On October 7, 2023, Palestinian resistance groups launched an unprecedented attack on their occupiers and an unprecedented escape from the open-air concentration camp of Gaza. Al-Aqsa Flood was the first major military campaign originating from within Palestine, and one of the greatest asymmetric warfare victories of our time.
Following a wave of light rocket attacks on over 40 locations in Israel, militants simultaneously breached the barriers that surround Gaza, most iconically with paragliders and bulldozers. They attacked multiple Israeli military bases and settlements and, most infamously, a music festival. The Israeli army collapsed within hours, leaving Gaza’s borders open for regular Palestinians to escape and carry out spontaneous attacks on their occupiers.
Overall, 1200 Israeli settlers were killed (including 340 active military), and 250 were taken hostage to use for prisoner exchange (including 40 soldiers). These numbers are contested, because Israel applied the Hannibal Directive, killing hundreds of settlers to prevent them from being taken hostage. Forty-eight Israeli gunship helicopters spent all their ammunition that day.
Al-Aqsa Flood was a brilliant, audacious, and perfectly legitimate military operation by severely under-resourced resistance forces, operating under total siege for 16 years, and under partial siege for much longer.
Al-Aqsa Flood was a brilliant, audacious, and perfectly legitimate military operation by severely under-resourced resistance forces, operating under total siege for 16 years, and under partial siege for much longer. The operation was unexpectedly successful, shattering the myth of Israel as an invincible military and intelligence state. Its first failure was underrating the Palestinian resistance and ignoring the numerous warnings it received about the planned attack.
What has taken place since October 7
The Zionist entity’s response to October 7 has been shocking. Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza and slaughtered more than 68,000 Palestinians via near-constant bombardment and a near-total blockade. It has targeted children, healthcare workers, journalists, UN aid workers, hospitals, ambulances, schools, and religious buildings. And it has weaponized the withholding of water, food, electricity, fuel, and other essential supplies.
The international Palestine solidarity movement’s response to October 7 and the ensuing genocide has also been shocking — but in a good way. Al-Aqsa Flood has galvanized unprecedented levels of support for the Palestinian struggle and brought it to the global forefront. Many millions all over the world have joined the movement and have participated in mass demonstrations, boycotts, civil disobedience, and student encampments for Palestine.
As revolutionary socialists, we give unconditional support to national liberation struggles, even if we are critical of the actors involved.
Though the movement has been unable to halt the genocide, it has made significant ideological advances. It has exposed the barbarism of the Zionist project, and thanks to the efforts of Jewish activists, decoupled Judaism from Zionism and anti-Zionism from anti-semitism. The movement has gone beyond condemning the particular policies of the apartheid state to condemning its very existence.
Al-Aqsa Flood has also caused a massive rupture of the status quo in apartheid Israel. Last year, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote that it could be “likened to an earthquake that strikes an old building,” and argued it kicked off a historical process “that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism.” Palestinian resistance — and Zionist reaction — has caused a deep economic crisis, capital flight, international isolation, the departure of hundreds of thousands of settlers, and the further fracturing of this deeply deranged society.
In every nation but Israel, public opinion has swung dramatically in favor of Palestine. Israel has been condemned by the vast majority of the planet, plus many state officials, the UN, and international courts. Even Bernie Sanders finally called it a genocide just last month (but still says Hamas started it).
A senior Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad, said last month: “You know what is the benefit of October 7th now? …If you look to the (United Nations) General Assembly yesterday, when about 194 people opened their eyes and looked to the atrocity, to brutality of Israel and all of them, they condemned Israel. We waited for this moment for 77 years. I think this is a golden moment for the world to change the history.”
Unconditional but critical support
There has been debate within the Palestine solidarity movement about whether to support Al-Aqsa Flood. Swiss-Syrian socialist Joseph Daher picks a side in his great book, Palestine & Marxism. He writes:
Like any other population under colonial occupation and apartheid, the Palestinians have the right to resist, including by military means […] The violence used by the oppressor to maintain its structures of domination and subjugation should never be compared to or placed on the same level as the violence of the oppressed who try to restore their own dignity and who seek to have their existence recognized.
As revolutionary socialists, we give unconditional support to national liberation struggles, even if we are critical of the actors involved. As Firebrand wrote a few months after October 7, Hamas is a conservative bourgeois-nationalist organization,
with leadership drawn from the Palestinian petty bourgeoisie, and support drawn from the regional bourgeoisie in right-wing Islamic monarchies. Its vision of a free Palestine has more to do with the growth of Palestinian capitalism and their hopes of becoming players amongst the other Arab ruling classes of the region than it does with the interests of the Palestinian working class and poor, who are often relegated to a passive supporting role in Hamas’s strategies.
So, we do not support Hamas politically, but we applaud Al-Aqsa Flood, and agree with the majority of US youth that it was justified. As US Marxist Hal Draper explained in 1969:
A distinctive feature of the Marxist approach is the distinction between military support of a given armed struggle and political support to a given political organization including a government) which may be officially “in charge” of that armed struggle.
Recognizing that support for armed resistance does not necessarily mean support for the political programs of resistance organizations is vital to the success of the movement. If people think they have to support Hamas’s reactionary political program in order to support armed resistance, they will be less likely to support armed resistance. If they don’t support armed resistance, their support for Palestinian liberation will be limited.
So, we do not support Hamas politically, but we applaud Al-Aqsa Flood, and agree with the majority of US youth that it was justified.
Let’s compare Al-Aqsa Flood to the 1968 Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Vietnamese resistance was led by the National Liberation Front (NLF), which makes for a good point of comparison with Hamas, since its politics were reactionary and authoritarian. The NLF subordinated and betrayed the workers’ movement and the left in Vietnam — including by massacring hundreds of Vietnamese Trotskyists.
Yet with the Tet Offensive, “the NLF served notice that the war was unwinnable for the Americans.” To quote Firebrand’s January 2024 statement again:
Like Al Aqsa Flood, that offensive was a surprise attack that bloodied the nose of an imperialist invader caught completely off guard. And it too was a desperate gambit that resulted in heavy casualties and a loss of military advantage, while conversely fulfilling the goal of a political victory. It showed the world that the US was not invulnerable, and that the war would henceforward be a bloody and protracted one. Because of this, it galvanized the antiwar movement worldwide, putting immense pressure on the US government and military. Today, the Tet Offensive is seen as a turning point in the war that ultimately led to the US’s defeat — and is still lauded by socialists for that reason. […]
Al-Aqsa Flood represents a historic shift in the dynamic of Zionist occupation — an unprecedented offensive against a viciously genocidal occupying force, humiliated on the international stage for the first time ever. The images of bulldozers knocking down apartheid fences, of fighters on paragliders and motorcycles winning a victory against one of history’s most fearsome military powers, are indelible and inspiring. In that sense, October 7 was heroic. Those who have compared Al Aqsa Flood to Nat Turner’s Rebellion or the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising are correct.
Settlers, not civilians
We should understand the killings of Israeli Jewish “civilians” on October 7 in the same way we understand the killing of settlers during Nat Turner’s Rebellion or the wars of Native resistance in North America. The killing of non-combatants, including women and children, may give us pause, but to condemn these risings would mean to side with the slavemasters, the settlers, and centuries of ethnic cleansing and chattel slavery.
The responsibility for the violence of October 7 must be placed on the Zionist entity. It is not our role to mourn settlers, but instead to build support for resistance to Zionism — a scourge on the planet, and on Jews in particular.
“That the violence of the oppressed reflects the actions of the oppressor should be our simple maxim,” as our Tempest comrade brian bean wrote. The responsibility for the violence of October 7 must be placed on the Zionist entity. It is not our role to mourn settlers, but instead to build support for resistance to Zionism — a scourge on the planet, and on Jews in particular.
Victory or defeat?
Because of the genocide that followed, Al-Aqsa Flood seems to have been an obvious setback, mistake, or defeat. But the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been ongoing since before 1948 — the Zionist entity only intensified it after October 7.
Consider how desperate the political situation had gotten for Palestinians. Israel would periodically “mow the grass” of Gaza or “put it on a diet” — Israeli euphemisms for slaughter and starvation. The Zionist state and society were lurching ever rightward. Settler violence and land-theft in the West Bank was not only unchecked but encouraged by the state. Palestine was isolated in the region as Arab governments normalized relations with their occupier.
October 7 was a desperate attempt to break this intolerable stasis. Indeed, it did result in an international solidarity movement like we’ve never seen, tremendous advances in consciousness, and a geopolitical shake-up that is still playing out. And it may have spelled the beginning of the end of the Zionist project itself.
As Marxists, we can get so lost in our analysis that the Zionist entity can only be defeated by mass working-class action, particularly on the part of the Arab working classes of the region, that we fail to recognize the role that armed resistance is playing in the process.
As brian bean wrote on October 8, “It seems tragically unlikely that the armed resistance in its current state will be able to militarily defeat the enormous Zionist military apparatus. Despite this, the attempt to make a crack in the edifice deserves a cheer as a blow against the oppressor and a gambit to alter the conditions.”
As Marxists, we can get so lost in our analysis that the Zionist entity can only be defeated by mass working-class action, particularly on the part of the Arab working classes of the region, that we fail to recognize the role that armed resistance is playing in the process.
So, does October 7 represent a defeat or victory? I want to suggest it represents both. Rosa Luxemburg explained this contradiction in her final writing.
Because of the contradiction in the early stages of the revolutionary process between the task being sharply posed and the absence of any preconditions to resolve it, individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of “war” – and this is another peculiar law of history – in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of “defeats.”
Luxemburg went on to explain optimistically that “unavoidable defeats pile up guarantee upon guarantee of the future final victory.” She was assassinated by the German Social Democratic Party the next day.
As Palestine supporter Cedar Salvo recently tweeted:
Al-Aqsa Flood was a historical rupture that exposed the foundations of our world. It was a flash of lightning that illuminated everything: international law, academia, civil society, & media. It was the great unmasking of our time, and now no one can plead ignorance ever again.
It is our task to further that unmasking, build solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle, fight alongside and recruit from among the radicalizing masses, and attempt to put the weapons of history and theory into action. The fight for Palestine is all-important in its own right, but it is also an integral part of the fight against capitalism, so socialists must be loud and unequivocal in our fight for Palestinian liberation, our solidarity with the Palestine movement, and our support for Palestinian resistance. Long live the intifada.
Illustration by Amjed Al-Siyabi
