The idea that the Palestinian people have only been able to persist because of their religion is ridiculous to me. They are resisting because colonialism, apartheid and genocide are very bad things to which nobody would want to be subjected, not because of Islam. If Palestinians were atheists, is he suggesting that they wouldn’t have the strength or the will to resist? Would their lack of a belief in the supernatural turn them into doormats for Isn’treal?
I like Hakim’s content, but his position on religion is quite frustrating. He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second. Also, Joram van Klaveren is still a right-winger.
In pretty much every post here and on hexbear that’s defending Hakim’s post I see at least one of a few assumptions taken as true which aren’t.
Firstly, no one here is criticizing the Palestinian resistance and the forms it takes. We’re criticizing Hakim’s post. Hakim has positioned himself as a Marxist educator and taken on the role of spreading ML theory. With this come some responsibilities, namely to share actual Marxist analysis. When he departs from this, he’ll get rightly criticized for it.
He can be religious and do what he wants. No one is criticizing the fact that he’s religious. We’re criticizing the fact that he brands himself a Marxist educator with Lenin as his picture and then shares idealist analysis like in this post.
Secondly, that his analysis is not idealist, when it really is. This has nothing to do with Islam specifically, it would be true of any religion, but stating that a religion is what’s driving resistance is simply idealist. As Marxists we know that it’s the material conditions that are the primary drivers of both the zionist settler-colonialism and Palestinian resistance. We, of course, don’t neglect the superstructural aspects, with ideology and religion among them, but we don’t make them the primary drivers of resistance. We begin with the material.
There have been similar resistance movements throughout history, some religious and some not which have persisted just like the Palestinian movement. As Marxists we understand why that is, and that, while in each particular case the particular ideology had an impact, ideology as such is not the driving force behind revolution.
As Amílcar Cabral said
What we (Marxists-Leninists) should be spreading are works through which you can learn about settler-colonialism and resistance to it in general, and works about the specific conditions of Palestine. No one’s even saying we should totally ignore religion, but it cannot form the basis of our analysis, and we cannot center it above the material.
An example of a better (in my opinion) post about Palestinian resistance right now is this thread by Roderic Day.
Also, as Marxists, critique is what we do. No one is beyond critique, and especially not our fellow comrades. Such critique and discussion is how we arrive at correct theory (and practice) and consolidate around it.