Kolektiva Mod Team on Nostr: 2) October 7th and the “Axis of Resistance” Since the attacks of October 7th, ...

2) October 7th and the “Axis of Resistance”

Since the attacks of October 7th, 2023, and particularly since the Israeli state responded with a genocidal slaughter in Gaza, there’s been an increase in popular support for Hamas and for the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ led by Iran, and supported by the foreign operations branch of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Al-Quds Force. Recent Israeli atrocities in Lebanon have seen a similar spike in support for Hezbollah. We consider this to be an understandable and predictable result of Israel’s ongoing military atrocities, given that these armed factions are often presented as the only forces willing and able to engage in effective armed resistance to the Israeli state's murderous actions in the region. The horrifying and existential realities of war exert a tremendous pressure on people to cast aside political differences and 'pick a side'. And clearly, many people have chosen to take the side of those seen to be fighting on behalf of Palestine, against Israel and their imperialist backers in the west.

Within this context, and under the pretext of building increased global anti-imperialist and anti-colonial solidarity, a current within the anarchist movement has for months been re-publishing reports and communiques from armed Palestinian groups, along with news articles that glorify the 'Axis of Resistance' and openly celebrate Operation Al Aqsa Flood, the attack carried out by Palestinian militants on October 7th 2023.

Over the past year, these posts have generated hundreds of reports. We’ve deleted some of the more egregious examples, but we left most of them alone. This has been a source of continual debate and disagreement within the moderation team, and with several of our users. Members of the Kolektiva mod team were initially sympathetic to arguments made about the importance of sharing information that is otherwise heavily censored by western media sources (such as reports about armed attacks on Israeli soldiers in Gaza) even when that information comes from heavily biased media sources or from groups that we find politically abhorrent. We also recognize that when we use our position to delete posts on a certain topic, or from certain sources, we are effectively censoring discourse and removing the ability of people to discuss and debate these ideas on this platform. Sometimes, this censorship is warranted (we aren't interested in promoting debates among the finer points of fascism, for example), but in this case we're talking about setting the parameters for discussion around one of the most brutal military campaigns in modern history and a crucial focal point for global anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistance. So we've generally opted to take a fairly light touch, and to have faith that our majority-anarchist userbase would mitigate the drift towards glorifying militarism, martyrdom & war.

However, over time we have grown increasingly uncomfortable as we’ve watched several of our users, including comrades whose work we have respected for years, along with their affiliated counter-info sites, gradually transform into uncritical cheerleaders for authoritarian Islamist paramilitary actors like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and totalitarian states like Syria and Iran - whose own security forces and assorted death squads have bombed, gassed, shot, detained, tortured and brutally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries and political dissidents across the region in the years since the Arab Spring.

These are reactionary and repressive institutions. This fact may be inconvenient for those who now see them as agents of liberation and Palestinian self-determination, but it is not lost on the millions of people whose calls for freedom were silenced by barrel bombs in Aleppo, or whose friends and comrades were shot by IRGC proxies in Baghdad or Basra, or executed for rising up against the murder of Jina Amini.

In the lead up to October 7th, there were texts circulating online calling for western anarchists to learn from the ‘revolutionary tactics’ and organizational structures of the Al-Qassam Brigades, and to use these lessons to target individual Zionists with ‘direct action’. These posts are often marked with an inverted red triangle, which has come to serve as a pro-Hamas dog whistle.

Not only are these posts deeply delusional and dripping with performative machismo, but they are also reckless. They blur the line between combatant and non-combatants and appropriate anarchist aesthetics and discourse to promote a 'unity of fields' strategy that imagines themselves as a fifth column of the Iranian military. As anarchists, we have serious concerns with this political trajectory and where it is heading - to put it mildly - and we’re no longer willing to platform these sorts of 'political interventions' on our instance.

Moving forward, we will be deleting these posts on sight and requesting that Kolektiva.social accounts associated with counter-info sites avoid re-publishing these sorts of posts on Kolektiva, or else find themselves a new home instance.

For more anarchist critiques of militarism in this current context please see:

1) Hostages to the Gun: On Militancy and Militarism
https://north-shore.info/2024/10/04/hostages-of-the-gun-on-militancy-and-militarism/

2) Abolition Media's Authoritarian Entryism
https://cola.blackblogs.org/2024/03/22/abolition-medias-authoritarian-entryism/

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