What Will Be The Shape Of Our Revolution?

I lost a few subscribers after my last post. A lot of people found me because of my covid stuff, and maybe they don’t like it when I write about white fascist realities or about colonialism, about capitalism or genocide? When I ask that we recognise the interconnectedness of all the problems that plague us, pandemics to climate chaos to genocide? I don’t know. But I’m going to write about it all again. And end with a poem.

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Last week Israel killed the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar.

They killed him while he was fighting in open combat, a nearly 62-year old man on the front lines of colonial resistance with little more than a handgun, some mentos and chewing gum in his pockets.

He was not in a tunnel, nor hiding behind hostages as Israeli propaganda had tried to convince us. It took two tank shells to kill him after he had fought back Israeli soldiers who withdrew from his position, too cowardly to engage him personally. Israel released drone footage of his last moments. He was sitting in an armchair in a destroyed house against a post-apocalyptic backdrop, covered in rubble, missing most of his right arm. With his remaining arm the video shows him hurling a stick at the drone, a resistance leader fighting the robots until his last breathe, fiction or myth made real.

Sinwar was born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, a refugee camp that still exists to this day, sixty-two years later. A refugee camp now being relentlessly bombed. Despite this, he completed a degree, learnt Hebrew fluently and translated entire books for prisoners after being imprisoned by Israel for his resistance. He was infinitely more inspirational than anything Americans will find on that ballot in three weeks.

He faced down a colonial killing machine backed by the most technologically advanced imperial power that has ever existed. Why did he do it? Because he yearned for his people to be free. Truly free. Not caged, literally caged, by an occupying power. For his people not to be given colour-coded passes when they turn 16, passes needed to exist and move around under occupation. To not have to funnel through separate checkpoints, checkpoints that don’t exist for Israelis. He didn’t want his people to live a ‘modest existence’ in perpetuity, as an Israeli minister said could have been the Palestinians fate without October 7th. An existence that meant a Palestinians living in Gaza had the lowest life expectancy of anyone in the region, where a man would die on average aged 73, 10 years younger than a man living less than two miles away. An existence that meant zero freedom of speech, that enabled Israel, under military order 101, to arrest people for waving a flag or meeting in groups of more than ten.

Sinwar and Hamas had tried peaceful protest. They really had. In 2018 Sinwar personally helped plan a series of peaceful marches to the highly militarised Gaza border fence. From March to May, protestors, organised by the Hamas government, marched to demand the right to return to the homes their ancestors had been evicted from and an end to the siege of Gaza. A siege that restricted everything, from incoming mail to food. From the first day, Israeli snipers in the watchtowers began shooting at protestors with live ammunition. The UN report subsequent to the massacre said Israeli soldiers had aimed for eyes and knees. They aimed to kill and if not kill, to permanently maim. This page from the report details the final death and injury toll. One hundred and eighty three dead Palestinians. Thirty five children killed by snipers. Thousands maimed. Zero Israeli casualties.

What was this, if not a massacre? Had you heard about this before this year? Before now even?

Amidst the protests, in an interview with Italian media, Sinwar had spoken passionately about his yearning for the children of Gaza to be free. About his preference to not use violence. He said:

“Whoever knows what war is, doesn't like war. You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It's breaking. And should break everybody. 55 percent of the population is under 15. They have no political affiliation. They have just fear. I want them free. I want them free."

But when the world turned a blind eye to the 2018 massacres, when it became clear that even months of entirely peaceful protest being met by deadly and disabling violence would not draw the eyes of the world, what was Sinwar supposed to recommend? When it became clear the path to a homeland was fizzling out under a barrage of sniper fire, should they have simply accepted occupation and a permanent siege? Should they have sunk to one knee and accepted living forever under constant fear of bombings, of sniper rifles taking out you or a loved one while baking bread or picking olives? Accepted as normal seeing blown off limbs and brains spilt on the floor? Should they have just accepted an occupation army that can decide at will to bulldoze your olive grove or your farm, rip out your water connection? Accepted an occupation that denied you vaccines in a pandemic while the occupier was on the way to full vaccination?

It’s easy for us who live in relative comfort and privilege to eschew liberatory violence. Far too easy. But how can we know what we’d do in those circumstances? And one fact, however uncomfortable remains: in 1968 Israel expanded beyond its internationally agreed borders, conferring a right of resistance, including violent resistance under international law on the occupied population. The inconvenience of this fact will never stop it being true

We can no more condemn Palestinians in 2023 for rising up against occupation than we can condemn slaves for rising up against the plantation owners in Virginia in 1831, condemn Haitians for rising up against colonial slave rule in 1791 or condemn the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1944.

The Palestinians rose up. And in response Israel, backed by the west, went rabid, killing 300,000 people, executing women, children and the disabled. Totally obliterating international humanitarian law. And they did so gleefully, their soldiers TikToking war crimes daily, the military releasing videos of war crimes daily. The latest over the weekend shows the Israelis marching blindfolded men to the edge of a large open pit, presumably lining up a mass execution. Some of the men were in wheelchairs.

Why would they release this footage to the world? Because Israel and its backers don’t just want to crush the resistance in Palestine, they want to crush resistance everywhere. Documenting events like this is designed to demoralise and dispirit anyone who desires a world of true human flourishing. Designed to put a metaphorical bullet through our collective dreams of justice. Designed to end our fantasies of a world without suffering. Propaganda documenting genocidal power in an attempt to shrink resistance is an historical staple. From Pol Pot in Cambodia to the Nazis.

Which is why, as important as it is to bear witness, we must not let it do this.

This post on Twitter in the aftermath of Sinwar’s death got me thinking.

What are we prepared to risk for our own liberation?

What will be the shape of our revolution?

People often ask in response to my articles: what can we do?

My answer is to take the advice of activist Mario Savio from 1964.

“Put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

Putting your body on the gears looks like disrupting rich people fundraisers for Kamala Harris. It looks like university sit-ins and encampments against genocide. It looks like shutting down roads and disrupting fossil fuel conferences and the speeches of executives. It means picking targets. What companies in your town, state, county, country profit from apartheid, genocide or climate chaos? The expansion of Israeli companies into the west, for example, has been a key component of legitimisation. They have names, they have addresses, they have insurance policies and liabilities.

If you can’t participate in-person it looks like finding alternative, remote ways of causing disruption by picking up the phone or by sending emails. Of designing leaflets and flyers to spread around your town. We also shouldn’t underestimate the cultural value of talking to your friends and family about your moral red lines, the things you demand we shouldn’t live with. It means organising outside the boundaries of electoral politics. It means creating the tension which prises open spaces for new ideas, groupings and leaders to emerge.

No justice, no peace has never applied more than it does today.

I wrote this poem. It’s called ‘what will be the shape of your revolution.’

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what will be the shape of your revolution

the bloated and free

who die not by the sword, but by the carotid artery

maybe it's shape will be round and around, liberation on schedule, every 4 year rote

craven and cucked little addicts of the vote

what will be the shape of your revolution, the plumpen and white

who bled out across the world, and turned it to night

maybe its shape will be square and clean, straight edges, four corners, neat tidy, fascisty

what will be its shape dear company man

perched in the middle, grist for the klan

will it be oval, a performative tear?

so terrible what's happening, but at least it's not here

our revolution was shaped like a star! And mine like a cross!

on the back of bodies burnt black

and imperial monologues

but now they’re rising from the ashes, now they’re taking our jobs!

tell me please, I’m asking kindly, what shape it should be for the wretched of earth

born occupied and vital, in the crosshairs of a scope

who we demand die quietly, while we lecture about hope

what shape should it be, I need an answer now!

if it can’t be a triangle, what will you allow?

hey how about this

how’s this for a plan

what if it’s the shape

of a one armed man

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(image including photo by Mohammed Ibrahim, a photographer in Gaza)