The Brooklyn Rail

In the first part of this interview, Minassian spoke about the integration of Israel/Palestine into global capitalism and the social composition of Palestine. Part two deals with the implications of this social composition for the proletarian and national liberation struggles.

Organisation communiste libertaire (OCL): Couldn’t the national liberation struggle, interclassist as it may be, help ease the grip of class domination on Palestinian proletarians? Might not the Israeli colonization possibly shield the Palestinian bourgeoisie from any intensification of class contradictions?

Emilio Minassian: How is the national liberation struggle doing in Palestine today? Does it even exist? The national liberation struggle involves a certain perspective (a national state freed from the colonizer), and we could say that it stays correct as long as colonialism persists in Palestine. But what about the mobilization process? Historically, this process always unfolded around political formations, impacting the class structure.

In Palestine, national liberation was embodied in the various parties composing the PLO, agents of what we used to call the “Palestinian revolution” after the ’67 War: it’s around those parties (Fatah, PFLP and all the splits) that a social movement regrouped, turning all the traditional hierarchies—inherited from the feudal world—upside down. The “Palestinian revolution” saw the emergence of a managing class out of the intellectual petite bourgeoisie in exile, which, thanks to the circulation of political rents, was able to integrate proletarians from the refugee camps of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria (and sometimes even non-Palestinian proletarians from those countries) into its organizations for the struggle. The traditional bourgeoisie was not destroyed but challenged: they had to negotiate with those organizations in order to protect themselves from the armed proletarians wearing the colors of the national flag. This is the typical engine of national liberation movements: a political leadership, aiming at forming a state apparatus, absorbs a social movement with a proletarian or peasant base or, more often—as in Palestine—a base in the rural masses being proletarianized under the weight of colonial relations. During the eighties this process reached Gaza and the West Bank, but without the military dimension: the first Intifada started as a revolt of the proletarians of the occupied territories (mostly from the refugee camps), exploited by Israeli capital; this revolt was “recuperated” only later, by the PLO, to turn it into a national political movement.

What happened next? According to the “classical” model, once the political leadership takes over the state, the interests of the social movement and the political formation start to diverge, and the proles are sent back to work by the newly formed nation state, supposedly for the benefits of the masses. In the specific case of Palestine, this delinking took place before independence was achieved: after the period between the Oslo accords and the second Intifada (1993–2004), the national cadres renounced the fight for independence, content to reap the rents and markets granted by Israel. Since then, the oppression of proletarians still takes the form of Israeli occupation and colonization, but without any perspective of struggle offered by the political organizations born out of the national liberation struggle, because its leaders had been integrated into this configuration as subcontractors. This is the well-known “double occupation,” widely prevalent in discussions in the West Bank.

OCL: And Hamas took up the baton?

Minassian: In certain respects, it is true that Hamas follows the trajectory of the PLO. The social composition of its cadres is similar: educated middle class people without proper capital, coming out of the universities, trying to operate as some sort of junction between a proletarian base and the interests of the commercial bourgeoisie. Unlike the PLO, however, Hamas did not rely on any social movement. It constituted a kind of pious counter-society, hierarchical and in abeyance to the social order. Hamas integrated proletarians through recruitment, without seeking to use the autonomous activity of the proletariat as an instrument in their negotiations with the bourgeoisie.

I think we should distinguish, at least methodologically, between “struggle,” based on a certain autonomy of agency, material interests, and social contradictions, and “resistance” as practiced by hierarchical military organizations such as the Al-Qassam brigades in Gaza. Hamas can legitimately proclaim itself to be part of the resistance (like Hezbollah or other military-political groups in the region), but in a militarized, hierarchical, centralized mode, separating the population from its “foot soldiers,” and ready to abandon its social base and crack down on their struggles.

In the mid-2000s, some fractions inside Hamas pushed for integration into the autonomy agreement and participation in elections, with the intention to become, following the model of Fatah, Israel’s subcontractor for the management of proletarians in the occupied territories. This led to their accession to power in Gaza. Since Hamas took power through military means and without negotiation with the Occupation, it could uphold its image of intransigence, but objectively it nevertheless became a local subcontractor for the management of surplus proletarians.

Over the sixteen years that Hamas has administered Gaza they managed relations with Israel (from negotiating to firing missiles), the suppression of struggles, and offered the local capitalist class an opportunity to get rich under its umbrella. Until, suddenly, Hamas abandoned its role on October 7, to reinvest in its military-political and international dimension, à la Hezbollah, I guess. In doing so, Hamas sacrificed the entrepreneur class it used to protect. We can hypothesize that this reorientation didn’t happen without internal conflicts, revealing an old contradiction between its military-political branch, with a strong proletarian clientele, and its branch integrated with the Palestinian business class.

OCL: British domination, and then Zionist colonization, the high proportion of refugees, the daily colonial violence, etc., did materially produce the identification of Palestinians as a “people” and their resistance too expressed itself in the guise of the “people.” Does this construction merely reflect the ideology of Palestinian elites?

Minassian: This identification exists, of course, but we have to ask ourselves what’s happening behind its back. I don’t want to say that “the people doesn’t exist, they are just a mystification the ruling class uses to camouflage its domination;” or, even worse, to claim that “proletarians would become conscious of their class interests, if the masks would fall.”

The idea of a Palestinian people is not exclusive to the Palestinian elites—it can even be used against them. The question is: what struggles are at play inside the category of “people,” openly or discreetly, between the various social segments using it? It’s not because one identifies with a people that one doesn’t fight from his social position.

Here we can go back to what I was saying about national liberation and interclassism. From the sixties to the nineties, the PLO needed the proletarian struggles to have a place at the table to negotiate with Israel, while the proletarians were using their “national” leadership as a way to legitimate their struggles against the elites. Inside the occupied territories, the first Intifada constituted the climax of this double logic of capture of the social movement by the political leadership, on the one hand, and of use of national struggle by the social movement, on the other. Proletarians and the national leadership struggled together, even if not without conflicts, until the period 2002–2005, when they stopped doing so.

After the debacle of the second Intifada (during which we could observe the same interclassist logic, connecting the sometimes armed proletarian rioters to the political leaders), the national leaderships started applying a logic (in the West Bank but also in Gaza) of repression against struggles, even ones mobilizing the grammar of national liberation.

Even if that seems counter-intuitive, the national cadres have been the first opponent of the proletarian struggles in the occupied territories since the failure of the second Intifada. Because it is the latter whom they confront, the cadres play the role of intermediaries between Israel and the local population. Israel freed itself from the burden of reproducing the population, handing this role over to the Palestinian leadership. Israel intervenes in the West Bank metropolises according to a logic of “raids”—and in Gaza, with pure and simple massacres.

OCL: What about the struggles in the last twenty years, outside/against the political parties?

Minassian: To talk about what I know better (I’ve only been in Gaza once, in 2002), in 2015–2016 there was, in the north of the West Bank, a latent insurrection in the refugee camps against the Palestinian Authority (PA). We talked then of an “internal” Intifada, with the Balata camp (on the outskirts of Nablus) as its epicenter. This social movement was able to keep the Palestinian police at bay, opening spaces for the youth to rebuild armed groups, and was also able to impose themselves against the notables linked to the PA, in Nablus and Jenin. The clashes of spring 2021 (riots in Jerusalem, in the Palestinian cities of “1948” Israel, a military-political offensive by Hamas, the cancellation of elections by the PA) escalated the situation: the PA found itself weakened and somewhat cooled its ambitions for authoritarian rule.

What I’ve found interesting about the cycle of riots of 2015–2016 is that a lot of people shared the idea (only superficially contradictory) that the Palestinian administration simultaneously prevented any physical clash with the occupation and denied access to work in the Israeli economy. There was a sort of nostalgia for a time when “We worked for the Israelis during the day and threw Molotovs at them at night.” That same year, a big strike broke out among the teachers hired by the PA, and the Authority managed to neutralize it, using intimidation, crackdowns, and blackmail, following the lead of “Arab” regimes of the region; nonetheless, it gave rise to a sequence of social protests shaking the foundations of its political control.

OCL: Why is our political milieu so quiet about those struggles?

Minassian: If you listen to what people say in the West Bank, the PA and the Palestinian bourgeoisie are considered a source of oppression everywhere. But, of course, we should take into account the context of these interactions: we—the white activists on a trip to the occupied territories, are assigned a task: to bear witness against the Israeli propaganda machine. We are assigned this task by the middle classes, who in one way or another are involved in gaining access to capital (material or symbolic) from the West. In fact, no one involved in this kind of encounter expects any expressions of solidarity with the class struggle against Palestinian exploiters. So, the people caught in these “internal” (on a national level) relationships of exploitation talk about them, all the time even, but those voices are not granted a political dimension—except in moments of extreme tension, like 2015–2016 in the West Bank.

What Palestinian proletarians experience as proletarians barely reaches our ears, and that's no surprise: this lived experience is not part of the “national“ that the political cadres pass on to their supporters overseas.

OCL: What perspectives can proletarians of the region, Israeli and Palestinian, expect to have in common?

Minassian: Israel embodies a vision of a nightmarish future: one in which a state belonging to the central bloc of capitalist countries reproduces the global zoning of the labor force on its territory, the same zoning that can be observed at the level of the global division of labor. This social zoning takes place on the scale of a metropolitan area: the distance between Gaza and Tel-Aviv is barely bigger than that between Paris and Mantes-la-Jolie[a nearby banlieue]. And this zoning is grounded on ethnicity (a constant feature of Israeli history, as in many other states, even outside the context of national struggle: before the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the Jewish proletarians “imported” from Arab countries had to pay the price).

But, in the last twenty years, the state has asserted itself as the sole custodian not only of the social reproduction of the Jewish proletarians under its control, but of their “physical” existence itself, their very survival. Today we see the enlistment of the “national” proletariat in support of its exploiters on a scale never seen before in history, against the surplus population of Gaza trapped in a concentration camp under constant bombardment.

We have to keep in mind that the struggles are taking place in such a nightmarish landscape. It is difficult to imagine those struggles capable of producing power relations strong enough to “tear apart the segmentations.” The mere fact that struggles continued to unfold and leave their mark on the reproduction of social relations in the occupied territories up until last year (here, again, I’m speaking of the struggles, not the hierarchical resistance) moved and inspired me. Today, the logic of slaughter crushes everything under its weight: the autonomous activity of the Palestinian proletariat is under carpet bombing and, as long as the Jewish proletariat remains captive to the Israeli state (a situation that is unlikely to change in the near future), nothing can be negotiated through relations of force. We have indeed entered a new phase, one that hardly gives cause for hope.

OCL: Isn’t denying a material basis of the Palestinian “people” the same as giving some sort of “passive support” to the state that actually colonizes and persecutes them?

Minassian: I think it’s possible to develop an analytic framework in which we can express solidarity with the struggles in Palestine without harboring any illusion about the perspectives held by the “national” socio-political apparatus. That’s precisely what Socialisme ou Barbarie did during the Algerian War: nourishing an internationalist line capable of keeping a critical stance towards the NLF, grounded in a class critique.

We’re living in times, in Palestine and elsewhere, in which a political incarnation of the proletariat based “on class” is nowhere to be seen. Some still identify with left-wing parties like the PFLP or the DFLP, or some hypothetical civil society at a distance from the political parties. I can understand the appeal, and during my travels I sometimes held similar views, because of some “cultural” affinity. But these parties and this civil society are riddled with class contradictions that the cadres wish to portray as secondary compared to national oppression. Yet it is the views of these cadres that one (usually) finds oneself in solidarity with, without realizing it.

I stick to the idea that social relationships prevail over political ideologies and that in order to understand the struggles that “the” national struggle claims to subsume, it is necessary, affectively and intellectually, to always “start from below,” apart from political identifications.

Distinct logics are perceptible in the identification with Palestine, with the idea of Palestine, depending on class, relationship to politics and capital (either militant, cultural, etc.). This is true over there but also here, in the various expressions of solidarity. These various logics do not cohabit, nor do they converge or coalesce. They are contradictory, antagonistic, whether more or less overtly or silently.

I don’t have much to say about “what is to be done.” It seems to me that we should be less concerned with the different political stances within the solidarity movement (the stance towards Hamas or a hypothetical bi-national state, etc.), and more with questions about its social composition, and the practices of struggles that result from this composition. We could then position ourselves in it, with the hope of “bringing the war home”—attacking the perpetuation of social order wherever we happen to find ourselves and thus putting an end to the ongoing massacre in Gaza.

In France, the capture and control of the solidarity movement—either by the politicians of, for example, La France Insoumise, who weaponize the “Palestinian cause” to align it with the confines of their interests, or by NGOs which position themselves as interlocutors of the powers that be— represent a defeat of the proletarian, non-political component of the movement, which expressed itself forcefully during the 2014 war.