If you haven’t seem atrocities, you are not on the correct telegrams.

It’s not a question of equating or equivocating. That Israeli is a fascist apartheid settler colonial state goes without question. That there is an asymmetric balance of power which makes inevitable methods which will be immediately labelled as ‘terroristic’, and are of course terroristic in the literal sense of the term, though of course no less so than what Israel practices, should also go without saying. Hamas is also, literally, and in many ways, a product of Israel. But the very reason why they financed them and ensured their ascendancy in Gaza was to split the Palestinian opposition, crush the secular left of the Palestinian liberation movement, and ensure they had an enemy who would be perfect in terms of optics, rhetoric and propaganda because they can very believable present them as a menace (by-the-bye, Hamas is an acronymn but sounds very similar to the word ‘hamas’ in Hebrew, which means ‘violence’).

Aside from moral and ethical questions (which are not irrelevant), there is also the obvious point that not all tactics or strategies used by particular national liberation movements are equal. It’s a mystery to me how people are able to wrap their heads around this very simple and obvious point in the case of, say, the Khmer Rouge or the Sendero Luminoso but not in the context of the Islamic world, and seems to me to have something to do with a lot of guilt that Westerners (on this site, seemingly clearly the majority) justifiably have in relation to the Islamic world. Tbh it’s embarrassing in the first place that the comparison even has to be made to get the point about its incoherence across. All this applies even if the situation is so fucked that there are no other avenues left open to progressive forces than to collaborate with your local far-right reactionaries who are going to commit war-crimes. That is the current situation. I’m certainly not saying that I would not have done the same were I a Marxist Palestinian militant. But that’s because they have no other choice, and we have to respect their opinion that the most immediate issue and the one on which their legitimacy depends is that of Israeli fascism, apartheid and settler colonialism. Ideally there would be a movement more akin to the First Intifada, but Hamas do not want that, because Islamists are fully aware that their interests are not served by actual working-class mass movements.

If you mean that most people in Hamas are not disgusting, well, that was neither my point nor is is possible quite frankly for you or I to confidently make that statement one way or the other. Like is the head of Hamas more or less reactionary that a working-class Israeli in Jerusalem? That’s not that clear. Though it does make me think that there’s a continued, fundamental misunderstanding of what Islamism actually is that’s going on here. Islamism is a far-right, extremely reactionary version of politics which is very similar in many ways to fascism, noticeably in that it is a mass movement and in its emphasis on a return to a mythical past through violence, warfare and blood, it’s death-cult characteristics, its extreme emphasis on hierarchy, is relation to women as essentially one of rape and seeing them as cattle for the bearing of children, its hypermasculinity, and the fact that Islamism is also a result of a (global) crisis in capitalist-imperialist production, but one affecting locally the Islamic global south, or poor proletariat or lumpenproletariat Muslim populations in the imperial core. Like fascism, it functions politically as a a mechanism to divert radical energy from socialist and Communist forces and then to crush them mercilessly.