November/December 2023 – Agrarian South Research Bulletin
Charlotte Kates is the international coordinator of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Also involved with the National Lawyers Guild, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the International People’s Tribunal on US imperialism, sanctions, blockades and coercive economic measures.
Max Ajl: Thank you so much for taking the time, Charlotte. What I would like to talk with you about today is, first, some of the difficulties Samidoun is encountering, but furthermore, something probably much less known amongst a global radical audience: the function and history of the “terror” list. And why is it incumbent upon us to resist these so-called terror lists in our contemporary moment; and how this interacts with contemporary dynamics within the actual Palestinian national liberation movement and the various forces who engage with that movement outside of Palestine. If we can start with one thing, something that burst out onto the news very recently is Samidoun was banned by the German state. Can you briefly give us some context for that?
Charlotte Kates: So essentially, two days ago, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser announced she was officially implementing bans against two entities in Germany: Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement and Samidoun, Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Now this might seem like kind of a large mismatch at first, because Hamas is a massive organization, one of the leading organizations in the Palestinian resistance, and Samidoun, while a growing kind of global organization, a network of activists for liberation of Palestinian political prisoners, isn’t playing the same role in the forefront of Palestinian resistance. But it’s very clear the German state views this kind of organizing in Germany as a fundamental threat to what they’ve declared as their reason of state, which is the maintenance and development of the Zionist project in occupied Palestine.
Now it’s important to note that this didn’t come out of nowhere, and it didn’t just come after October 7. So, it is true that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced several days after October 7 that he was going to seek a ban on Samidoun and Germany, and that this was meant to appease, but also further and advance the tremendous anti- Palestinian anti-Arab anti-Muslim racist wave of propaganda that has been directly used in Germany. It’s not just a natural phenomenon. This is something that has been supported, managed and sustained by the government and leading media corporations to dehumanize Palestinians and to advance Germany’s imperial goals in the region, because it’s important to, just, like note that a lot of times this is phrased as if there’s a problem with German guilt and that this is an expression of German guilt and the German states guilt about the Holocaust and its rejection of nationalism and the fact is that nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than being some kind of expression of guilt or sorrow over the crimes committed by the Nazi regime against Jews and against Russians, against millions and millions of people in Europe, which would lead them to object to genocide, to take a stand for justice for all peoples, what’s going on here is the projection of German imperial power. It comes hand in hand with the advancement of Germany’s role in NATO. It comes hand in hand with Germany being one of the second largest supplier of military support to the Zionist regime. It comes hand in hand with Germany’s investments in the region. It comes hand in hand with Germany’s view of Arabs and Palestinians from the region as a source of cheap labor for its industries and not as people that have the right to speak of protest and demonstrate if they are refugees or living in Germany. This is not an expression of guilt. This is not an expression of sorrow. This is not misdirected guilt or misplaced emotions. What is happening is Germany playing its role as an imperial power alongside the United States, Canada, Britain, France and Italy in its alignment with the Zionist project after October 7, when the Palestinian resistance demonstrated very materially that it has the power and the ability to strike a significant blow and especially in alignment with other regional forces that are part of the resistance camp, posing a serious threat to the maintenance of the Zionist project in occupied Palestine, but fundamentally to the maintenance of U.S,-led imperialist domination in the region, and that’s why we’ve seen this kind of outrageous, hysterical response. This kind of wide ranging racist propaganda that seems to be meant to incite lynch mobs against Palestinians and Arabs and people who support Palestine in Germany and France and all of these countries.
That’s why in Germany we’ve been seeing bans on demonstrations, police attacks. People are sitting down and having a vigil in Frankfurt and the police are coming and spraying water hoses on them in scenes reminiscent of the civil rights movement. You have cops attacking people walking down the street, you’re wearing a keffiyeh holding a Palestinian flag or saying free Palestine on Sonnenallee, a major street in Berlin, which has always been kind of a center of Arab social, cultural, and economic life in the city. There are, daily, hundreds, if not thousands, of cops deployed almost as an occupying force that are charged with everything from attacking children for wearing a keffiyeh to sending cranes down the street to grab a Palestinian flag off of a third or fourth floor balcony. This didn’t just start October 7. The Nakba marches have been banned in Berlin for the past two years. Palestinian Prisoners Day protests have been banned.
There have been days when there are hundreds and hundreds of people arrested in Germany daily for protesting for Palestine and what we’ve seen is essentially the acceptance of the Zionist project into the modern version of German imperialist fascist nationalism that Zionism is reflected as this kind of force within Germany. If you look at the kind of hate messages and racist messages that the thousands of people in Samidoun Deutschland receive overwhelmingly, these are messages that are sent with people with German flags. In their bios, some of them even end their messages with Heil Hitler. You have this kind of recreation of a fascist project, with the target being Arabs and Palestinians. And this comes hand in hand with the rehabilitation of fascists in Eastern Europe and Ukraine and elsewhere, as part of this anti-communist cause and the promotion of NATO. You see the banning of the letter Z, the banning of the Russian flag at commemorations of the victory in Europe and World War Two, and the defeat of Nazism. These things come hand in hand. This is not an expression of guilt. This is an expression of fascist repression and imperialist domination. What we’re seeing is the targeting of Palestinian Arab communities in Germany as part and parcel of that project. And it’s important to note here that Samidoun in Germany is largely made up of young Palestinian refugees who have been expelled from their homeland, have been denied their right to return with their families for the past 75 years. Who have come from the camps of Gaza and Lebanon and Syria, and who currently are being subjected to an extremely high level of political oppression in Germany, including this kind of ban. They’re people being threatened with deportation, with stripping their residency, with political bans that criminalize them for going to demonstrations or attending protests. And this isn’t even just happening to Samidoun activists. It’s even happening, for example, to medical students that wanted to attend a conference of Palestinian doctors in Europe.
They’ve also received letters stating they’re going to be deported from Germany, so it is notable in this context that Germany has focused on Samidoun and even when it’s engaged in widescale repression against any expression of solidarity and sympathy for Palestine. And that’s because Samidoun unequivocally expresses its support for the Palestinian resistance as a Palestinian prisoner support organization. The Palestinian prisoners are part and parcel of the resistance. Their leaders of the resistance, whether it is the resistance, or student organizing and land defense or leadership in the armed struggle. It’s that the resistance and the prisoners’ movement are one front, and because the message of not just October 7, but this entire period of building the Palestinian resistance alongside the regional resistance, is something that presents a threat to imperial domination in the region. The tip of this attack must be directed at those who openly speak for the Palestinian resistance and the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, and not those who are advocating for a future Palestine that could be incorporated into an imperialist project.
MA: In this context, it’s probably worth noting that the silence or inability to see Germany as an organic part of the imperialist front also has let Germany be the leading edge of NGO based neocolonial counterinsurgency in the Arab region, especially in the post so-called Arab Spring. It’s been particularly pernicious and kind of containing the radical edge of mobilization for national liberation in Tunisia because Germany does not have superficially, or at least the reputation of the same level, the same kind of colonial legacy that France and the UK and the US have, and this has really enabled Germany to play this role, although we’re also starting to see real fractures because many of the young people and not so young people who are associated with those NGOs in the Tunisian context, are actually taking very firm stances against the German imperial project and the concordant silence on Palestine and Zionism.
On our topics, what I really want people to understand is the literal criminalization of Samidoun and any type of expression of support for Hamas is carrying on a slightly older legacy going back two decades, emanating, of course from the imperial heartland, the United States, where the terror list was passed. And there’s a context now where there have been attempts to call any form of anti-Zionist or even simply let us say pro-Palestinian activity as material support for terror. There’s legislation put forward in the US Congress, the US Senate, reflecting that. So I would like it if you can actually give us a primer about the origins and history and function of the terrorist list, hnd how they’ve been used to fracture contemporary Palestinian liberation organizing.
CK: And I want to note, in agreement with your point about NGOisation, that all of Germany’s major political parties view the existence of Israel as part of their reason and justification for existence. Again, given that that’s been incorporated into the German national imperialist project, and they’ve historically found it useful to use these kinds of party affiliated NGOs to create a supportive environment for Germany in the region, even at the same time that they practice these heavy levels of repression, but in the past four years, what we’re seeing is an increasing demand even on these NGO workers, particularly in the Arab region, to accept and support the maintenance of the Zionist project. So it’s pushing towards a greater conflict that is no longer able to be concealed in the name of kind of a project of infiltration through the NGO community.
It’s being exposed before the world and at this point there is kind of a choice that must be made. For example, German foundations are associated with political parties and have funded Palestinian organizations, Palestinian NGOs that were engaged in kind of the human rights project, and that then later the occupation regime labeled terrorist organizations in its incessant drive to impose this label on any Palestinian project that doesn’t completely comply with their demands, and the German state kind of officially rejected those, but Nancy Faeser – the same interior minister who issued the bans against Hamas and Samidoun – said that she actually supports those designations. What we’re seeing is even in this realm, the German state is now saying, it’s all out for Israel and the Zionist project in the region. And one can say that there’s going to be some positive developments that come out of that in terms of the weakening and exposure of what that German influence means for people organizing in the region. But that’s a little bit of a digression, just to say that when we talk about Palestinian organizing, anti- imperialist organizing, liberation movement organizing has always been branded as terrorism from the Haitian Revolution and certainly throughout the history of the Palestinian liberation movement, the term terrorism has constantly been used to denigrate people’s movements fighting imperialist powers. So, on the one hand, there’s nothing new about that. As concerns Palestine, and in the United States in particular, because I’m going to focus on the US here for a little bit, there have been previous past persecutions of Palestinians, the prosecution of the Los Angeles 8. They just didn’t take place within the framework of the current legal system: this so-called crime of material support for terrorism. The reason why we’re going to start in the United States is because most of the so-called anti-terror legislation that has been adopted around the world, particularly in the post 9/11 2001 era has been based on US legislation. A version of the US legislation is what’s in use in Canada. It’s what’s in use in most European countries. It’s what’s in use in Australia. It’s what’s in use in the Philippines to target the Filipino National Democratic movement. This has been spread worldwide as a model for this kind of legislation. In Germany, when we talk about the persecution of Palestinians happening today, we can look back 50 years in the early 1970s, when there were mass deportations of Palestinians, there are generations of Palestinian German children whose mothers had German citizenship and whose fathers were Palestinian that didn’t grow up with their fathers because they were deported. We’re not saying that the persecution began at this time, but there is an important context. We’re now looking at the post-Oslo era – the Oslo project was this attempt to impose a liquidationist settlement on the Palestinian cause and to redirect the compass of the region away from the liberation of Palestine and to the normalization of the Zionist regime in the region. This was the Oslo Accords. The Declaration of Principles was signed in Washington DC for the creation of the so-called Palestinian Authority, allegedly leading to a limited sovereignty and statehood in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. This was a project that was supported by Palestinian capitalists, who saw this as a potential to maintain kind of a base for capital and banking in the region and to seek accommodation as part of the imperialist order. And of course, that date of 1993 is no accident. We’re talking about the point after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Socialist bloc in Eastern Europe and a time of capitalist and imperialist triumphalism, and repeated declarations of the end of history and the resolution of all struggles, in the interest of capitalism and imperialism and eternal domination of the United States. In that context, the Oslo Accords were adopted by the PLO under Yasser Arafat. They were signed officially by Mahmoud Abbas, today’s PA President, and the Zionist regime. There were a lot of illusions at the time about the Oslo Accords, and it’s important to be clear about that because while there were many Palestinian political forces that rejected the Oslo Accords, there was also kind of a great deal of popular propaganda, and there had been a great deal of trust developed in the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Oslo Accords were essentially stealing the fruits of the First Intifada from the Palestinian people and instead of achieving any kind of independence, self-determination, or sovereignty, instead put Palestinians on the path to this kind of subordinate construction of and a colonial subordinate authority that would be in connection and security coordination with the Zionist regime and with the United States above that.
We don’t need to talk in detail about what’s wrong with Oslo. There’s a great deal of scholarship and Palestinian political work about that, and it’s a whole conversation in and of itself. But it’s important to note that Palestinian political forces, some inside the PLO and others outside of it, such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at that time, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, other Palestinian factions, some of them quite small, others of them, as you know, quite large and mass movements objected to the Oslo Accords and began to speak out against them and say that this is a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and that what we’re fighting for is the liberation of Palestine.
And of course, this is also when we saw a significant escalation, particularly in the armed struggle by Hamas, by Palestiian Islamic Jihad in particular. This was also a period of crisis for the Palestinian left, for the aforementioned reasons regarding the loss of their international support and frameworks at that time. What you’re seeing is this attempt to impose this Oslo project for the final liquidation of the Palestinian cause. And you’re also seeing Palestinian resistance forces organizing themselves and fighting back, the resistance in Lebanon getting stronger and stronger and stronger. This is in the decade before the final liberation of southern Lebanon in 2000 and the United States was determined to impose this project and impose the normalization of Zionism on the region. In 1995 in the context explicitly of supporting the Oslo Accords and maintaining what was called the Middle East peace process, then President Bill Clinton issued an executive order listing several organizations in the region and declaring that if you were attempting to support any of these organizations financially, these funds would be frozen. You can’t in the United States create a criminal law by an executive order. This was the first step in the process of creating this kind of legislation and creating the list. Now it’s important to note here they did include in addition to all the Palestinian organizations and in addition to the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah, they also included Kach and Kahane Chai. And it’s important, and they included these as like kind of names as “unacceptable” Israeli organizations that were also in violation of the peace process to create this mirage of two sides. One should note that those organizations have now been removed from the US terrorist list, but also no one was ever prosecuted under them. It was quite acceptable and remains quite acceptable to be openly honest and to promote and fundraise for Kahanist organizations inside the Zionist project. No one has ever been prosecuted for it, as far as we know. No one has even been investigated for it, so this was always a fig leaf and it was never something that indicated any kind of serious US response or indication. It did indicate kind of what kind of politics the US felt were productive for the Zionist colonial project to pursue, and which ones they thought were unproductive.
So in 1996, after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, there was this big push for stronger death penalty and anti-terrorism laws. And of course, this had nothing to do with so-called foreign terrorist organizations, but that was the political context. That was used to pass a piece of legislation called the AEDPA, the Anti- terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, and this is where this list of foreign terrorist organizations designated by the Treasury Department and then the State Department was institutionalized into US criminal law which made it illegal to engage in what was labeled material support, which at the time was understood as financial support or the provision of armaments to these organizations. And once again, the justification that was provided for the creation of the terror list was that allowing these organizations to receive material support would undermine the Middle East peace process. So, it was very specifically created to protect the Oslo project from resistance organizations in the region that were seeking to achieve their liberation in Palestine and Lebanon again and to liberate their land and their people from Zionist colonialism, rather than allowing the US and its partners in Europe to determine the future of the region. That is why the terrorist list exists. It’s in the executive order. We don’t need to guess about why they were doing this. They made it very clear that the maintenance of Oslo was the reason for the creation of this list. And of course not to go too deeply into the entire history of of what was happening at the time, but what we did see in 2000 was the upsurge of what’s been called the Second Intifada or the Al Aqsa Intifada, in September 2000 in reaction to the same policies that we see today with the massive upsurge in settlers in the West Bank, the ongoing violence, the denial of any form of sovereignty. That, and of course, the escalating Palestinian armed resistance, that of these organizations that were being targeted and of course not to mention six months before or less than six months before the outbreak of the Al Aqsa intifada, we saw the final liberation of southern Lebanon by Hezbollah.
So that’s a clear indication that we don’t need to rely on this process of the US constantly giving the occupation billions of dollars in weapons each year, while promising there’ll be a Palestinian state in the future. There’s another way to achieve liberation and this is very visible. In this context the movement was developing and of course what we also saw one year later was September 11, 2001. This, of course was used to pass another whole range of repressive legislation, including, most infamously the so-called USA Patriot Act, and in the Patriot Act there was an extension of the definition of material support for terrorism to include this entire range of kind of activities, such as providing training or education or communications equipment, or “services.”
There was, then, this very detailed and vague list of what could be considered material support for terrorism. These are the frameworks. Every now and then they’ll put some far right, reactionary, or criminal organization on the list. That doesn’t change the list’s purpose, which has always been to promote and preserve imperial domination and to also separate communities in exile in the United States and in other countries that have similar laws, from being a part of their national liberation movements by rendering it illegal to do so. That’s always been these laws’ purpose. It’s also to sever the solidarity movement from the liberation movement by creating a context of threats of material support of terrorism. Instead of speaking about the resistance forces leading the movement, people and movements are pressured to speak about alternatives to the resistance, whether that’s NGOs, people that are set up as spokespeople as civil society. The purpose of this kind of legislation isn’t to just throw hundreds or thousands of people in jail. The purpose is to create political change, to create [conditions to] dissolve the resistance movement by separating it from its global supporters and of course, in the Palestinian context where there are millions upon millions of Palestinians in exile and diaspora who have been denied the right to return home. The diaspora organizing that is part and parcel of the Palestinian liberation movement, that’s been the point of these laws from the very beginning.
It’s not a side effect. This is the reason why they exist. Of course, there are several cases in the US that are particularly well known. The case of the Holy Land Foundation 5, in which a charitable organization that raised millions and millions of dollars for Palestine, one of the most effective charitable organizations and fundamentally independently supporting the steadfastness of the Palestinian people, supporting schools and hospitals and social programs that were being supported by Palestinians in exile and diaspora and by their supporters to maintain the steadfastness of the Palestinian people. And not through the United States, not through Germany, not through France, not through any of these NGOs that you see the European flag and the US flag everywhere in Palestine indicating the money’s origins. This was meant to be money that was given independently to support Palestinian steadfastness against the occupation, and that’s why the Holy Land Foundation was seen as a threat. That’s why it was attacked. Currently, there are still three people serving sentences of 20 years and up to 65 years in federal prison after being convicted of material support of Hamas, and they weren’t even able to show that the people involved gave money to Hamas. What they argued was that by supporting the social framework that sustained and supported the resistance movement, that was also material support for terrorism. And it was an important case because it kind of showed that in the United States, you can completely divorce the aspects of, for example, armed struggle from the social aspects of the resistance, and that the social aspects of the resistance are equally criminalized because the state does actually recognize the relationship between the social aspects of the resistance and the armed aspects of the resistance.
In creating that kind of fundamental popular base of support, this is also the era of the Sami al-Arian case, in which people won those cases. And Sami al-Arian got a grand jury, and instead of either prosecuting him again or giving up on the case, the US essentially came up with a whole series of other demands. So trying to coerce him to appear before a grand jury to provide testimony against other Palestinians. And when he refused to do this, he was jailed and later was deported to Turkey. So that was another of the main legal cases in the US about material support. There have been a whole lot of other material support cases. Many of these are this kind of FBI manufactured plans where no actual resistance group or organization was ever involved. You have the FBI or other police agents convincing people that they’ll be doing something to support some kind of an armed action – in many cases, these are not Palestine related – and then convicting the people who agreed or were coerced to be part of this. In many cases, the people targeted are marginalized, struggling with mental health, and this is essentially a framework of the manufacturing of these cases. But I just wanted to talk about a couple of those really high-profile Palestinian cases where there was a meaningful outcome and there was a meaningful goal of fundamentally changing the way in which Palestinians inside Palestine are able to relate to Palestinians in exile and diaspora.
This legislation has been used as a basis for the current framework of the terrorist entities list in Canada. It’s related to the to the legislation that was passed in the European Union and Post 2001 with a list of designated terrorist organizations, similar legislation in the UK and Australia and elsewhere. Basically, all of the imperialist powers and many of their subordinate states, including Arab reactionary regimes, have adopted some form of this type of anti-terror legislation with a list of organizations that varies from country to country, but fundamentally always takes its fundamental beginnings from the list that was created in order to maintain the Oslo project at the expense of the Palestinian people and to maintain the colonization of Lebanon at the expense of the Lebanese people. That’s why this legislation exists. It never existed for another reason, and we should understand that the reason why terror laws exist, is to maintain imperialist domination in the region and to provide a criminal mechanism of undermining the connection of the diaspora to their own liberation struggle of cutting off any form of meaningful international solidarity to those who are on the front lines confronting and making a fundamental political change in the way that people advocate and speak about Palestine and other liberation movements.
MA: It seems that there have been two other prongs of the terror list that have been advanced in the recent period. One of them has been to a cleave off and create a kind of safe Palestine organizing in the US and Europe and to create this separation between that and the on-the-ground National Liberation movement. The other is a prong which has advanced more recently, but has long been in the offing, which is actually an attempt to criminalize anti -Zionist activity in the US under the ages of claiming that anti- Zionist activity itself is support for Hamas.
CK: This first point that you made is kind of part and parcel of the entire project. After Oslo you had two parallel tracks that involved kind of imperialist state involvement in Palestine. One of them was, of course, this criminalization track where you have this tremendous amount of state power, surveillance resources, criminal law, not to mention, you know, propaganda deployed to criminalize the Palestinian resistance.
Then at the same time you have the push for NGOzation and this is a major factor of the post Oslo era. So during the Oslo process, what we saw is a systematic transformation of popular organizations that had been part of the popular mass resistance in the Intifada, away from being popular organizations that depended on the Palestinian people and having an Arab and international dimension, and popular support of the struggle for funding and resources into a professionalization and an NGOisation that saw the dependence instead going to essentially the European Union and its member states, the United States was footing the bill for the PA’s so-called security agencies, which were charged with directly arresting, surveilling and harassing the resistance and stopping it physically while the Europeans took on the job, largely of being the provider of funding to NGOs and the creation of more and more and more of this kind of multiple levels of NGOs which, while officially nongovernmental organizations, were connected directly to the same Western governments that were responsible for the ongoing crimes against Palestine. So this funding was often initially perceived as, well, if we can get something out of these countries, we might as well take it. We might as well take what we can get, but what we saw over the years and over the decades was that what was initially kind of provided directly or without much question or without much challenge, shortly developed into extreme levels of conditional funding and support. While USAID is perhaps the best known in this context, most of the European agencies engage in it as well. In order to receive this kind of EU funding, particularly in the present day, organizations need to assert that not only are they not affiliated with any of the banned or listed resistance organizations like Hamas, the PFLP, et cetera. Not only did they have to assert that they’re not a wing or connected to these organizations, but that none of their employees are connected to these organizations.
That none of their employees are a member of these organizations. That none of the recipients of their services are a member of these organizations. So essentially what you have is this funding being used to undermine and tear apart the structures of the resistance movement from within. One of the reasons why we’ve seen such a great deal of success, for example, on the part of Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a growing force on both in a popular on certainly on the level of the military resistance. But it’s also important to note on a popular level as well is because they rejected this path of NGOisation. I mean, they’ve gotten the reputation of rejecting the social or popular approach to struggle at all, but that’s not really true. That’s not really an accurate descriptor of the work that they do, but by rejecting this approach to NGOisation, what this also meant was that they did not experience the condition whereby their members were gradually stripped away and recreated, not as members of their organization, or as members of the resistance, but instead as NGO employees that constantly have the role of creating new NGO employees and limiting their understanding, analysis and promotion of what’s happening in Palestine to the level of human rights violations and steering clear from having any discussion of national liberation, which has been largely the case for most NGOs, including those who are doing good work, valuable work, valuable support work, valuable documentation. There’s a whole realm of politics that they’re fundamentally forbidden from entering, because if they enter them, they will lose millions and millions and millions of Euros of funding. And this isn’t a question of greed. This is a question of a trap that was set up by imperialism for this purpose. This isn’t a question whereby there are founders of NGO’s who want to be greedy and they want to get money. The issue is that you’ve set up a program that, say, funding 100 families and supporting their kind of agricultural work or supporting, you know, 15 clinics. Well, you’ve now become dependent on the European Union to fund those projects for you. And if you reject this framework that’s been imposed upon you of political conditions, of severance from the resistance, well then you don’t have access to those funds anymore. And you can’t provide the programs, so this isn’t a trap that was kind of accidentally created. It’s a trap that was deliberately created and it happened side by side with this process of criminalization. What this meant was that particularly in the West, we started hearing more and more about how we need to listen to Palestinian civil society. And in this context, Palestinian civil society was differentiated from the Palestinian resistance forces, and the Palestinian, certainly from the Palestinian armed resistance, but also from the Palestinian political resistance as well. And so it, you know, these organizations would in many cases produce excellent human rights documentation, very useful and meaningful information about the kinds of crimes that were being committed on a daily basis. But the forbidden connection was to say, and that’s why Palestinians are resisting.
That’s why we are part of this resistance movement rather than an alternative to it. So what you have is this discourse in the West and in the solidarity movement where people are constantly talking about NGO leadership as the leaders of the Palestinian people, whereas in Palestine these are just seen as people who are with NGOs and are not the leaders of the Palestinian people, not the leaders of the Palestinian resistance. And so, you have this duality that has been created by on the one hand, the process of negotiation and on the other, the process of criminalization. Because what that means is that at least until the current period, this kind of advocacy was seen as a safe alternative, a safe alternative because we constantly talk about how nonviolent we are. And this has been one of the real downfalls of what could be considered BDS. And I’m not talking about the boycott of Israel here. When I say BDS, I’m talking about this kind of official presentation whereby you are obliged to repeatedly talk about not just how the obvious fact that it is, in fact nonviolent, to boycott and divest from Occupation. But that it’s a normatively nonviolent approach. Thus, an alternative, a more ethical alternative to the Palestinian resistance, and of course, this is something these kinds of organizations, including like the Boycott National Committee, are loathe to say in Arabic because it would completely deprive them of their political and popular legitimacy. But unfortunately they have not hesitated to say in English and even to attempt to coerce organizations around the world from working with, for example, Samidoun. They state the reason because we speak about armed resistance and armed struggle. This is not a dispute over tactics or a dispute over personalities. This is a full on recognition that the purpose of this NGOisation is to be an alternative to the armed resistance that also includes in terms of even what international solidarity movements are supposed to envision as their role in supporting the liberation of Palestine, and that in some cases these kinds of NGO officials are willing to actually play that disciplinary role themselves, in which they demand that organizations, for example, like Samidoun but not only like Samidoun like The Mapping Project in Boston, for example, must be boycotted and excluded if they go beyond the acceptable bounds. And fundamentally, the conditions that are set by the United States and Europe on what is acceptable in Palestinian organizing and organizing for the liberation of Palestine and that by and large, what’s acceptable, being something that’s very different than what the solidarity movements for Palestinian liberation were saying in the 1970s and the 1980s, when you had people in Europe and the United States going to the camps in Lebanon and openly joining the Palestinian struggle, including the armed resistance. There is a strong history of solidarity for Palestine, that shouldn’t be just like, papered over by saying, wow, we have the largest solidarity movement we’ve ever had. There have been been extremely strong socialist and revolutionary and anti-colonial linkages with the Palestinian cause. I mean, certainly in the Arab region, which I wouldn’t call a solidarity movement because it’s part and parcel of the Arab liberation struggle, but also around the world and even in the imperial core, that were very effective and that would achieve things that are almost impossible to consider today because of the ways in which our horizons have been limited. And it’s worth knowing and going back to that history. You know, when we were talking about Germany earlier and I love to bring back kind of these old posters and events from the German solidarity movement with Palestine, both from the German Democratic Republic but also even from Western Germany, that were unequivocally part of the radical left that used the logos of Palestinian resistance organizations, for example, the PFLP images of Palestinian fighters with guns and said this is what we’re in support of, with no equivocation.
And so there are tremendous gains that have been made in the solidarity movement today, particularly because of the rise and the strength and power of the resistance, the decline of the United States and the rise of reaching an era where we can talk meaningfully about a multipolar or a pluri- polar world. But at the same time, we should be able to go back to this history and not allow our horizons to be to be constrained by these two parallel mechanisms of criminalization and the creation of a safe alternative or NGOisation in order to constrain the Palestinian struggle to a very narrow perspective that’s meant to seek accommodation and imperialism rather than an overthrow of the system in alignment with regional forces that are also fighting that system, such as the Lebanese resistance, the Yemeni resistance. But finally what we are seeing, especially in the post October 7th era , but also before then in the pushing of the IHRA definition which when we see that kind of global map of who’s adopted the IHRA definition, we’re fundamentally looking at the imperialist powers and states that they have coerced – it’s the opposite map of the countries that have recognized Palestine and it’s a map that is the very same countries that are aligned up to support the Ukraine war project on behalf of Ukraine as a proxy state for the US and NATO.
The IHRA definition is not some neutral or just kind of general Zionist approach that’s meaning to confront anti- Semitism. It’s very similar to what we see taking place in Germany. It’s another way to rehabilitate fascism and Nazism and the process of anti-communism and NATO rebuilding, while saying that Palestinian Arab liberation movements are the source of anti- Jewish hatred. It’s almost obscene to look at but it is something that is central to the promotion of this project, in the past several years, but it’s been escalated dramatically in the post October 7th context. What we’re seeing is that this process of providing a safe alternative and the NGOisation process did not achieve all its goals.
There’s still a Palestinian resistance movement, stronger than ever before. Even this process of “the carrot and stick” hasn’t broken the popular cradle of the resistance. In fact, it’s only developed further. Now there’s less and less of an incentive for these powers to continue to promote this kind of so-called safe alternative and are instead just promoting a full criminalization of the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian struggle, including any kind of anti-Zionist activities. We just saw in front of the French Senate how a bill was introduced to criminally prosecute people who insult Israel, but right now, even with that, I mean that legislation might be unlikely to pass. But there have been several people already sentenced to six months in prison for graffiti, or said, Viva Hamas or long live the Palestinian Resistance. Members of political parties have been called in for interrogation for making social media posts that said victory to the Intifada and congratulated the Palestinian resistance on a successful action on October 7th. So, while we see an even more dangerous phenomenon happening, criminalization is already happening. And this isn’t just restricted even to Palestinian, Arab and communities in France. Communities labeled as Muslim have faced the worst brunt of repression. Yet, this is being done against leftist activists, against communists, against revolutionaries who view support for the Palestinian resistance as part and parcel of their reason for existence and reason for
organizing, particularly in the imperial core. There’s this spectrum of repression that we in Samidoun in our organizing need to confront. And we can say that on one end we have the imprisonment policy, the mass imprisonment of Palestinians inside Palestine, occupied Palestinian, ’48 and the West Bank. For that then we can include PA political imprisonment of Palestinian resistance supporters in the reactionary Arab states, imprisonment of people like George Abdullah in France. Or the Holy Land Five in the United States. This is the one clear end of this repression. Of course, we can even go beyond that to the mass murder and genocide that’s taking place in Gaza today. But then there’s a whole series of forms of repression that less than this, but still clearly state directed attempts to silence the movement: the banning of Samidoun in Germany, the attempt to dissolve the collective Palestine Vaincra in France. You have so far toothless, or non-legally binding is the term they also use for the IHRA resolutions that were passed, for example in the Senate and in the House by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to attempt to kind of semi-criminalize National Students for Justice in Palestine and SJP chapters, but without being able to provide any meaningful criminal penalties and saying that, for example, showing a picture of a person on a glider entering Palestine like a little cartoon picture, this is material support for terrorism now . Under the current legislation, that doesn’t work because of the purpose of the legislation, was to prevent people from communicating and corresponding with each other.
So one of the fundamental legal principles is there must be some kind of direct coordination. You cannot have material support for terrorism simply comprising, saying, “I like math. I like Islamic Jihad. I like the PFLP. I think they’re good guys. I think they’re revolutionary movement.” That’s not material support for terrorism under the law in the US, nor is drawing a picture of a resistance fighter and putting it on a poster and sharing it around the world. You’re not actually coordinating with the organizations and the legislation was constructed to target the behavior and the practice that they saw as most threatening, which was direct coordination with these organizations to build one movement. That’s what they criminalized. Now they’re saying wait, this is insufficient because even though we criminalized that, we haven’t succeeded in criminalizing this kind of popular public support and sentiment.
The fact that people looked at what happened in October 7th, aside from all of the lies, all of the propaganda, all of the atrocity stories and what they saw was a people inside living under occupation, living under colonization and saying, “We have the potential to take back our land. We have the potential to win.” That’s a responsive sentiment, that can be a political response, but it’s also responsive sentiment. What we’re seeing right now on the part of these states, the escalation in Germany and France, in the United States and elsewhere is an attempt to respond to that popular sentiment of solidarity with intense criminalization and to say, “Well, you might feel sympathy with the Palestinian resistance. But what if we can send you to jail for that?” And so that’s why all of these countries which do not hesitate to impose sanctions on states from Venezuela to Cuba to Iran under the premise that they are preventing people from engaging in public demonstrations, have not hesitated to clamp down on demonstrations with physical violence, criminalization, arrests, passing of new legislation to criminalize political activity. Literally every single one of these things has been used and in many cases the story is completely false in relation to the target of imperial power. But all these things are routinely used as justification to impose sanctions upon and engage in an economic and physical war against countries around the world that resist US imperialism.
While the US, France, Germany, Britain present themselves as beacons of freedom, democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and what we see in this post, October 7 era —in this era of the developing multipolar world— is that these countries are giving up the pretense of the niceties of bourgeois democracy. When it comes to the need to save the empire and where we’re seeing that happening on the front lines right now is about Palestine. But we will see it in a lot of other places as well if this continues. The Macron government in France, has moved from trying to dissolve Palestine related organizations, to Antifa, and now it’s against an environmental group, which, by the way, has now spoken up about Gaza and that environmental group might not have spoken up about Gaza or about Palestine before, but now they have, because the criminalization that they’re facing leads them to actually recognize and understand more deeply France, not just as a creator of climate change, but as an imperial power that is a creator of climate change directly at the expense of people in the global South. And only by building that kind of solidarity is it possible to confront criminalization and repression inside France as well as to fight climate change in a meaningful way. What we’re witnessing is an era in which these states are willing to give up their pretense of human rights, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech to suppress what they view as an existential threat to the empire. And yet, you know, we’re having this interview today on a day when literally millions of people around the world are out marching for Palestine and showing that kind of criminalization which has been fundamentally insufficient to suppress the Palestinian resistance movement, has likewise been insufficient to suppress the immense amount of popular support that exists out there for the liberation of Palestine and the very real and horrific recognition of just how horrific the crimes of imperialism have been and continue to be currently in Gaza, but also everywhere around the world. And that’s a future that they don’t want to complete, but it’s a future that we have to do everything that we can, including confronting and fighting back against these legal mechanisms that are intended to prevent people from ever being part of an anti- imperialist movement. So we absolutely have a responsibility to fight back against the terror list.
We’ve got to fight to get resistance organizations off the list, but we’ve got to fight to bring down these structures altogether because the only reason they exist is to extend imperial power. They don’t exist for any other reason. They exist to destroy our movements. They exist to demobilize us, they exist to separate us from one another, and we have to resist that separation, that splitting, that attempt to create an acceptable alternative of the future within imperialism. Because what we see in Gaza today is the future within imperialism, there is no other future there, and the only way we can get a different one is by fighting back and resisting on all fronts.
MA: I was going to ask you why it’s incumbent upon us to resist the terror list and what can be done. But I think you made that point extremely clearly.I have one small point, only partially related to that which I think you are in a position to educate us about: can you talk a little bit about the contemporary orientation of the more Marxist inflected groups on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank and elsewhere and their relationship with the more Muslim, ideologically identified groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas, because this is something that I think is very not adequately understood and is helpful for people to understand.
CK: Well, let’s just be clear that in terms of like the armed resistance that’s happening in Palestine, the groups that are leading this, the groups that have the strength, that have the mobilization, are Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as some organizations that are most closely associated with them, like such as the Popular Resistance Committees and some other organizations and Gaza on a political and an ideological level as well as on a military level. But it’s important to understand that we’re talking about very different levels of capacity between these different organizations. The Palestinian left is 100% lined up with the resistance. The PFLP, even the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which back in 1999 was removed from the US terror list because they agreed to accommodate with the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo Process and to leave the alliance of factions confronting at the Oslo Accords, today in 2023, the DFLP and its national resistance brigades are part and parcel of this fight that’s going on. Every Palestinian left organization with any kind of meaningful presence is 100% on board with the development of the resistance, with the actions of October 7th, with the leading role of the Islamic resistance movement and with participating in what’s been called the joint operations room of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and elsewhere, there isn’t a debate taking place about this and there isn’t an internal struggle about this and the Palestinian movement left organizations are 100 percent part of this resistance and supporting it. But the forces are leading it, the forces that have the highest level of popular mobilization, the highest level of popular support and the level of military advancement and development are the Islamic resistance forces. Finally, I want to note, Islamic Jihad is a very interesting example and it’s worthy of more conversation and discussion because they’ve actually always had an approach that specifically focuses on the oppressed, the role of workers in the movement, that does class analysis. It’s not an approach that rejects a class analysis. There’s a very strong class analysis that Palestinian Islamic Jihad has, and that’s reflected in the kind of work that they do. But that said, the left is in complete and clear alliance with Islamic forces and is does not view this as a contradiction. It views this as absolutely necessary for the liberation of Palestine, and absolutely necessary for the next stage. It’s difficult to imagine a future after this in which forces will continue to kind of prop up a bankrupt so called PLO that is only reflected in the Palestinian Authority and it’s continued security coordination with the occupation inside the West Bank and is actually suppressing the movement to stand with and to engage and struggle directly with Palestinians in Gaza. It’s very difficult to understand a future in which that that emerges as a viable organization any longer. It’s very clear that there is a Palestinian national unity and that Palestinian national unity revolves around the resistance.
October 7 marked a reassertion of a Palestinian revolution. And not only a Palestinian resistance and all of the forces that are part of the resistance, that are part of the revolution, that want a liberated Palestine are part and parcel of that, and that includes the Left. That includes the Islamic forces, that includes nationalist forces. On the ground in Gaza right now there is a united front. All those forces routinely speak to it, including the Islamic forces. There’s no contradiction there. The contradiction is between imperialism and Zionism, and the Islamic forces are engaged and speak quite clearly. They’re engaged in a national liberation struggle and if we want to support the Palestinian left, we can and should do that part and parcel supporting the Palestinian Left is supporting the alliances that they have and supporting the actual resistance that’s on the ground, but also to not just mythologize Palestinian left organizations, but to look at what actually exists in reality in Palestine and build the movement that is necessary to be the international popular cradle of the resistance, because it is in our hands to do that. It is in our hands to fight back against repression and it is in our hands to reject repression and take on the tasks that are necessary, because this movement needs a Palestinian popular cradle. It needs an Arab popular cradle. In many ways, it has those things already. But what we can do is make an international popular cradle and we can see that in these numbers that are coming out to the demonstrations despite all the propaganda and despite the lies, there is a fertile ground for that. And that is a responsibility to act on and build for.