For the early Christian Zionists who drove the Balfour Declaration forward and repeatedly steered the British Mandate in Palestine back towards Zionism, part of it very seriously was

*Slaps Palestine*

"This bad boy can fit so many Jews I don't want in my own country in it"

It was a weird mix of yearning for and reaching towards the apocalypse (because many Protestants believe 'the Jewish people' must return to 'the land of Israel' in order for Christ to return and for the world to end) and at the same time thinking 'I'd rather not have that domestic Jewish population'.

In that way, Zionism and anti-semitism have really worked hand-in-hand from the very start of the Zionist project.

the gradual technical changes, from bullets to gas to bombs to depravation of water

I'd like to emphasize with you just how gradual that has been, comrade. Israel has been using criminal siege tactics against civilians, like we're seeing today, including the deprivation of access to electricity, food, clean water, and medical supplies, since at least the 1982 invasion of Lebanon— over forty years ago. But unlike the 1982-2000 war in Lebanon, of course, each time Israel has ratcheted up these techniques against Gaza, the Gazans were already and continuously surrounded, penned in, and totally dependent on the IDF for all of their infrastructure needs. The Gazans were pre-invaded, occupied ahead of time, pre-besieged.

In the particular case of water, contaminated drinking water had already been a major source of disease in Gaza for years before this latest episode of escalating deprivation. There has been an astonishingly prolonged, unremitting march towards this point.

They had to get rid of Armistice Day somehow. A holiday about demanding world peace on the basis of the trauma of a global war was too easily marshalled by leftists, an ideal somewhat shattered and humiliated by the subsequent carnage of WWII, and basically incompatible with the US' growing imperial ambitions. So US leaders 'expanded' it to honor 'more people', and transformed it into something else entirely.

I've been thinking about the same kinds of arguments today, too.

Another line of reasoning I'm too tired to fully lay out right now but that I've seen elsewhere and I think is compelling:

Israel's history of targeted assassinations and arbitrary imprisonment of activists in the occupied Palestinian territories, taken together with the fact of the Oct 7 attack itself, proves that the state of Israel doesn't know who or where the Hamas leaders they supposedly want to target are. So the only 'targeting' they can do is indiscriminate, and the only end point of their bombing campaign is total destruction. And this is borne out in the rhetoric of many officials and much of the Israeli public, and of course in the atrocious, ongoing violence the IDF is right now carrying out.

The impossible goal becomes an excuse for 'no red lines' because no matter how far they go, they can always say they are still not done. This dovetails as well with the analogizing of Oct 7 as an 'Israeli 9/11', the 'War on Terror', and the USA's forever wars in the Middle East.

But your point about the reflexive brutality, the observation that somehow a military response is the only one considered or undertaken here, is also extremely vital. Because part of the rationalization here is absolutely this idea that 'there was no choice', given the desire to uproot Hamas. But of course that's bullshit.

I have a very strong negative reaction to this, admittedly only some of which is due to its dissemination through a channel supposedly focused on Marxist analysis.

There's nothing in the screencapture that could be recognized as Marxist analysis. There's no science here, just idealism and essentialism (Islam is about not just the culture but the 'nature' of the Palestinian people, really?).

Even the book recommendations seem dubious to me. Is biography really central enough to history for Marxists for the biography of one man to be a 'great historical work'? The next title even sounds like it could have been AI-generated from a collection of apologetics tropes, from its fixation on the figure of the convert to the 'this was supposed to be an anti-religious book' move other grifters in the space use to enhance their credibility.

Yes, I think religious faith absolutely plays a role in organizations like Hamas (as well as in daily life, 'resistance by existence', for many) that is not reducible to material interests or other forces. Religion, like ideology, takes on a force of its own beyond the material conditions that shape both its initial formation and constrain its evolution. For that reason, superstructural forces like religion are worth analyzing in their own rights (alongside the material forces that are, as Marxism understands, 'determinative, in the final instance' in the unfolding of history). It can even be argued that particular religious institutions (as distinct from religious beliefs or doctrines) are material, are members of 'concrete social relations'.

But an analysis which asserts that Islam is the driving force of the resistance movement in Palestine without any account of things like the fact that secular forces' leadership were in exile, outside Palestine, when Hamas rose to prominence during the first intifada; or that there are nearby Islamist nation-states willing and able to smuggle arms to resistance groups in part to serve their own geopolitical interests, while there have not been any such Marxist-Leninist states for many decades... this is neither dialectical nor historical nor materialist.

Analysis of how religious institutions on the ground in Palestine organize, support or constitute anticolonial resistance is one thing. Exhortations to study the Quran are another: ordinary proselytizing.

Edit, a couple days later: I still think it's true that the post pictured in the OP isn't Marxist analysis. But I also think that my turning that observation into criticism was a mistake, and that my criticism was fundamentally misplaced.

Political education is a task, not an identity. It's no one's job to speak always and only in a Marxist idiom. Sometimes a reading recommendation is just a recommendation, not a thesis— and that's fine.

My hostile reading of the individual book recommendations was also reductive and uncharitable. I glossed over the analogy Hakim asserts between the broader social context of the emergence of Islam and present-day Palestine. Because other aspects of its premise remind me of hackish Christian apologetics books that have been pushed on me in the past, I also discounted one good faith reason Hakim had (and stated!) for recommending von Klaveren's book: namely that the author's conversion journey involved overcoming common Islamophobic myths and stereotypes. Even if that book absolutely sucks, that's a feature it couldn't have in common with Christian conversion narratives situated in cultures where Christianity is dominant.

It may be true that as a writer, Hakim could have done something to frame his post in Marxist terms, or to 'tag' it as not really directly concerned with Marxism. But as a reader, I think I failed to recognize a lot of implicit framing that was already there, in the form of the Deprogram catalog itself, by considering pretty much only what was excerpted in the OP when I started commenting here.

A corollary: the move from liberalism to Marxism is marked by a change in worldview as a whole. Like 'paradigm shifts' in the Kuhnian conception of scientific revolutions, 'disruptive innovation' under capitalism, or the qualitative character of change in dialectics, this transition is marked by a kind of incommensurability between two things, in this case the consensus point of view in liberal societies and the Marxist point of view.

Marxism isn't a liberal, capitalist framework with a series of factual misapprehensions and faulty analytic judgments corrected, and for that reason, winning people to Marxism isn't a matter of correcting liberal bullshit. Taking up Marxist thinking involves movement from two directions: realizing that liberal, capitalist ideology is defective, an inadequate way of understanding or changing the world; and entertaining a Marxist perspective on its own terms. Correcting liberal errors can play a role in the former but does nothing for the latter. And today, there is already a widespread sense that the consensus narrative is bankrupt.

The final consideration in explicitly embracing Marxism is that a Marxist framework does a better job of making sense of the world and orienting oneself towards political action within it than a liberal, capitalist framework does. The largest part of motivating such a judgment in favor of Marxism comes from engagement with Marxism itself, both analytically (theoretically) and practically (i.e., working with Marxists and Marxist organizations).

Both in life and in efforts to persuade

Instead of mainstream social media, I've been directing the energy that ongoing events in Palestine stirs up in me into educating myself on related topics, and just engaging the topic in conversations with the people closest to me. Similarly, when I feel too tense or riled up about news coverage and commentary, I focus on long-form content not directly concerning the current bombing campaign, like history books or YouTube lectures.

What I probably need to do more of generally is just disengage altogether, but overall I do feel like it serves my mental health better when I avoid the punditry in favor of more substantial content.

Anyway I think that advocacy is important and valuable, but I think it's absolutely your prerogative to limit that or pursue that in a way that supports your overall mental health.

And it's not just you. Mainstream discourse on the ongoing slaughter of Gaza, and indeed the whole Palestinian struggle and situation, is fucking exhausting and infuriating here in the imperial core. And the facts of what's happening, even aside from the way the situation is discussed, are just plain heavy and painful.

mostly

For your convenience, here's the article.

Currently they're saying 1,200 total, listing ~320 names, with ~105 of them civilian and ~215 military and police, so of the confirmed Israeli deaths from October 7, it's about 67% active military and police.

I'd question the nature of that support. I'm sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game in protecting them, however support for the recent bombings and ground assaults is significantly lower.

Well, a large supermajority of Israelis support continuing the current campaign, which is inarguably characterized by indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza, 'until Hamas is completely eliminated'. This is a clear statement of support not just for the bombing which has so far taken place, but a claim that it must continue (indefinitely— until reaching a goal that is arguably impossible).

I'm sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game

Are you familiar with the concept of strategic depth? Given Israel's limited size and accessible terrain, its geography profoundly lacks this feature. This means Israel's defensive capabilities have a virtual ceiling, and the ability to make strategic retreats against an invasion is very limited.

For this reason, Israel has a long history of preferring offensive action over defensive action. And indeed, a large plurality of those polled by IVP, as reported on in the article cited above, have come out and said that Israel's biggest mistake leading up to October 7 was failing to carry out more offensive operations in Gaza prior to the attack.

Calls for Israel to 'step up its military game' are intimately tied to offensive action in Israel, and the pretense that they could conceivably relate only to defensive measures for 'protection' or 'safety' is unsustainable under any historical scrutiny.

there are many in Israeli leadership roles behaving that way. It's hard to say whether they genuinely feel that way themselves or if they're just encouraging it for their own benefit - Netanyahu is probably the latter, in my opinion

Why such interest in the rhetoric when there is a growing pile of civilian corpses behind it? Who cares what is in Netanyahu's heart when the evident fact is that his finger is pulling the trigger?

Most people in any nation just want peace and prosperity for themselves, rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.

The demand for peace without justice is a demand to normalize violence. Are you familiar with the concept of 'normalization' in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or in the BDS movement? If you aren't, regardless of the outcome of this discussion, I urge you to take the time to review and at least consider this recent lecture on the concept. Peace is indeed vital for all human beings, but how peace is demanded is equally vital.

rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.

And yet Israel, a country in which conscription is mandatory for both sexes, military training typically begins at age 14, a large supermajority of the population serves in the military, and whose military and intelligence agencies are rooted in paramilitaries that antedate the formal state by decades, has been engaged continuously in exactly such a project of forceful expulsion for more than a hundred years, without pause.

If this history is unfamiliar to you, or Palestinian displacement has been presented to you primarily as very recent or unintentional, you may find some deeper engagement with the topic enlightening, if challenging (and you may not agree with all the analysis you read, of course).

There are a large number of books, including books by Jewish Israeli scholars, currently available for free on this topic.

If you're interested in diving deeper, outside the context of this argument, please let me know. If you have preferences for audiobooks, videos, or other formats, I can help you find something that works for you.

I'm also willing to do a 'reading exchange' with you if you're open to that— I'll read one related book of your choosing if, after you give me a sense of what texts most interest you, you agree to read one book I recommend, and we can discuss both books together.

I understand that the latter is a big time commitment, so no big deal if you can't do it.

Do we know for sure that the emoji spam on Hexbear is due to the downvote policy? It seems to me like it could also just be explained by accidents of history and community focus/culture.

The resources required are presumably proportional to activity

it's probably just a matter of clutter, in the worst possible case