A Victory For The Resistance?

A few words on the ceasefire, and what it means to all of us.

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.-Henry Kissinger

The resistance has scored a great victory against the Zionist entity.

The full withdrawal of the IOF from Gaza cannot be described any other way. Already, Hamas fighters are emerging from their tunnels to celebrate their victory. The people, exhausted from nearly 500 days of genocidal war are celebrating this great victory with spontaneous parades in the honor of the resistance and their valiant struggle against the IOF. Hamas is still there, still strong, and promises that they will not abandon the Palestinian people.

Even the Zionists now admit that they have not defeated Hamas, and cannot do so through military means. The primary orchestrator of this genocide, Anthony Blinken, has admitted it openly to his allies at the Atlantic Council, where he said that the military operation has created as many Hamas members as it has killed. Of course, this begs the question of why he backed the Zionists to the hilt for over a year, why he allowed them to go through with their plans with absolutely no restrictions at all, despite having all the leverage in the world. Did Blinken just now realize that the harder they crack down, the stronger the resistance becomes? Or is he simply trying to create post-hoc justifications for yet another defeat? Anyone who has been paying attention to the past century of history would be able to tell you that a conventional army cannot defeat a popular resistance movement.

The conduct of this war by the Washington-Tel Aviv axis shows that they have learned nothing. Their strategy of terror and mass destruction does nothing but galvanize the people against them. From Vietnam to Afghanistan and countless times in the Middle East, they and their partners have responded to people’s uprisings with tactics like mass detention, torture, rape, indiscriminate attacks on civilians and much more. In this war alone, there is so much photo and video evidence of the IOF doing all of those things that a case for genocide is progressing in international courts. What are these tactics, if not terror?

It is a great irony that they frame all resistance against them as terrorism when terror is a cornerstone of their operations. This is an intentional rhetorical trick designed to de-legitimize popular resistance as something inherently evil and wrong, while simultaneously legitimizing the violence they inflict on the world. The fact that Hamas is called a terrorist organization while the US government has torn apart entire countries, murdered millions and kidnapped people that even they admit are innocent to be tortured at dungeons all around the world shows just how meaningless the word “terror” has become.

Outside of the west, where the narrative can largely be controlled by a compliant media and sophisticated methods of propaganda, this strategy has failed. This is precisely why the Washington-Tel Aviv axis has been humiliated so many times by popular resistance movements. In countless nations all around the world, the story has been the same. The mighty occupier has been humiliated by stubborn resistance from the “backwards” natives who are willing to die by the thousand rather than submit. Each time they respond to popular uprisings with massive firepower, they are sewing the seeds of their own defeat.

It was the same in Gaza. Despite massive losses, Hamas and the resistance were largely able to regain their strength and had been stepping up operations against the IOF in the months before the ceasefire. Although cut off from heavy weapons due to the complete siege of the strip, the resistance had found great success turning the Zionist weapons against them, using their American-made munitions to build IEDs that were used to devastating effect all throughout Gaza. With little risk to themselves, resistance fighters could quite literally bring down the house on Zionist forces, often killing or wounding entire infantry platoons at once. There was very little that the Zionists could do about these tactics, save withdrawal. Far from destroying them, American-made brutality became both the physical and ideological basis for the resistance.