Ireland Stands With Palestine?

The Israeli genocide on Gaza is one year old. In that time the world has watched the massacre of well over 40,000 people unfold in plain sight. We have learned that Israel is intent on wiping out an entire people. We have learned that the United States will support and lie for Israel no matter what. 

We have learned about Ireland too. It is often said that Ireland has a deep sympathy for the Palestinians, that we understand their plight. This article examines that view critically. 

First, I show that Ireland, or rather, a huge majority of working class people, do sympathise with Palestine because of colonialism. Ireland was colonised by the English, the Palestinians are colonised by the Israelis; “we” sympathise with the colonised. To make the point clear, I compare a specific period in Irish history with the current situation in Palestine. The period from the 1641 rebellion to the Cromwellian plantation a decade or so later has four clear parallels with what has happened in Palestine since 7th October 2023: 

(1) Colonisation, (2) Atrocity, (3) Propaganda and (4) Genocide. However, support for the colonised people of Palestine in Ireland is far from universal. 

It is foolish and dangerous to accept the cosy assumption that “we” support Palestine. “We” do not. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are fully behind Israel. The public statements of Simon Harris and Micheal Martin sometimes try to hide this but their actions make it crystal clear.

The Irish state is deeply embedded in the US-led imperialist system that maintains, benefits from, and apologises for Israel and its genocide. Harris may have officially recognised the state of Palestine but his government refuses to take the political and economic action that would really challenge Israeli genocide. 

I want to show how, whether in relation to conflict in Ireland in the seventeenth century or Palestine in 2024, some take sides with the colonised and oppressed, and some take sides with the colonisers and oppressors. 

In conclusion I say that as socialists, we identify with the Palestinians, not because we are Irish. We identify with the Palestinians because their struggle is our struggle. They are resisting the violence of US imperialism carried out by the proxy Zionist state. That imperialist violence exists for one reason only - to maintain US dominance of global capitalism - the very same system that our own ruling class uses to ruin the lives of ordinary people in our own country.

“Why Ireland is the most pro-Palestinian nation in Europe”

In March 2024, CNN published an article with the headline “Why Ireland is the most pro-Palestinian nation in Europe”. Why indeed? The Palestinian Ambassador to Ireland explained it in this way: “This historical background that the Irish people themselves endured… they know exactly what’s the meaning of occupation, colonisation, oppression, dispossession.”

Even Leo Varadkar was on the same page. He said this in Washington in March 2024: “Leaders often ask me why the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people. And the answer is simple: We see our history in their eyes”. On this account the Irish support Palestine because “we” have suffered in the past as they suffer today. 

As it happens, one episode from Irish history - the 1641 Rebellion and the fifteen years of conflict that followed it - reveals striking similarities with the period after the October 7th Hamas attack and the ensuing Zionist genocide on Gaza. 

The 1641 rebellion, the conflict that followed and the Cromwellian settlement is similar to the October 7th rebellion and the subsequent Zionist genocide in four ways:

1.   Both the 1641 rebellion and the rising of 7th October were responses to colonial and settler colonial projects.

2.   Both rebellions saw acts of atrocity being carried out by the rebels against civilian settler populations.

3.   In each case, the atrocities visited upon the settlers were used for immediate and longer term propaganda purposes. 

4.   In the case of both risings there was a brutal, genocidal military reaction from the colonial power.

ONE: Colonialism & Settler Colonialism

The settler colonial projects of the English in Ireland and the Zionists in Palestine share many common features, these are: Land Confiscation and settler colonialism; Murder and Ethnic Cleansing; Racism and Apartheid.

After the defeat of the Gaelic armies in the Nine Years’ War and the “Flight of the Earls” in 1607 the English crown proceeded with the Ulster Plantation. Lands previously owned by the O’Neill and O’Donnell clans were given to undertakers, servitors and a small number of “deserving Irish”. The “deserving Irish” had fought on the side of the crown and were allowed to retain some lands, albeit under much worse conditions.

Unlike previous plantations in Munster and the midlands, this was to be a successful one in that the settlers who came to Ireland from England and Scotland, stayed here. By 1630 there were 80,000 Protestant settlers living on land in Ulster that had previously been owned by Gaelic septs and populated by Gaelic labourers and tenant farmers. This bred enormous resentment that built up to the explosion of violence in 1641.

All the while, even the “deserving Irish” and the remnants of the Anglo-Norman elite grew more and more alienated from the crown – a campaign to introduce “The Graces” (laws that would roll back on some of the confiscations of land and to lesson discrimination against Catholics) was defeated. And all the while English officials in Dublin were engaged in decades-long theft through the practice of seeking out “defective titles” in landholding by Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords. The futility of challenging defective titles suits did not stop many land-holders bankrupting themselves in trying to do so.

By the time of the 1641 rebellion, both the remnants of the Gaelic order and the Anglo-Normans had come to believe that they had no option but to resort to violence in rebellion.

The 1948 Nakba was the culmination of decades of planning on the part of the Zionist elite.  In the space of a few weeks, Israeli ownership of the land of Palestine went from 8% to 77.4%. Indeed, Israel further expanded their territories in 1967 with the seizure of the Sinai, Gaza, West Bank and Golan Heights. Illegal expansion of Israeli settlements has been ongoing ever since. Even in the first three months of the genocide on Gaza, settlers in the West Bank built 15 illegal outposts, 18 roads & multiple checkpoints.

A really clear parallel between the Irish colonisation and the Palestinian one is how property law and the land courts were subordinated to the overall plan to seize the land. The Palestinian lawyer, Raja Shehadeh, describes the futility of trying to legally dispute Israeli land seizures: “The building of settlements in the Occupied Territories was a state project. It was not going to be hampered by questions of law”.

The English colonisation of Ireland became more and more violent as the century of plantations led up to 1641. Swathes of the country were laid waste in the 1560s, 1580s and the period of the nine years’ war.  While hundreds of thousands of ordinary people died because of violent struggles between ruling clans and lords, the ruthlessness of the English military expeditions’ scorched earth tactics brought murder to a grotesque level.

For example, the suppression of the second Munster uprising in 1580 saw deliberate targeting of civilians on a mass scale and widespread crop burning and confiscation of cattle that led to a famine and bubonic plague that killed 30,000 people.  

The numbers of people wiped out in the nine years’ war up until 1603 by the same means was probably as high as 100,000. The decades that followed the flight of the earls in 1607 saw fewer out-and-out wars. However, the political defeat of the Gaelic clans and the de jure (if not always de facto) exclusion of the Gaelic Irish from the settled lands and towns meant resentment of the settlers festered.

The violence of the zionist colonisation of Palestine has been enormously one-sided since the Nakba. Thousands died in 1948 - most notoriously in the village of Deir Yasin - and 750,000 people were ethnically cleansed. The wars of 1967, 1973 and 1982 saw an increasingly superior Israeli military achieve kill ratios of 20:1 or higher.  During the eight years of the first intifada 1,600 people died, 12% of whom were Israelis, during the second intifada 6,600 people died, 17% of whom were Israelis.

Repeated incursions into Gaza (known colloquially as ‘mowing the grass’) left thousands dead. For example, Operation “Cast Lead” in 2009 resulted in the deaths of 1,400, over 300 of whom were children. The numbers of dead do not capture the quality of the destruction caused by Israeli violence: 70% of the 20,000 homes destroyed by the Israelis during another episode of ‘mowing the grass’ (“Protective Edge”) were still unreconstructed years later. Siege was the zionist weapon of war; scarce availability of water, electricity cut off for 16/18 hours each day; the entire population hemmed in and denied access to employment, health services and any form of decent life.

The English colonial mindset held the Irish to be a barbaric, “wild” species.The Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 codified these prejudices in the form of rules for English settlers: Intermarriage with the Irish, speaking Irish, wearing Irish clothes, allowing Brehon rather than English law to operate, allowing Irish tenants access to land were all punishable – forfeiture of land, amputation and the charge of treason were all sanctions.

This carried on for centuries: In 1556 a commission introduced by Lord Sussex set down laws that allowed colonial officials to execute Irish people suspected of a crime. The four projects of plantation from the 1560s to the 1650s all restricted or forbade Irish people from having access to land.

It was a widely held belief that not only were Irish lives of little account, but that colonisation was really a good thing for the Irish; even if it meant mass murder. Sir Arthur Chichester, the Lord Deputy leading the Plantation of Ulster summed up this thinking about how to deal with the Irish: “famine to consume them; English manners to reform them”.  

Zionism does not see Palestinians as human beings. The very same opposition between civilisation and barbarism that the English used to denigrate the Irish was used by the zionists. For example, Theodore Herzl, one of the founders of the Zionist movement, very deliberately viewed the future state of Israel as a bastion in defence of the white man’s civilisation. It would be “a part of the wall against Asia, and serve as the vanguard of civilization against barbarism”. 

Herzl also articulated the “white man’s burden” view that the Zionist colonisation of Palestine would actually be a good thing for the people already living there: “It is their well-being, their individual wealth which we will increase by bringing in our own”. The racism of ordinary Israelis in the pre-October 7th situation was such that killing Palestinians just didn’t matter: In the words of an Israeli soldier who shot an old woman in the head: “That’s what’s so nice about Gaza: You see a person on a road…He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him”.

Another soldier described the situation as follows: “The lives of Palestinians, let’s say are something very very less important than the lives of our soldiers”.  Discrimination against Palestians is systemic to the extent that every human rights organisation from Human Rights Watch, to Amnesty to the Israeli group B’Tselem describe the zionist regime as apartheid. Palestinians do not have equal rights when it comes to citizenship, property ownership and access to employment. Amnesty is firm in describing the property-owning system as racist: “A state-sanctioned racist administration of public land that has excluded Palestinians from leasing on, accessing, developing or owning the overwhelming majority of public land and housing.”

TWO: Atrocities

The 1641 rebellion saw widespread atrocities carried out by Gaelic rebels against Protestant settlers. Trinity College Dublin has collected depositions from over 5000 eye-witnesses that give a unique insight into what life (and death) was like for ordinary people: 

In Portadown in November 1641 one hundred men, women and children were rounded up, imprisoned in a church, tortured for days and then driven naked to a river where they were drowned en masse. A month later, on the shores of Lough Erne, another mass atrocity took place: “the rebels did most cruelly and barbarously murder the said Protestants to the number of men and 60 women and children or thereabouts”.  Further west in Kilmacrenan, stomach-churning violence was visited upon settlers, including women: “‘one of whose bellies they ripped up, she being great with child, so as the child sprang out of her belly”.

The estimate of the number of Protestants massacred in the winter of 1641/42 range from 4,000 up to 300,000, although the latter figure given by Sir John Temple in 1650 has long since been discredited as there were fewer than half of that number of Protestants in Ulster at the time. 

History didn’t start with this outburst of violence by the oppressed - this violence was a response to a mountain of political and economic oppression. The Oct 7th attacks against Israel led to many deaths. But the cycle of violence didn’t begin on Oct 7th - those acts weren’t the cause but the effect.

More recently, credible news reports have emerged that many of those massacred on 7th October were actually killed by the IDF themselves. But whenever the oppressed respond to the oppressor with violents acts - those acts are then used as a means to enforce further oppression.

THREE: Atrocities as Propaganda 

The 1641 depositions remained political dynamite right up to modern times - in 1935 and once again in 1969 the Irish state prevented their publication to stave off potential unrest. Without context the violence of the 1641 rebellion seems sickening. Even at four hundred years’ remove the depositions make for difficult reading. However, they did not take place in a vacuum. As I have pointed out they occurred after an extended period of colonisation with the mountain of suffering and brutality that implies. 

However, pamphlets in London, such as that produced by James Cranford, The Tears of Ireland seized upon the acts of violence and desecration in order to provoke hatred and fear of Irish Catholics who he compared to “the savage cannibals in the Indies” who can only be “ruled with a rod of iron”. 

Another publication in the same vein was “The Irish Rebellion” published by the Master of the Rolls in Dublin, Sir John Temple in 1646. In that text he gave a quick overview of the Irish as “a beastly people indeed; for the inhabitants were generally devoid of all manner of civility”. He blamed the insurrection on Catholic priests (“having from their priests received the watch-word”) and the inherent barbarism of the Irish. There was no attempt or inclination in this writing to ask why these events had taken place or to offer solutions other than to double down on colonisation. The wider English public (including a relatively unknown MP, Oliver Cromwell) took note - these atrocities meant that there would be no mercy - Irish Catholics were to be put to the sword.

It would be ludicrous to ask today “Do you condemn the 1641 rebellions?” The question would not advance our understanding of context, cause or consequence one bit.  Yet the equivalent question was posed repeatedly in the wake of the October 7th rebellion. On 13th October 2023 Richard Boyd Barrett was cut off mid-interview by RTE radio because he refused to “condemn Hamas”.

Condemning Hamas does nothing to advance our understanding of why this rebellion had taken place. Propaganda about 7th October is as charged and as partisan as that following the 1641 rebellion. Joe Biden repeated a lie about having seen footage of babies beheaded but that was just the most high-profile of the pro-Israeli propaganda spread around the newsrooms and social media of the western mainstream media class in the days and weeks after and the months since 7th October 2023. 

FOUR: Reaction

The loss of life in the decade after 1641 was staggering - it is estimated that up to 30% of the population were murdered or died of starvation or plague. This is a proportion greater than that lost during the Great Famine and is comparable to the devastation and losses suffered during the second world war by countries such as the Soviet Union. In the immediate term, there was an escalation of sectarian massacres of Catholics in response. Sir William St Leger in Munster and Sir Charles Coote in Leinster were responsible for indiscriminate massacres of Irish Catholics “murdered in their beds and many hanged by martial law without cause”.

While there was an easing off of atrocities and a “settling down” to a state of war throughout Ireland, the memory of 1641 was to incubate in the mind of Cromwell for the next eight years. The English Revolution of 1648 required mobilising the poor against the Crown. But what to do with the English poor when the likes of Cromwell felt the revolt had gone far enough? By sending his army to Ireland he could divert the English revolution, tie the English poor to their own wealthy classes and wipe out all glimmer of resistance to English rule in Ireland.

When he eventually landed in Dublin in August 1649 his New Model Army committed massacres of civilians that were explicitly justified as righteous acts of vengeance for the 1641 rising which he felt was “unprovoked….the most unheard of and most barbarous massacre (without respect of sex or age) that ever the sun beheld”. Cromwell justified the murder of up to 4,000 in Drogheda as “the righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood”.

Cromwell spent only nine months in Ireland but his example started a period of colonial butchery that would ruin Ireland, physically and demographically. In doing so he pushed the project that had given rise to the rebellion in the first place - the colonisation of Ireland - to a decisive conclusion. This is crucial. Just as the 1641 massacres did not take place in a vacuum;  the large-scale death and suffering that followed were also part of that wider context of colonialism.  

The immediate reaction by the Israeli political class to the atrocities carried out on 7th October in Israel were essentially “team talks” priming a campaign of genocide. There are parallels with Cromwell’s divinely sanctioned mission of revenge.

The South African Government’s case against Israel to the International Courts of Justice lists multiple utterances that leave no doubt of the genocidal intent of the Zionist political and military leadership. Netanyahu’s notorious invocation in speech and repetition in official government publicity of the Biblical story of “Amalek” are cited as clear evidence of genocidal intent. The South African legal case sets out how this message was received, understood and put into genocidal practice by the Zionist military. A year since October 2023 the death toll in Gaza is over 40,000 but could be much higher: the Lancet estimates the death toll to be 186,000.  

Of course this genocide has a context. However, 7th October is not that context. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths is somewhere between 180:1 and 38:1; 7th October is a trifle in comparison. The context of this genocide is precisely that outlined in this article - the settler colonisation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, racism and murder that the zionists have unleashed upon the Palestinian people since 1948.

The similarities between the events of 1641-56 in Ireland and the ongoing genocide on Gaza provide evidence to support the claim by the Palestinian Ambassador cited above of “an historical background that the Irish people themselves endured… they know exactly what’s the meaning of occupation, colonisation, oppression, dispossession”.

Irish history is contentious

Of course, it’s not as simple as that: “occupation, colonisation, oppression and dispossession” mean very different things to different communities in Ireland. The specific example of the period 1641 to 1656 is contentious: 

First, the 1641 rebellion is firmly set in the chain of nationalist historiography. It is literally one of the six historical risings mentioned in the 1916 proclamation. On this account it is celebrated as an act of resistance and victory. Most importantly it is identified - by the drafters of the Proclamation at least -  as a defining moment in the emergence of the modern Irish nation.

Second, in Protestant/Unionist historical memory the events of that period - especially the rebellion of 1641 -  are represented as archetypes of siege mentality. The settlers of the Ulster plantation standing fearlessly against the assaults of the murderous Irish. For example, as recently as 1991 the Orange Order in Portadown produced a video in which they explicitly compared 1641 to the Nazi Holocaust. Around the same time, Peter Robinson wrote:

“It was on Saturday, 23 October 1641, that the Catholic Irish had commenced an evil campaign of genocide. Over 100,000 were killed in a period of months. Hanging and burning were common, but stories surfaced of how children had been boiled to death, pregnant women split open, men buried alive, and hundreds drowned in rivers … Among the leading butchers were those who had long been regarded as ‘friendly Irish,’ an early term equivalent of today’s ‘moderate Catholics.”

As socialists we do not seek to trace a linear history of the Irish nation. The Irish “nation” did not exist in the fractured political map of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth century and as a result the inclusion of 1641 in the 1916 Proclamation is significant not as history but as a piece of nationalist mythology. Ideas of nation had not yet gained political currency in the seventeenth century.

We must always keep in mind that when they did start to do so, in the wake of the French Revolution, they were expressions of bourgeois power that were historically progressive at first - capitalism is better than fuedalism. But capitalism is progressive to the extent that it creates a working class, oppposed to the system and capable of mocing beyond capitalism.

In fact, the form of state that would emerge from these bourgeois revolutions is the very one that Lenin calls to be swept away through working class revolution in State and Revolution. Furthermore, we cannot detach nationalist historiography from its use by a new ruling class in the emergence of the so-called free state that emerged from the 1916-1922 conflicts. The “carnival of reaction” south of the border saw workers divided, women and children brutalised and the poor flung in their hundreds of thousands onto emigrant boats.

Neither can we consider the paranoid ravings of Peter Robinson cited above as anything other than supremacist tribalism serving to divide the working class and consolidate the power of the “fur-coat” employer and landlord class unionists of Ulster. As Connolly predicted, the carnival of reaction would take hold across the island.

If national identity did not exist in 1641, neither did class consciousness in a sense comprehensible in 2024. There was class conflict, of course: the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman social order that was swept away, and the English one that replaced it, were both systems based upon the economic exploitation of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the country.

But it was more than just a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. It was also a rupture in property ownership and inheritance customs, a transformation from one legal system to another, the beginning of the decline of the Irish language and a hardening of religious sectarianism. In simple terms, there is no escaping from the context of colonialism. Class conflict in the centuries that followed was always characterised by the fact that the island of Ireland was subordinated economically to the British industrial bourgeoisie and its imperial state. 

Colonisation is also of crucial importance to understanding the traditions of political and military resistance to British rule: each revolutionary movement would have to contend with tensions between the ‘social’ and the ‘national’ question between economic class and Irish unity. This choice survives to this day, most obviously in Sinn Fein’s current jettisoning of left-wing positions on social issues. Socialists combine the fight for econonimc equality with the fight against imperialsim - the working class should lead both.

Support for Palestine is not universal in Ireland

So, the Irish “historical background” invoked by the Palestinian Ambassador is subject to disagreement and conflict. If our understanding and evaluation of Irish history influences our current understanding and evaluation of the genocide in Palestine it should come as no surprise that opinions on Palestine diverge. When Leo Varadkar says of the Palestinians that “we see our history in their eyes” as socialists we can be sure we’re not seeing the same thing as he is.

In the early days after the Hamas rebellion on 7th October there were strident voices in the Irish political and media classes expressing support for Israel. As Taoiseach, what Varadkar had to say was going to carry a lot of weight around the country. On RTE Prime Time he came out swinging. In support of Israel: “Israel is a country that is surrounded by these brutal, savage groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, countries like Iran, often supported by Islamic fundamentalists and anti-Semites around the world, so Israel is under threat”.

Fine Gael Youth issued a post on “X” declaring “We Stand with Israel”. The Dáil debates on 18th October saw the Ceann Comhairle and the Tánaiste leading condemnation of Hamas and making assertions that Israel had a “right to defend itself”. The marching season in Ulster saw loyalist areas festooned with Israeli flags alongside union jacks and orange banners (a phenomenon that goes back over twenty years), while Palestinian flags were being tossed onto bonfires together with tricolours.

Support for Palestine is far from universal - there are clearly many people in Ireland today who look at the genocide of Gaza and see things from the point of view of the coloniser rather than the colonised, sympathise with the oppressors rather than the oppressed. In the words of the Zionist ambassador (14th September 2024): “Some people even ask: ‘why do the Irish hate us?’ Considering the outpouring of empathy and sympathy towards Israel I receive, I do not believe it is the majority in Ireland that feels this way”

It is hard to take her view very seriously when you consider the enormous groundswell of support for Palestine  that is visible all across the country. Week in, week out, public gatherings such as the one that was 100,000 strong on 13th January 2024 in Dublin alongside the thousands of local actions that take place up and down the country made it clear to Fine Gael and others who identify with Israel which way the wind is blowing. Consequently, overt expressions of support for Israel have become very muted, leaving only a few Zionist extremists such as Alan Shatter publicly supporting the regime.

It is in this climate of widespread public support for Palestine that the Irish government, under severe pressure and acting against their own pro-Zionist inclinations, recognised the state of Palestine on 28th May 2023. No-one seriously believes that anyone in Fine Gael cares about the displaced, the dispossessed, those forced to migrate, or the victims of famine. They wouldn’t be in Fine Gael if they did. However, Fine Gael may be tories but they are not fools - they saw which way the wind was blowing and have shifted their rhetoric accordingly; in this case “support” for Palestine is being informed by public opinion rather than historical parallel.

Why we really support Palestine

A common criticism made by Zionists is to point to Hamas as a terrorist group steeped in brutal islamic fundamentalism. Referring to Hamas as “terrorists” is ludicrous given the far more horrific terrorism of the Israeli genocide. Indeed, the obscene acts of “techno-terrorism” carried out in Lebanon in September are proof that Israel is the supreme terrorist actor in the region, if not the entire world. 

The Palestinians have no empire, no airforce, no global propaganda apparatus backing them up. Of course, as socialists we have no common ground whatsoever with Islamic fundamentalists. However, this struggle is first and foremost a desperate struggle for survival. Someday, we may have the luxury of debating with or challenging those involved in that struggle. Besides, the Palestinian struggle is an archetype of Lenin’s conception of “legitimate, progressive and necessary” war; one of an “oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners” - while he reminded socialists of the need to not paint national liberation movements in a “communist colouration” socialists in oppressor nations, like the nations of the West, had to be the first to call for freedom for the oppressed.

It has to be said, too that, despite the Palestinian ambassador’s expression of allegiance with Ireland, we reject too the compromised position of the Palestinian Authority; in three decades they have failed to operate as anything other than a security guarantor for Israel and their policy of a two-state solution was a dead end long before the current genocide. 

Conclusion

The events of 1641 - 1656 may seem remote but they are not. To this day, Irish Nationalists and Unionists look back in anger and conflict. They see either the story of an emerging nation or an archetype moment of the colonisers’ siege mentality. 

As socialists, notwithstanding revolutionary strains in the struggle for national liberation, we must reject both of these versions of history. What took place in the mid-seventeenth century in Ireland was an episode in an ongoing class war where the primary mode of oppression and exploitation changed from a clan-based system to a colonial one. We use the same class-conscious approach when analysing the Palestinian struggle today.

As socialists we see the Palestinian struggle in anti-imperialist terms, but we see the same struggle taking place before us in the Irish capitalist class system. We know what side to take in Palestine, not because we are Irish, but because we identify with those oppressed by, not those who benefit from, global and local capitalism.

Most importantly, as socialists, we see that the Zionist project, including this genocide, is bankroled by the United States, the hegemon of western capitalism. Our own ruling class and political and media apologists are fully behind and embedded in that system and this is why we must support Palestine. 

The fact that the Irish government allows the transportation of weapons bound for Israel through Shannon airport means that our state is, in truth, militarily on the side of Israel. This fact cannot be stressed enough. German socialist Karl Leibnecht’s 1915 maxim that the “main enemy is at home” has never been more relevant. The question of whether we condemn the actions of Hamas is as useless as the question of whether we condemn the actions of the 1641 rebels. We condemn local and global capitalism and its imperial fist and we stand in solidarity with all thsoe who struggle against it.