate more resistance than it would crush. Counterinsurgency
might be even more genocidal, in terms of the loss to human life and
the inabilty to resolve the conflict and meet people's needs as if
everyone is actually a human being. But the counterinsurgents are
thinking of how to be effective. Atfirst, Israel was able to recruit alittle
over 300,000 soldiers from reserves, shutting down various sectors
ofits economy to add toits 150,000 conscript army, while Hamas had
an estimated 40,000 fighters. PIJ had at least 10,000. Thousands
more have been fighting back in the West Bank. Hezbollah, who's
been constantly sheling srael from the north since Oct 7, has an
estimated 100000. So Israel's meagre manpower has been
stretched thin. By now, all reservists have gone back home. The
Americans know that lsrael’s forces are not nearly enough forces to
win in urban warfare in as complex aterrain as Gaza. You need aratio
of one to 10 or even one to 20 attackers for defenders, following
John Robb and his book Brave New War, and John Spencer as well
in a maxim that goes back to Clausewitz with his assertion that
defense s the strongest form of warfare. [12] Sothey're

1111 Joint Publication FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, 2013,
[12] Carl von Clausouitz, On War (CreateSpace Independent)
16

saying, okay, how can you realistically do this? What are your
achievable goals? You can'tjust act intuitively and try to wipe out 2.3
million people and think you're going to win when your adversaries
arefighting back and appear to know what they're doing.

Accordingly, about every other day since the ground invasion started,
the Palestinian resistance has put out unbelievable videos of guerrilla
footage, targeting the IDF with snipers, mines, IEDs, mortars,
thermobaric explosives, and countless RPG strikes, frequently with
the Yassin 105, which is a made-in-Gaza double- headed munition
that disables the tanks' reactive armor (Jon Elmer's Twitter profile is
currently a good archive for this footage).

The Israeli casualty rate has risen accordingly, with the army releasing
the names of two to five dead soldiers a day on average over the first
couple of months and dozens of wounded soldiers every day. And
these are just ther figures, knowing the Israeli army is a pathological
liar. Citizens report a constant flow of rescue helicopters from Gaza
to the hospitals. According to Israeli hospital regstrations, the actual
number of wounded soldiers is about ten times higher than what the,
IDF has been releasing, [13] with thousands of newly disabled soldiers
in what an Israeli Defense Ministry official says is quote
“unprecedented, not something we've ever

Publishing Platform, 2012); lohn Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and
the End of Globalization (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2008): John Spencer, “Miai-
Manusl  for the Urban Defender” John  Spencer Online, 2022
urbandefender.

itps://ww johnspenceronline.com/mini-manus
113] Yaniv Kubovich and Ido Efrati, “Discrepancies Arise between IDF and Hospi
on Numbers of Wounded Soldiers,” Haaretz, December 10, 2025, sec. lsra
hitps://wew. haaretz,con/srasl-news/2023-12-10/ty- article/. premium/1-59:
soldiers-wounded-since-october-7-idf- revesls/000001 S-5416-df2f-adac-fedfbe6d0000.

17
dealtwith." [14]

Unable to sustain the mass ground invasion militarily and
economically, Israel has by now (iate March) released all of its
reserves brigades, stil refusing a down-climb ceasefire and hostage
exchange deal, even at the risk of violating a recent UN Security
Council resolution.

Within Israel, we've seen the rise of this guy called Yitzhak Brik. He's a
major general in reserves, who predicted this utter collapse of Israeli
defenses, having extensively surveyed dozens of Israeli nits back in
2018. He he met Netanyahu and Gallant, Prime Minister and Minister
of Defense, a few times in October, as one of many people who are
advising them, but as one who's been vindicated popularly and
militarily, he cautioned against land invasion too, calling it “a trap.” and
recommending aerial bombardment, continued tightened siege, and
“surgical raids® coming in from the sea with use of elite units like the
“Ghost Unit."[15] This unit, the brain child of Aviv Kohavi, hasn't been
used in large-scale combat yet, by the way; their head, Colonel Asaf
Hamani, was killed on October 7.

HOSTAGES AS LEVERAGE: A HISTORY

As of this writing, the Palestinian wild card remains: hostages.

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18

Israel has been in what | would call a strategic vacuum, reacting out of
genocidal rage and humiliation and continuously shattering to dust ts
own social contract by bombing, shooting, and even gassing its own
citizens held hostage in Gaza. With the collapse of this paradigm,
different strategic approaches are vying to fill the void: namely,
counterinsurgency (COIN), which is pushed by the primary genocidal
accomplice, the US, and full-fledged messianic genocide, which is
very popular in the extremely fascistic and racist Israeli society. The
COIN vision would basically see a revamped Palestinian Authority try
to take control of the Gaza Strip in some kind of process towards
statehood, but the problem is that any Israeli leader who would
outspokenly agree to roll with this scenario is unlikely to win among
Israeli voters, who have been conditioned for years to see Arabs as
subhuman terrorists who could never be trusted with a state.

Taking soldiers hostage has been a way for the Palestinian resistance
to generate leverage against lsrael for decades. The first deal that
broke the status quo of 11 prisoner for prisoner was, according to
Israeli negotiator Ariel Merari, [16] a 1978 agreement with the PFLP-
General Command (a militant group that splintered from the PFLP) to
exchange 76 Palestinian political prisoners for one Israeli soldier.
Since then the resistance was able to raise the floor of Israeli
negotiations with every deal, with the Jibril Agreement being
particularly contentious in the Israeli national memory, where the,
PFLP-GC was able, in exchange for three Israeli soldiers captured
during the First Lebanon War, to bargain for the release of 1151
Palestinian political prisoners, including the Palestine  solidarity
militant K620 Okamoto of the Japanese Red Army.

Gilad Shalit, kidnapped in 2006, marked another watershed deal,
Shalit was captured (and two other soldiers n the tank were killed)

[16] Lior Kodner, “Professor Ariel Merari: Ein Li Safek” Haaretz Podeast YIND °,
November 12, 2023, htps://www. hasretz.co.i/digital/podcast/weekly /2023-11- 121ty-
articl-podeast/0000018b-36d-de2l-a3fb-<7rd81560000.

19

during Olmert's government, an Israeli Prime Minister, who, in an Al
Jazeera documentary interviewing him, expressed disrespect for
Shait himseff, for not fighting back like the others who were killed,
basically revealing that Israeli leaders prefer soldiers dead rather than
captured.

Shalits family, with his dad Noam in the forefront, was able to
galvanize a social movement to pressure for his release through a“no
matter the cost” prisoner exchange. This social movement was
picked up and endorsed by Olmert's rivals across Zionist political
lines, from the right wing to liberal Zionists.

Olmert was still gonna broker a deal—of about 350 Palestinians
prisoners for Shalit—but, according to him in this AJ interview, his
rival and former PM Ehud Barak visited Shalit's family a night before.
the deal would be signed, signaling to Hamas that Israel would bend
further yet.

When Netanyahu took power in 2009, with Ehud Barak as Minister of
Defense, it was with a promise to his base to bring Gilad Shalit home.
Andin 2011an unbelievable deal was brokered (1027 Palestinians for
1 soldier, including head of Hamas in GazaYahya Sinwar. This
agreement is largely seen by both sides as a huge failure for srael
and an amazing victory for the resistance.

David Graeber, i his piece on Palestine after his visit, had one of his
quintessentially simple yet profound anthropological observations
‘where he said that hospitality is “the entire point of ife” (*hospitality is
everything®) in Palestinian culture, and that one of the tragic ironies is
that Israel is the worst possible guest. And its true, you know, anyone
who's experienced Palestinian hospitality will tell you that: in many
ways the meaning, the core of social lfe in Palestine, is to be
generous to guests and strangers. And we're seeing it in the
treatment of the hostages, in how they recount their experience in the
rare occasions that they're actually allowed to speak freely, as was
the case with Yocheved Lifshitz.
20

We've also seen this with Gilad Shait - he has never spoken in detal,
apparently not even to his family, about his five-year experience in
captivity - but Hamas released footage of him basically hanging out
with his captures, Hamas's “Shadow Unit” chatting, drinking a ton of
tea, receiving letters from his family, doing a barbeque outside, and
50 on. Now I'm sure it wasn't a pleasant situation for him, but compare
that with the experience of Palestinian prisoners - who, since Oct 7,
have been experiencing retributive torture, beatings, being put in
stress postures, sleep deprivation by blasting Israel's national anthem
in the cell, and murder. And in international media, we see this
absolutely racist double standard, no word about more than 7500
Palestinian political prisoners held without fair trial, many of whom
don't even know what the justifications are for capturing them under
administrative detention, not to mention thousands more, who were
abducted since Oct 7.

Up until now, every deal has been the new floor in Israel’s hostage
negotiations with the resistance. The question going forward is
whether the Shalit deal and Oct 7 created enough of a rift in Israel's
sense of self that this will now change, and that Israel will be able to
withstand the pressure to concede. The cost of not conceding might
be too high, paving the way for mass migration.

Eschewing a prediction that might be proven wrong, | would say we.
might want to wait for the Five-Year Mark before making any
conclusions one way or the other. Historically, Israel takes five years
to concede after a miltary defeat, and it is only force and violence
that forces its hand. Five years after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, it
finally made a commitment to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Five
years after the beginning of the First Intifad, it allowed thousands of
former Palestinian fighters and refugees, including Yasser Arafat, to
return to Palestine and start the so- called peace process. Five years,
after the start of the Second Intifada, it withdrew its settlements from
Gaza. And five years after Gilad Shalit was captured, his release deal
wasfinally brokered in 201,
21

The true gains from the current leverage that Palestinians hold with
their hostages from Oct 7, will only materialize as Israefs shaky
poliical terrain  crumbles  internally under the  Netanyahu
administration. As with Netanyahu against Olmert, the opposition
parties - headed by the genocidal Zionist centrist Yair Lapid - are
claiming to be the rescuers of the hostages now. Sooner or later they
might find themselves brokering Israel’s concession.

‘THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY: A TOOL OF ISRAELI COUNTERINSURGENCY

The Israeli wildcard is the Palestinian Authority (PA). The Netanyahu
administration is politically incapable of recognizing the PA as its
most vital military asset, but, again, a successor might be able to doso
and try to rebrand, revamp, and reappoint the PA as a governing
body in both the West Bank and Gaza. Unless something unexpected
happens, which is by no means impossible, Netanyahu will stay at
least until elections in October 2026. Meanwhile, the PA contines to
crumble. By now, the resistance - from the armed factions (including
Fatah's armed wing, the Al-Agsa Martyrs' Brigade) to the youth
tioting in the streets - fully recognizes the PA as an arm of the Israeli
state, and true political wizardry would have to be done to recover its
legitimacy.  However, the success of Israeli-American
counterinsurgency depends on this.

Starting in December 1987, the First Intifada was a massive popular
uprising against Israeli apartheid. This uprising saw the use of the
tools of mass struggle to a great effect - strikes, civil disobedience,
mass rallies, riots, tax resistance - all working together in confluence.
And despite the fact that the uprising was largely unarmed, it was met
with unspeakable brutality, the kiling of many hundreds of protesters,
the arrests of tens of thousands, and injuries to over a hundred
thousand Palestinians by Israeli soldiers who
22

were specifically instructed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to *break
their bones” [17] Stil, its remembered with incredible fondness by
that generation of rebels, and the way that this uprising was pacified
was ot by *breaking their bones,” but by bringing in the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO), which was in exile in Tunis, and
appointing it as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
As specified in the US Army's Field Manual, successful, long-lasting
counterinsurgency “requires development of viable local leaders and
institutions” [18] If there are no leaders, if the resistance is
decentralized, COIN requires the creation of a centralized leadership.
The PLO, which had been created by Arab states in 1964 as what
Baconi calls *a tool to control the insurgent [Palestinian] factions," [19]
was now appointed by the US and Israel as the leadership of the
uprising. This allowed Israel and the US to marginalize and ignore the,
decentralized popular committees that were, to use Fanon's
terminology, “guiding” the insurrection away from  recuperable
“traditional politics” [20] Then, through the Oslo

[17] Between 1988 and 1993, 60,706 Palestinians suffered injaries from shootings, beatings
or tear gas in the Gaza Strip alone. Joel Peters and David Newman, ods., The Routledge.
Handbook on the Iiracli-Palestinian Conflict, Routledge Handbooks (London and New York:
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 56. In an artcle in the London Review of Books,
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt assert that IDF soldiers were given truncheons and.

encouraged (o break the bones of Palestinian protesters, ciing, in addition, the Swedish
branch of Save the Children's estimate that "23,600 (o 29,900 children required medical

treatment for ther beating injuries in the first two years o the Intifads.” one third of

whom were children under the age of ten years. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The
Lracl Lobby.” London Review of Books 25, no. 6 (2006): 3~ 12. Additionally, it is

estimated that Israel arrested between 57,000 and 120,000 Palestinians during the six years
of the First nti

a. Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Endless Wars and No Surrender,” in How
Fighting Ends: A istory of Surrender, ed. Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan (Oxford
University Press, 2012), 26

1181 foint Publication FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, 2018, 1-22.

119] Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and

fication of Palesinian Resistance,

Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamie Societies and Cultures (Stanford.
Stanford University Press, 2018), 14.
120] “Les dirigeants de Iinsuerection, qui volent e peuple enthousiaste o ardent

Jifornia;
23

Accords between 1993-95, the PLO, lsrael, and the US formed the
PA as an auxiliary arm of the lsraeli occupation, with a limited security
apparatus that would be dedicated to policing and repressing
insurgents within Palestinian population clusters in select areas of the,
West Bank and Gaza. | can't describe how successful this move was.
Well-meaning people still see the Oslo Accords as a genuine peace
process rather than a sophisticated COIN operation that enabled
Israel to continue entrenching its settlement project with relative
calm. After the so-called ‘peace process collapsed with the
conclusion of the five years allotted for s duration, the PA remained.
The Second Intifada broke in October 2000, and for a brief moment
PLO Head Yasser Arafat did act up by releasing 350 political
prisoners including Hamas and PLJ members, but then the US and
Israel effectively fired him, and a new collaborator-in-chief was
appointed, Mahmoud Abbas AKA Abu Mazen. The PA was ousted
from Gaza in 2007 when Abu Mazen attempted what Baconi calls a
“US-planned coup” [21] after Hamas won the elections in 2006. [22]
But Abu Mazen was able to complete the coup in the West Bank and
greatly help in stabilizing Israef's control there. [23]

The PA creates the appearance of Palestinian autonomy, but in fact,
much like the governments of the Bantustans of Apartheid South
Africa, it is simply an extension of the colonial state, a tool of
counterinsurgency that is highly effective for the repression of local
rebellions, because it makes the native population police itseff. Fatah,
which was a revolutionary movement, the Palestinian resistance
movementinthe early days of the armed struggle, is now

porter des coups décisifs & Ia machine colo

ite, renforcent leur méfiance & I'égard de la
politique traditionnelle.” Frantz Fanon, Les damnds de a terre (La Découverte / Poche,
2016, 127.

[21] Baconi, Hamas Contained. 331

[22] David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, March 3, 2008,

itps:/ e vanityfar.com/news/2008/04/ga2a200801.

1231 Baconi, Hamas Contained. 125

24

mostly contained by the PA. Would-be rebels are now government
employees, fighting to keep their collaborationist jobs. Community
organizers are now working for NGO's, exempiifying Colin Powell's
infamous categorization of nonprofits as *force multipliers® for
Empire. [24] The money funneled by NATO countries into the,
nonprofit and government sector is the main reason for the relative
pacification of the West Bank following the miltarization of the
Palestinian resistance in the Second Intifada. This echoes General
Petraeus’'s COIN guideline of employing ‘money as a weapons
system” [25] These are the winning COIN principles: move in with
overwhelming force to control space, isolate the insurgents from the
general population, appoint your own government (but, importantly,
make it of the same identity as the general population), and supply the.
population with services so they don't become insurgents to meet
their basic needs (this ties with General Peter Chiarelli's SWET
concept, [26] standing for sewage, water, electricity, and trash-
collection, and | recommend Greg Stoker's short video on SWEAT-
MSO for his own explainer of this).In short: ‘divide-and- conquer® and
money - this is how empires win wars.

But somehow, even though the world supplied the Palestinian
Authority with the neoliberal institutions that would lead it into the
choking counterinsurgent stability of a neocolonial regime, Israel
keeps shooting itself in the foot. Interestingly, Israeli army literature,
generally fails to recognize the effectiveness of the PA in furthering
its own interests. The term counterinsurgency hasnt been
comprehensively translated into Hebrew, and when Israeli strategists
dotalk aboutitin English they generally conflate COIN

124] Sarah Kenyon Lischer, “Military Intervention and the Humanitarian "Force
Muldplir,” Global Governance 13, no. 1 (2007): 99-115.

1251 David . Petracus, “Mault-National Force-Irag Commander’s COUNTERINSURGENCY.
‘GUIDANCE" (Military Roview, 2008), 211

. The Insurgents: David Petrasus and the Plot o Change the American
Way of War, Ist Simon & Schuster hardeover ed (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 185.

25

with “counterterrorism.” [27] You can see this scroling through
Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies, a 2016 Cambridge
publication edited by lsraeli authors: in their timeline of Israel’s
purported “counterinsurgency experience,” they simply skip the
important years following the Oslo Accords, [28] revealing to us that
they only understand COIN as the application of force, and not as
“stability operations,” which is at the heart of COIN. [29] How can they
misunderstand this? it might have something to do with the nature of
Israel being a settler-colony, where the foundational idea is to
ethnically cleanse and replace the native population rather than
simply contain and control it. But | think the true reason is actually
incompetence and, on a broader level, greed. The Israeli army, as
argued by Israeli historian Uri Milstein, is a deeply anti-intellectual
institution, [30] and with its increased reliance on the army as a
generator of GDP, it incentivizes a suicidal military strategy. | suppose
you could see this as a symptom of capitalism as a whole, where the
market inexorably continues its suicidal drive despite the grave
consequences for the perpetuation of itself. The Palestinian
resistance, which, by contrast, focuses on sumoud (perseverance)
and on the long-term sustainability of its capacity to fight, might

[27] Efcaim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, “Israel’s Counterinsurgency Experience.” in
Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies, . Beatrice Heuser and Eitan Shamir (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 168-50.

[28] Inbar and Shamir, 175,

[29] foint Publication FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, 7-3 (89)

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26

find this somewhat encouraging.

LOOKING AHEAD

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I doif | was alive during
slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would | do if my
country was committing genocide? The answer is, you're doing it.
Right now.”(— Aaron Bushnell)

Six months in, the question remains: when wil the world intervene?
The resistance within Gaza continues unabated to inflict IDF
casualties and impede the machinery of genocide. Resistance
continues also, importantly, in Lebanon, Yemen, and Irag. In the US,
there has been some targeting of Israeli shipping company ZIM, of
arms manufacturer Elbit, and other logistical operations and
weapons manufacturers. However, the impression has been that
whatever popular energy had appeared in the first several weeks
following Oct 7 has been mostly contained by liberals and identity
politicians. Anti-Zionist Arab, Jewish, and student organizations
some of whom, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), have expressly
denounced October 7 - have been able to channel popular rage
towards marches and ralies, and are now gearing up to continue this
de-facto counterinsurgency operation by platforming  electoral
campaigns. Their MO is simple: as soon as someone proposes more
decisive action, they defang it by claiming that the action would pose
a risk to people of a marginalized identity. Of course, as Idris
Robinson says, their ability to hold civil protest is “predicated on
genocide in Palestine.” Meanwhile, the insurrectionary tendencies
that would be able to call out and circumvent the counterinsurgent
modalty of the liberal and identity organizations has not yet
intervened meaningfully for Palestine. These tendencies participated
in the 2020 George Floyd Uprising and have apparently reappeared
as a completely decentralized network powering the Stop Cop City
movement. They successfully
27

temporarily dismantled the Cop City construction site on March 5,
2023 and pressured multiple construction companies to drop their
contracts with the project, including one company that held on
tenaciously before finally dropping out after dozens of clandestine
sabotage attacks all over the country. A similar campaign could
conceivably isolate, drive out, or compel local arms manufacturers to
stop supplying Israel. It remains to be seen whether these tendencies
will be willing or able to connect themselves materially o in deed to
the popular forces that have still ot been fully coopted by what Idris
calls ‘the progressive wing of the counterinsurgency.”

In February, anarchist Aaron Bushnel did the extraordinary act of
kiling a US Air Force soldier by comitting a live-streamed self-
immolation - an act of solidarity felt deeply by various Palestinian
resistance groups. While his death is tragic and horrifying, it charged
what he had to say with meaning. This seemed to have helped in
giving protest in the US another boost, challenging people here and
everywhere, again, to have a fraction of his courage and do
everything in their power to stop the genocide. His sacrifice calls on
usalltostep up.

I find some hope in the increasing popularity of the writings of Basil
A-A'aj in Palestinian resistance discourse. Himself a martyred
resistance fighter killed by Israel soldiers in a shootout in 2017, Basil
was heaviy influenced by Fanon and adopted his radically inclusive,
anti-identity politics outiook. In his “Eight Rules and Insights on the
Nature of War® Basil said: “every Palestinian (in the broad sense,
meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle,
regardless of their secondary identities), every Palestinian is on the
front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your
duty"31In a lesser known piece that has yet to fully appear in English,
he wrote:

31 Basil Al-A'ma Resistance News

{ght Rules and Tnsights on the Nature of Wa
Network, 2017 2025, htps://tme/PalestineResist/25227.
28

“Ino longer see this as a confiict between Arabs and Jews, between
Israeli and Palestinian. | have abandoned this dualty, this naive
oversimplification of the conflict. | have become convinced of Al
Shariati and Frantz Fanon’s divisions of the world [into a colonial
camp and aliberation camp].

“In each of the two camps, you will find people of all religions,
languages, races, ethnicities, colors, and classes. In this confiict, for
example, you willfind people of our own skin standing rudely in the
other camp, and at the same time you willfind Jews standing in our
camp.’[32]

He goes on to criticize Israeli journalist Amira Hass's editorials as
insidious  examples of ‘the progressive wing of the
counterinsurgency,” counterposing Israelis such as Yoav Bar and
Jonathan Pollak as examples of Jews who, as Fanon would say,
“change sides, go native, and volunteer to undergo suffering, torture,
and death as members of the camp of liberation. [33] If, as per Basil
and Fanon, the broad resistance would be able to distinguish friends
and enemies based on “the choices they make," [34] on their actions
and commitments, rather than their identity and ‘race then
counterinsurgent psychological operations that pit people against
each other and diffuse collective action might be halted at the point
of implementation, enabling a more formidable movement trajectory
in the heart of Empire.

— Adi Callai, April 2024

1321 Basil AL-A'si, W

Tata

153] Frantz Fanon, The Wrelched of the Earth, trans. Richard Phileox (New York: Grove
Press, 2000), 94.

154] James Yk Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan
Revolutionary Writings (Chicago, lL.: Spear and Shield, 2010), 181
29

‘ C The violence which has ruled over the

ordering of the colonial world, which has
ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the
destruction of native social forms and
broken up without reserve the systems of
reference of the economy, the customs of
dress and external life, that same violence
will be claimed and taken over by the native
at the moment when, deciding to embody
history in [their] own person, [they] surge into
the forbidden quarters.

— Frantz Fanon
The Wretched of the Earth
‘The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world,
which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of
native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of
reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external ife, that
same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the
moment when, deciding to embody history in [their] own person,
[they] surgeinto the forbidden quarters.

~ Frantz Fanon The Wietchedof the Earth