Do you support the Resistance?
We should count ourselves lucky to be witnessing the bravest of warriors in a world ruled and dominated by despicable ghouls.
I have written several times in these pages about the anachronistic nature of the Western colonial project in Palestine with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel as its malignant modern manifestation. Colonisation was the West’s raison d’etre before the Second World War; after the end of the war the process of decolonisation began and slowly nearly all of the Global South was decolonised, according to the official narrative. (In reality, however, the West kept its erstwhile colonial subjects firmly in its grip through its many neo-colonial projects like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, et al., and more clandestinely, through a host of covert regime change organisations which are mobilised as and when needed.) Those born in the erstwhile colonies, but after the formal decolonisation of their native lands, never saw the heroes of their liberation in flesh and blood. The Haitians have their Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, and the Congolese Patrice Lumumba, to name just some of the anti-colonial heroes from the Third World.
In a world before video recording became ubiquitous, the heroics of anti-colonial fighters were confined to oral renditions and written texts. It left a lot to the imagination. Thankfully, we have no such constraints when it comes to witnessing the heroics of the Palestinian (and the Lebanese) Resistance in their struggle for liberation against the Zionist nemesis.
The year of genocide in Gaza — which has been expanding rapidly into Lebanon for over a month now — has been an unending stream of horrors, with the Israelis stooping to the levels of depravity that has few, if any, parallels in history. From methodically shooting toddlers in the head to anally raping their fathers with electric rods, and from incinerating plastic tents full of several generations of Palestinian families to running bulldozers over the injured to bury them alive, there’s no evil that the Israelis have spared in their quest for Jewish supremacy in Gaza.
What’s more, they have recorded it all on camera and then uploaded it for the perverted pleasure of their genocidal public, who appear to just can’t get enough of the depravities of their brethren.
While the Jewish supremacists have gleefully disseminated the evidence of their war crimes, the Resistance, on the other hand, has given us a near-cinematic view of morality, steadfastness, and valour on the battlefield. This bravery was exemplified by none other than Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar himself whose heroism will be talked about for ages. His is the kind of legend that becomes folklore. About which poems are written. The kind of tale grandmothers tell their grandkids, who listen with rapt attention, and excitedly ask, “What happened next?”
By no means was Sinwar’s heroism an aberration. There have been stories galore of unparalleled fighting spirit in Gaza and Lebanon, showcasing extraordinary strength of character in these remarkable men of Resistance.
Did you hear the story of Hamza Hisham Amer aka the Elegant Fighter? He used to glide through the streets of Gaza in his trademark long, black overcoat to scorch many a Zionist tank with his shoulder-fired Yassin 105s. Burberry will never find a better model for its overpriced ware.
How about Mouhannad Rizq Jibreel, who after scorching an Israeli troop gathering in Gaza, drifted away with the immortal line, “Analyse this, Duwairi!” (A reference to Fayez al-Duwairi, a military analyst on Al Jazeera Arabic who analyses Resistance videos for his TV audience.) Duwairi gladly obliged and called it an honour to have his name shouted out by the brave fighters of Palestine.
Or how about Ahed Adnan Abu-Sittah of Al-Quds Brigades, leaping for joy, shouting: “Walla’at (It’s ablaze)!” after scorching a Zionist tank.
One leap for a Resistance fighter, total liberation for mankind, eh?
Or Hezbollah’s Ibrahim Haider, who took on an entire Zionist unit all by himself, unfazed by the hail of bullets flying in his direction before achieving martyrdom due to a typical cowardly Zionist airstrike.
We have seen these heroes and their heroics because the Resistance has ensured that it captures all the action it can to apprise us of the happenings on the battlefield. More helpfully, in its videos the Resistance points out the enemy with red triangles. A year’s worth of red-triangled Zionists and their military ware has made the humble emoji into a global symbol of resistance.
Watching the Resistance fighters in their modest track pants and sandals armed with nothing more than shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and improvised explosive devices taking aim at multi-million dollar Merkava and Eitan tanks and hitting them accurately enough to cause the intended damage has been a sight to behold.
Then there are the videos that defy all definitions of bravery. If there were a physical device that measured valour, it would break by the stress of getting stretched beyond its highest reading. These are the acts in which fighters run all the way to the tanks to hand-deliver the explosive on the tank turret and then run for safety at full pelt before it explodes. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around such bravery. Other than the danger of the tanks suddenly turning in the fighter’s direction and blowing him to smithereens, there’s also the risk of the Zionist drones flying constantly overhead spotting the fighters and delivering their payload on top of them. But the Resistance fighters are seemingly impervious to such puny fears.
In his legendary Ballot or the Bullet speech, the African-American revolutionary Malcolm X gave his audience a little glimpse of what it takes to fight guerilla warfare. Delivered in April 1964 in the context of the American struggles in the illegal Vietnam War, Malcolm gave a primer on guerilla warfare, which wouldn’t be out of place in the context of Gaza over the last 13 months.
Malcolm: “It takes heart to be a guerrilla warrior because you’re on your own. In conventional warfare you have tanks and a whole lot of other people with you to back you up — planes over your head and all that kind of stuff. But a guerrilla is on his own. All you have is a rifle, some sneakers and a bowl of rice, and that’s all you need — and a lot of heart.” The Palestinians and the Lebanese have nothing if not humongous hearts that fear none but God.
Later in that same speech, Malcolm also informed his audience of the outcome of such battles: “The white man can’t win another war fighting on the ground. Those days are over. The black man knows it, the brown man knows it, the red man knows it, and the yellow man knows it. So they engage him in guerrilla warfare. That’s not his style. You’ve got to have heart to be a guerrilla warrior, and he hasn’t got any heart. I’m telling you now.”
What Malcolm told us 60 years ago, holds equally true today. When we see the Zionist cowards never stepping out of their tanks (other than to take selfies) for the fear of getting sniped (they get sniped while taking selfies anyway), Malcom’s “he hasn’t got any heart” screams aloud. The Zionist, indeed, has no heart. He is all powerful when dropping American and European munitions from the sky on helpless civilians trapped inside a giant cage with nowhere to run, but when it comes to fighting man-to-man, he starts quaking in his boots.
But it’s not only about bravery on the battlefield. It is also about the ethics of warfare.
The Resistance has been fighting what is possibly the most immoral military that ever existed. While the Zionists target hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, children, elderly, and women as a matter of policy, the moral Arab fighters have refrained from attacking even the enemy’s injured soldiers simply because the Islamic law of warfare prohibits them from such attacks. For over a year, the Zionist medical evacuation helicopters have flown unharmed despite being in the firing range of the Resistance, such has been the restraint of the Islamic fighters against their immoral Jewish supremacist enemy.
Moreover, the way the Resistance has treated its prisoners of war couldn’t be further from the way the Israelis have treated the Palestinian abductees. Imprisoned without charge, the tens of thousands of Palestinians have been tortured, raped, and left to rot in Israeli dungeons, often coming out abused, emaciated, crippled, amputated, and with infectious skin diseases all over their bodies. Meanwhile, the Israeli prisoners of war in Gaza have been treated with typical Arab hospitality despite a siege, enjoying Arabic delicacies and even birthday cakes.
Despite taking countless losses, including the slaughter of their families and relatives, destruction of their homes, neighbourhoods, schools, universities, and hospitals, the Resistance fighters have stuck to their principles.
Indeed, as Justin Podur concluded in a recent article:
Suppose… they [the Israelis] win the war, somehow destroying Hizbollah in the mountains of Lebanon, completing the genocide and starving the fighters of Hamas to death, cleansing the Palestinians of the West Bank to Jordan, destroying Iran’s missile abilities, crushing Iraq, perhaps miring Yemen and Syria in fratricidal wars? Then Israel will have bought itself a decade or two of tranquility to dance again in the ashes. And in a generation, a new war, in a totally different geopolitical and technological world than today’s, with foes that make it long for the enemies of today, who were foolish enough to think they could force a Western enemy committed to genocide and racism to fight with reason and honor. (Emphasis added.)
Reason and honour are concepts alien to the pretend-Semite white Europeans and North Americans of Israel, who have clearly not been able to cope with the unending reservoir of the natives’ bravery for over a year in Gaza and now for over a month in the mountains of Lebanon. Despite wanton destruction and incessant display of fake bravado, the Israelis are heading in the direction of the Americans in Vietnam: humiliating defeat at the hands of the natives.
Having missed out on watching the anti-colonial heroes of yore, we should count ourselves extremely lucky to have seen the Arabs warriors, fighting with such dignity and honour that the Israelis and their Western backers cannot even fathom let alone aspire to.
Remember, the only thing preventing the complete annihilation of Gaza and Lebanon is the indigenous Resistance because the Western powers — who determine when and where the so-called “rules-based international order” is applied — have sacrificed the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Iraqis, and the Iranians on the altar of Jewish supremacy.
In a world of muddied discourse and muddled thinking engineered by the powers that be, the notion of the state’s monopoly on violence has been so deeply ingrained that it is seen as legitimate, no matter how unjust and barbaric that violence. Conversely, the resistance of the oppressed has been tarred with the broad brush of terrorism, no matter how righteous and just their resistance. Consequently, heroes have come to be depicted as villains and terrorists as vanguard of human civilisation. Don’t fall for that fraudulent characterisation. Indeed, to borrow further from Malcolm’s speech, if you have paid heed to the state propaganda, “Oh, I say you been misled. You been had. You been took.”
One must never equate the violence of the oppressor with the resistance of the oppressed, for the former is terrorism and the latter is a righteous, moral, and just fight forced upon the afflicted as the only means of survival and the preservation of the sanctity of life.
We are witnessing just such a fight in the Middle East for over a year. The least we can do is say thank you to the Resistance warriors for standing against evil and support them every way we can, for we may never see their like again. May the red triangles reign. 🔻
I have had to start a fundraiser on my Ko-fi page: https://ko-fi.com/palestinewillbefree. It would be amazing if you could lend a helping hand. Thank you for reading and your support.
To add James Baldwin’s prescient summary:
"....We are all at the mercy of the European vision of the world - and that vision is obsolete…”
🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻 With the deepest thanks 🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻