“Imperialism as a whole is the enemy of humanity, not particular countries”: Reading Michael Karadjis on the Middle East [ThreeWayFight]

by Matthew N. Lyons

The last time Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, in 2006, I argued on Three Way Fight (here, here, and here) that US leftists should support Hezbollah against Israeli aggression, despite the fact that it was a right-wing movement with ultimately theocratic goals. This pissed off a lot of leftists. Some people said we should reject both Israel and Hezbollah equally, but the stronger disagreement came from leftists who declared it was wrong to characterize Hezbollah as right wing, that Three Way Fight was imposing US categories on a situation we didn’t understand, and that doing so played into Islamophobia and helped justify imperialist US policies. The debate spilled over onto various blogs and listservs, and Michael Staudenmaier carried it forward on Three Way Fight’s behalf in the pages of Upping the Anti, in a sharp exchange with Rami El-Amine in 2007.

While I don’t necessarily agree with everything I wrote in that debate, I still hold to the same basic position and the same basic approach: we need to go beyond simplistic Us-versus-Them models of politics, and we need to be prepared to take a stand while being honest about political complexity.

Applying that approach to the Middle East has been particularly challenging this past year, with the brutal Hamas-led October 7th attacks on Israel followed by an ever-mounting genocidal assault by the Israeli military on the people of Gaza, an ugly settler-led campaign against Palestinians in the West Bank, and growing military conflict in the wider region. It’s not hard to refute the dominant US narratives that paint October 7th as an unprovoked crime, ignore or justify Israel’s decades-long history of settler-colonialism, and portray the US government as a virtuous bystander working “tirelessly” to halt the human tragedy. But Us-versus-Them tendencies are also widespread on the radical left: glossing over criticisms of Hamas and Hezbollah, celebrating any and all “resistance” to Israel, and dismissing any sympathy with Israeli Jews as support for colonialist oppressors. Sound-bite responses don’t work here. What I want is a way to paint a fuller picture and face the nuances and contradictions, because I believe our political work is stronger and more effective when it’s based on a serious attempt at understanding than when it’s based on slogans.

One forum that I believe helps address this need is the website Their Anti-Imperialism and Ours, featuring writings by the Australia-based Marxist Michael Karadjis on political struggles in Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere. The website’s title refers to Karadjis’s focus on refuting “campism,” which divides the world into good and bad camps:

“In doing so, ‘campists’ aim all their fire at the oppression and crimes carried out by the side they condemn, and actively engage in vile apologetics for the side they support. Internationalism by contrast always resolutely takes the side of the oppressed whenever they are in conflict with their oppressors no matter which ‘camp’ they allegedly belong to.”

Karadjis is particularly concerned with campists on the left, including so-called anti-imperialist campists (who denounce the US and its allies while defending states considered rightly or wrongly to be in conflict with the US) but also what Karadjis calls “reverse campists” (leftists who have come to see Russia and China as the biggest threats, to the point that they buy into bogus claims that the US is defending democracy internationally). In a Mideast context, this means challenging a lot of geopolitical assumptions held by people across the political spectrum.

There’s a certain irony in my holding up Michael Karadjis’s work as a positive example of Middle East analysis. In 2006 Karadjis was one of my loudest critics with regard to Hezbollah, who argued that the organization was “a genuine national liberation movement” and not right wing or theocratic. To his credit, Karadjis’s assessment changed when Hezbollah sent troops to fight in the Syrian Civil War on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s government starting around 2012: in 2015 he wrote, for example, that Hezbollah had transformed from a resistance organization into “a hired sectarian death squad for the Syrian Caligula regime.” Karadjis has also criticized Hezbollah for using violence against Lebanon’s own anti-sectarian uprising in 2019 and notes that “despite rhetoric about ‘the dispossessed,’ [Hezbollah] has emerged as a key party of the Shiite bourgeoisie” in Lebanon.

In the remainder of this essay, I want to outline some of the major themes that I see as helpful in Karadjis’s writings about the Middle East on Their Anti-Imperialism and Ours over the past year. This doesn’t mean I endorse everything Karadjis has written on the subject during this time, but I believe his work offers a good overall framework for making sense of the situation, refuting many widespread misconceptions, and charting a course of action.

1. A stark assessment of the Israeli government’s goals in Gaza and beyond, and the US response.

Like many critics, Karadjis dismisses Israel’s ostensible goal, to destroy Hamas, as “an absurd smokescreen.” He writes that Israel’s “genocidal operation…aims to make Gaza uninhabitable, kill or drive out as much of the population as possible, ensure that whoever remains will find life impossible, re-occupy the territory or at least part of it, while also annexing more and more of the occupied West Bank.” He notes that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a personal motive in prolonged war (to delay corruption charges that could put him in prison) but more broadly that a wider war involving Iran and the US could provide Israel the cover needed to complete the depopulation of Gaza. Karadjis wrote in July (weeks before Israel sent troops into Lebanon), “it is not that Israel wants to fight Hezbollah (and still less Iran), rather it wants the US to do that as a sideshow—Israel’s actual war remains the extermination of Palestine.”

Karadjis contrasts the Netanyahu government’s goals with those of “more rational ‘centrist’ Zionist leaders” such as Ehud Olmert, who want to consolidate what Israel has already achieved over the past year (which has not only wrought unprecedented suffering and destruction on Gaza but also, despite widespread illusions to the contrary, put the Palestinians in an incomparably worse bargaining position than they were in before October 7, 2023), accept a ceasefire, and bring the remaining hostages home. Karadjis notes that this “more or less coincides with the position of Biden and the mainstream of US imperialism.” Among other factors, Biden is concerned about how the full elimination of Palestinians from Gaza would further destabilize the region, “and how the hatred of the Arab masses for their rulers for doing nothing to prevent it could lead to new revolutionary uprisings and completely alienate even these regimes from the US.” (Donald Trump, by contrast, appears to support Natanyahu’s approach much more wholeheartedly.)

2. No “anti-imperialist” illusions about Iran, Turkey, or the Arab regimes

Karadjis is sharply critical of these states as capitalist regimes that are often brutally repressive toward their own peoples, and that in many cases talk about solidarity with the Palestinians but at best have done nothing to substantively help them in the face of Israel’s genocide. “Iran, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey etc, is a sub-imperialist power trying to cut out its ‘sphere of influence’ in the region; therefore it has supported and armed movements or states to build its sphere, regardless of their actions in relation to the US, Israel or Palestine.” Worse, “the Iran-backed, Alawi-led (but secular) Assad dictatorship in Syria, which…has a markedly non-‘resistant’ history [toward Israel], has slaughtered its own Palestinians, has strong relations with various ‘non-resistant’ Arab regimes, and the backing of Russia, which has strong relations with Israel and is anything but ‘resistant’ on Palestine.” The character of these states also has little to do with their stance relative to the United States: “Iran’s Shiite fundamentalist theocracy is no more progressive than the Sunni fundamentalist theocracy partnering with the Saudi monarchy,” and “Assad’s secular tyranny in Syria is fundamentally similar to (though vastly more repressive than) its fellow secular tyrants in Egypt and the UAE.”

3. A critical but nuanced portrait of Hamas…up to a point

Karadjis writes that Hamas originated as “a religious-sectarian militia whose 1987 charter was full of antisemitic prejudice” (for example, I would add, the document cites the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an accurate representation of Jewish aims), but he argues that in the mid 2000s it began to tone down its “rightwing Islamist ideology” somewhat. The organization also ended its “horrific” suicide bombing strategy in 2005 and proposed a modified version of the two-state solution, “with long-term ceasefire replacing full peace with recognition.” “This went hand in hand with statements by [Ismail] Haniyeh [then head of Hamas in Gaza] and other Hamas leaders that their struggle was against Zionism and occupation, not against Jews…and this was later instituted into their new political program.”

Karadjis describes the Hamas-led October 7th attacks as “a gruesome massacre of hundreds…a mass prison break in which the brutalised turned brutaliser.” Planning for the attacks was spearheaded by Yahya Sinwar, who succeeded Haniyeh as head of Hamas in Gaza in 2017 and is often considered more hardline. However, citing secret correspondence obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Karadjis considers it “unlikely” that the Hamas leadership intended for the attackers to commit atrocities. He also quotes Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi’s argument that with October 7, Hamas drastically overestimated the degree of military support it would receive from Hezbollah, Iran, and other forces, and that Hamas failed to understand that the Iranian state is fundamentally concerned with furthering its own interests, not aiding Palestinians.

While these assessments are helpful to a degree, analysis of Hamas’s political evolution and actions is one area where I think Karadjis falls short. If Hamas began moderating its reactionary politics and scaled back its anti-civilian violence two decades ago, what led it to reverse course? Was this mainly a response to Israeli intransigence, encouragement from Iran, or other factors? In addition, as a writer who combines thoughtful analysis with (I believe) a greater-than-average thoroughness and attention to accuracy, Karadjis is well positioned to try to untangle the myths and realities surrounding October 7th itself. The attacks were coordinated by Hamas but involved members of multiple organizations and had multiple targets (both military and civilian), so how do we understand the actions and responsibilities of the different forces involved? How do we navigate between Israeli government lies about what happened and efforts by Hamas apologists to gloss over ugly truths? As far as I know, Karadjis has not (so far) addressed these questions.

4. Debunking the Axis of Resistance myth

Wikipedia defines the Axis of Resistance as “a network of Iranian-backed militias and political groups in the Middle East, formed by Iran by uniting and grooming armed groups that are dedicated to confronting the influence of United States and Israel in the Middle East,” and says that it includes Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthi movement in Yemen, various Shi’ite groups in Iraq and Syria, and Syria’s Assad government. (Other sources vary this list slightly.)

Karadjis challenges the whole concept of the Axis of Resistance as a specific application of wrong-headed campist ideology to the Middle East region. He points out that some other Middle Eastern governments, such as Erdogan’s Sunni-Islamist regime in Turkey, as well as Sunni groups aligned with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood network in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen, have been as outspoken as Iran in pro-Palestinian rhetoric, and some of them have provided practical or even military support to Hamas. At the same time, action by supposed Axis members against Israel has varied; while Hezbollah and the Houthis launched attacks on Israel, Syria did not, and Iraqi Shi’ite militias actually ended their attacks on US bases (for the time being) under Iranian pressure.

Karadjis also notes that the supposed Axis has been riddled with conflicts, which belie its existence as any sort of coherent formation, much less the image of Iran pulling strings across the region. These conflicts include the longstanding mutual hatred between Hamas and Syria’s Assad regime, Hamas’s 2013 demand that Hezbollah withdraw its forces from Syria and “leave its weapons directed only at the Zionist enemy” (which Hezbollah apparently ignored), opposition to the Houthis at different times by both Syria and Hamas, and so on.

What Karadjis draws from all this is that (a) the Palestinian struggle is central to Mideast politics as a whole, not a specialized concern of a particular faction or forces supposedly aligned with Iran, and (b) the level of action against Israel by different Middle East forces “has been rooted in the concrete realities of each country, region and state/movement, rather than by membership of any ‘Axis,’ still less due to being ‘proxies’ of Iran” (emphasis in original).

5. Calling out the use of enemies to mobilize popular support

Rulers have long used external scapegoats to win loyalty and deflect popular anger away from themselves. Karadjis argues that all of the states in the Middle East—every one of them an oppressive capitalist regime of one kind or another—use the Palestinian struggle in this way. We see this, for example, in Israel’s hostility toward Hamas’s previous turn toward relative moderation. “Hamas was only useful for Israel as an ‘extremist’ pole which could justify continued Israeli rejectionism; Israel was so terrified of peace that it assassinated Hamas mediator Ahmed Jabari in 2012 just after he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel…” In broader terms, Israel’s system of rule benefits from repression and theocratic authoritarianism across the rest of the Middle East:

“The decisive role played by the Iran-backed Shiite militia in crushing Iraq’s anti-sectarian uprising of 2019; of Hezbollah in crushing Lebanon’s similar anti-sectarian movement that year; of Iraqi militia, Hezbollah, Iranian ‘revolutionary’ guard and even Afghan Shiite sectarian forces in crushing Syria’s glorious uprising; of the Houthis in plunging the Yemeni Spring into civil war and Saudi intervention; alongside Iran’s crushing of its own ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement; have all made the region safer for Israel’s own racist, sectarian project; the victory of democratic, non-sectarian forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran etc would be a far worse threat to Israel than harsh but hollow words from ugly regimes, which only facilitate Zionist siege ideology. Not surprisingly, Israel has always preferred Arab dictators to democracy in the region.”

And the obverse is also true:

“The existence of Israel in its current apartheid form is itself a factor in the continued existence of the region’s dictatorial regimes; their mutual existence [is] symbiotic…. A victory for a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional democracy in Palestine, the PLO program, would be anathema to the region’s dictatorships; Israel’s horrific oppression of the Arab and mostly Muslim people of Palestine provides a foreign ‘enemy’ that is useful for the region’s dictators to rationalise their repressive rule.”

Conclusion

If we want to understand the stark but intricate dynamics of power and conflict in the Middle East from a radical standpoint, Michael Karadjis’s website Their Anti-Imperialism and Ours is a good place to start. As I’ve outlined, the site doesn’t address all the important questions, but it cuts through a lot of “common sense” assumptions to get at deeper realities. Karadjis challenges campist frameworks by arguing that “the global system of imperialism as a whole is the enemy of humanity, not particular countries within it,” and he shows that one-sided campaigns against specific oppressive actors can reinforce oppression elsewhere and in other ways. That’s not a call for political passivity; it’s still important to mobilize opposition against concrete injustices and threats, but it’s also important to put those initiatives in a larger context. Karadjis’s approach reinforces Three Way Fight’s challenge to dualistic oppressor-vs.-oppressed or left-vs.-right models of political conflict. In broader terms, his approach resonates with our project’s emphasis on confronting political complexities and contradictions, even (or especially?) when they make people on “our side” uncomfortable. Or as Three Way Fight contributor rowan puts it, one of the most important things about a three way fight approach is “a demand that radicals tell the truth.”

Photo Credit:

Tyre airstrike: photographer unknown. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.