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It hurts the Palestinian solidarity movement to celebrate the October 7 massacre

Surprising as it may seem, there is a debate on the Marxmail list over the attitude to the Oct. 7 atrocity by Hamas. This is also an issue in the Palestinian solidarity movement, as in Today John Reimann posted the following article on it (https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43655). It links to an article from Michael Donnolly about “sanjoseagainst the war” holding an action to celebrate the anniversary of the October 7 atrocity.

John Reimann
[Marxmail} Left supports Oct. 7
Thu, 8 Oct 2026 01:48:39 -0700

Here Michael Donnolly exposes where the left is at:
https://michaeldonnelly.substack.com/p/ ... c61GkAPzQ viewtopic.php?t=518

Note what they are celebrating: The Oct. 7 "al Aqsa flood"! Yes, they are actually celebrating it. And some denounced me for my criticisms of the pro-Palestine movement! [See viewtopic.php?t=518] Without taking back a word I've said denouncing Israel and Zionism over the years, I must say that the left is outdoing itself in its stupidity.

Some thoughts on history, that may add some perspective to the debate over the "Al Aqsa flood":

In 1955, the war of the Algerian people for liberation from French colonialism had reached a dismal point. The counterinsurgency waged by France against the FLN had been very successful, to the point that only one FLN cell was capable of any initiative. The leaders of that one cell embarked on a desperate course, they carried out what is known as the Phillipsville massacre, which was clearly an atrocity by any modern definition of the term.. This atrocity produced widespread violent retribution by the French which set the war on a totally different course after that. The "middle ground" of the Algerian struggle was swept away, and anyone who sought to stand on that ground found themselves compelled to take sides; either they supported the struggle of the Algerian people for independence, or they stood with the French for the continuation of colonialism. Certainly the FLN was not a perfect leading force for this struggle. It was a secular organization, but it incorporated many Islamic themes as well. Although it called itself "Marxist-Leninist", it had many revisionist aspects. What was significant was that it gained the support of the Algerian masses and held them together through difficult times.

The Palestinian people have been at war with the Zionists since before 1947. At first this struggle did not have leaders outside of the Arab ruling class, but after the mid-1960's the PLO began to take a leading role. After the 1967 war, Israel gained control of new territory, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan. It also controlled Sinai until it gave it back to Egypt in the late 1970's. The war became more intense because of the large refugee camp population and the steady rise of settlements in the Palestinian majority areas. During the Lebanese civil war, Israel played a very prominent role, and occupied south Lebanon for over a decade. Hamas was founded during the first Intifada in Gaza. The PLO began to seek a deal with the Zionists that did not reflect the interests of much of the Palestinian masses. Eventually this course led to the Oslo Accords. For the PLO, this promised a new field of struggle, and a recovery from the Tunisian exile that it had been driven into at the end of the war in Lebanon. When Rabin was assassinated in 1995, this all began to change. Netanyahu's first government revealed that the Zionists were clearly determined to put the screws on the PLO, and beneficial aspects of their new course were less apparent. In Gaza, friction between the Zionist settlements and the Palestinian masses, which included a large number of refugees driven from their homes in Israel, was fertile ground for Hamas, because the PLO was not providing suitable leadership. Hamas has conducted a struggle marked by many "terrorist" episodes. It has sought to use any weapons that it could find to sharpen the struggle against Zionism, whereas the PLO has become a tool of the Zionists for their control of a population that it would rather get rid of entirely. This has led to the current situation, the October 7 massacre, clearly an atrocity in many ways like Phillipsville, has been met with a sustained offensive by the Zionists aimed at a "final solution" of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, and renewed expansion into south Lebanon and parts of Syria adjacent to Golan.

Historical analogies are always fraught with many difficulties, because they are never exact and they often can be used to illustrate any point a writer wants to make. In this case, I do not intend to praise Hamas for its attacks on October 7, just as I would not praise the FLN for Phillipsville. Wars often involve brutalities and atrocities, "civilized" war is an elusive term. But what these two events do show is that such atrocities are historical milestones, turning points that direct the two sides into a rupture that reflects the inherent contradictions much more clearly. We now have close to hundred thousand (some would say many more) dead in the occupied territories which far outnumber the thousand or so killed by Hamas during October 7. Some ask us to condemn the massacre of a thousand by Hamas while at the same time remaining silent about the much larger scale of the massacre of the Palestinian people by the Zionists. This is clearly a ridiculous request that any firm revolutionary should refuse. That the current leadership of the Palestinian people lacks coherence is clear. The PLO has lost whatever credibility by its conciliation of Zionist rule, whereas Hamas has shown that it has no grasp of the necessary tactics and strategy necessitated by the current situation. We need to make a careful analysis of this situation based on the historical "big picture" while not allowing ourselves to be caught by moral dilemmas. More on these ruminations is to come, and comrades are certainly free to make any criticisms that they see necessary.

The vigorous growth of the Palestinian solidarity movement has been an important and needed development. Many activists have come out to write, demonstrate, or otherwise oppose the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. The devastation of Gaza and its people, the intention of the Israeli government to push the Gazans out if they can, and the stepping up of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have led to the growth of sympathy for Palestinians among working people.

But the problems in the radical left have led to it being unable to deal with the differences that occur in the solidarity movement. This has reached the point where there are those on the left that slur over the support for Oct 7 action demonstrated by a certain section of the movement, or even take part in it. For example, the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (a Trotskyist organization) emphasizes that it gives “unconditional” and “military support” to Hamas and regards Oct 7 as a “historic event”. (
https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide ... esistance/)

John Reimann denounced the celebration of Oct 7 at a solidarity meeting held on the third anniversary of Oct. on the Marxmail list the celebration on this atrocity. (https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43655) This started a debate on the list. This has provided more of a picture of how the radical left sees this. And I reported that here on CVO Talk that this debate had started.

Philwest44, I’m glad you commented on this thread, thus extending the discussion. But I’m not quite clear on what perspective you have sought to add to the discussion.

The main point you seemed to be making is that nothing Hamas did justifies the genocidal destruction of the Palestinians, which a crime of the Israeli zionists. That we all agree on, and the entire Palestinian solidarity movement agrees on this. We are not just not silent; we are active opponents of the Israeli rimes. You write that “Some ask us to condemn the massacre of a thousand by Hamas while at the same time remaining silent about the much larger scale of the massacre of the Palestinian people by the Zionists.” Those who do so are not part of the solidarity movement, and not the activists we hope to address on these issues.

You also wrote that you “do not intend to praise Hamas for its attacks on October 7”. We are agreed on this as well. But this means it should be useful to go further, and consider how to oppose the harm done when certain trends in the solidarity movement do praise Oct 7. But how does one deal with this? Do we let others slur over the political stands that Hamas has followed from the start, and how Oct 7 is a continuation of them? Or do we clarify in the movement what is going on?

You present the PLO has having sold out, while Hamas is compared, to an extent, to the FLN of Algeria. But the path put forward by Hamas is as bankrupt as the path of the PLO. If the PLO didn’t succeed in its armed struggle, neither has Hamas, and it has now brought Gaza to the point which David Walter characterized on the Marxmail list as a “second Nakba”. He wrote “My view of Oct. 7: probably out of line with most but I consider this to be the Second Nakbah. A total disaster for the Palestinian people with easily over 100,000 killed by the IDF.” (https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43701) This is far more realistic than those who celebrate the struggle Hamas has waged in the last three years.

The left and the solidarity movement need to look directly at this reality. Yes, the main work is denouncing the Israeli genocide, but it doesn’t help to close our eyes to what the role of various trends are in the Palestinian. It doesn’t help the movement to be silent on the nature of the Oct 7 atrocity or to present the three years that followed in a glorified light, as a certain trend in the solidarity movement puts forward.

You point out that “the current leadership of the Palestinian people lacks coherence”. Overall, that’s true. But individual trends in the movement have their own standpoint, which they stubbornly and persistently stick to. The Islamic fundamentalist trend has become a major trend in the Palestinian movement, and it has definite standpoints that are different from that of other trends. It has its own view of what liberation of what liberation means, of who are its allies, and of how should the fight proceed. Oct 7 is the most dramatic act of Hamas, but it is not an accident; it is typical of many much smaller actions encouraged by Hamas. If the PLO’s path hasn’t been successful, neither has that of Hamas. It has lead the resistance movement in a wrong direction.

This doesn’t mean that the Israeli zionists have the right to exterminate the fundamentalists, nor to exterminate the Palestinian movement as a whole, or to turn Gaza into a living hell. The Israeli zionists are responsible for what they are doing, and their acts to destroy an entire people. The memory of the devastation of Gaza and their other crimes will never be forgotten. Nevertheless, Oct 7, and its aftermath, does create a situation in which the resistance and solidarity movement, if they are to handle the current situation, need to be realistic about what has happened.

Nor is Hamas synonymous with Palestine resistance. Oct 7 wasn’t decided on by the people of Gaza as a whole, nor by the resistance as a whole. It was decided on by Hamas leaders who were concerned to strengthen Hamas’ s position, which was slipping, if I recall the events of several years ago properly. They knew that they couldn’t start a protracted military struggle to liberate Gaza with that attack; instead Oct 7 was something of a bloody stunt to give them a temporary advantage. They thought Oct 7 could strengthen Hamas’s position; they didn’t mind another atrocity, which they long ago had become used to, although Oct 7 was far and away the largest one yet; and they gambled with the destruction of Gaza. Incredibly they gambled that the most vicious and openly genocidal government Israel has ever had would be relatively moderate in response. Given what has happened since Oct 7, celebrating the Al-Aqsa flood and “three years of resistance” have taken on the tone of wishing people many happy returns of the day at a funeral.

I think it would be helpful if we could follow-up on this discussion which has broken out in Marxism, and more generally help develop the discussion on various issues in the solidarity movement. These differences have interfered in various ways with broad agitation. For example, a section of BDS denounced the film “The Land”, which graphically shows the ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank for years and year.

I think we need to deal with what’s going on now in the movement and in the world. A study of the Algerian war of the mid-1950s involves many different issues. It requires more than a quick comparison of the 1955 Philippeville masacre by the FLN and the Hamas-led atrocity of Oct 7. Hamas has a different relation to the struggle than the FLN. Moreover, a discussion based on comparison to the 1950s sidelines everyone who dodn’t much about that, which is almost everyone, as this occurred before they were born. If someone does do a careful study of the Algerian war, it could be of interest. But right now we are short of material concerning major issues in the present.

There is also one point of detail I wish to raise, I was surprised that you said the FLN called itself “Marxist-Leninist”. Are you sure of this? The sources I have seen say the FLN was nationalist, and it was the PCA which represented communist participation in the armed struggle in Algeria; the FLN was wary of them; and soon after independence, the FLN banned them.

II hope this is just the start to the discussion. I am interested in what other comrades have seen of the debate over the differences in the current movement. And I hope we are able to reinforce the effort to bring those differences into the light of discussion, not just among us, but among other activists and working people.

Later edit: I corrected a typo. The film's title is "The Land", not "Our Land".

Phil, I don't know what you're trying to accomplish by raising Algeria and the Phillipsville massacre, but maybe you don't either. As you know, the FLN and Hamas are quite different organizations operating in quite different conditions.

With regard to Hamas, this is by Palestinian writer Muhammad Shehada. Except for 2-3 details, I don't think it contains much that we didn't already know. But it may be helpful in refreshing memories.

Where Does Hamas Stand Three Years After Oct. 7 – and What Comes Next?

Three years after Hamas launched its deadliest attack on Israel, the group finds itself in perhaps its worst predicament since its inception. The movement that has built its identity and purpose around armed resistance has come to realize that its weapons in Gaza won’t move the needle, but it can’t find a viable alternative to coalesce around.

Despite Israel killing more than 1,450 Palestinians since the Trump-brokered ceasefire of October 2025 went into effect, including many of Hamas’s top militant commanders, its militants haven’t fired a single bullet or rocket at Israel or its military in retaliation (Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations that the group has violated the ceasefire). In July, Hamas begrudgingly agreed to lay down its arms in Gaza in return for Israeli withdrawal. The group’s leaders even ceased their fiery speeches, rhetorical threats, and public spectacles of strength. Their latest statements focus more on survival than liberation. Hamas is now divided between those who call October 7 a “disaster” and a “strategic mistake,” and those who feel compelled to use Yahya Sinwar’s legacy to maintain popularity and legitimacy among the movement’s supporters.

How did Hamas get here? Where does the movement stand today? And what comes next?

Hamas’s Shocks and Miscalculations

Shock has been the dominant sentiment among Hamas’s leaders since Oct. 7, 2023, itself. It was first the shock of overreach, of the attack going “out of control,” as Sinwar put it in a message to his peers. “People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened,” he said. Hamas didn’t expect Israel’s fortified perimeter fence and border defenses to collapse as quickly or completely as they did, or that it would take several hours for the Israeli army to show up. This “overachievement,” as some experts have put it to me, triggered a strategic catastrophe for the group as the situation descended into mayhem, and it caused Hamas unprecedented international public relations damage as scenes of atrocities began to spread.

This was compounded by the second shock that neither Hezbollah nor Iran joined Hamas’s attack when Sinwar urged them to as Qassam militants were still storming the fence and Israel was overwhelmed at its weakest moment. These two shocks led Hamas leaders in Gaza to immediately offer to release all civilian Israeli hostages and seek a ceasefire from the first day. Hamas’s chief militant leader, Mohammed Deif, sent an urgent letter to the group’s political chief, Ismail Haniya, in the earliest days of the war, urging him to mobilize regional pressure to end the genocide.

It was also striking that Hamas promptly sought to deny responsibility for and distance itself from any attacks on civilians from day one, and instead claimed that its militants were focused on Israeli military targets. The group had historically claimed responsibility for multiple attacks on Israeli settlers, but the large scale of civilian casualties on Oct. 7 and global outcry forced a reckoning with that old rhetoric.
The third shock was that of a disappointing regional reality. Hamas had expected its attack and Israel’s retaliation would spark an uprising in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and inside Israel, along with large demonstrations in neighboring countries like Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It also expected a wave of Arab governments cutting relations with Israel and halting the Abraham Accords. That didn’t materialize either.

The fourth shock was the near-total idleness of the international community in pressuring Israel to end the war or restrain its conduct. Hamas’s leadership expected pressure to grow on Israel the uglier the situation on the ground became, especially after the International Court of Justice found in January 2024 a plausible risk of genocide and issued provisional measures in both January and May 2024.

Those shocks collapsed many of the assumptions Hamas had been operating on. This includes the concept of triggering a multifront war that would overwhelm Israel and put it in a corner; that firing improvised projectiles on Israel would eventually make everyday life impossible for Israelis, pass Israel’s threshold of pain, and create pressure to end the genocide; that Israeli massacres in Gaza would trigger Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to carry out armed actions or take to the street; that the Israeli government would have been eager to strike a deal to free its hostages in Gaza as early as possible; that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government would collapse from internal divisions; that then-U.S. President Joe Biden would have followed through on his threats deeming an invasion of Rafah a red line; that since Israel was only used to fight short wars, it wouldn’t be able keep the genocide from going on for more than six months.

“[Sinwar] didn’t consider all the possibilities... In my estimation, the matter required a broader perspective… they considered the least harmful possibilities, but you always have to consider the worst one,” Hamas leader Mohammed Madhoun said in July.

Ahmed Yousef, the adviser of Hamas’s assassinated political chief Ismail Haniyeh, similarly said: “Certainly, people were euphoric in the first moments, but then the inevitable happened, and a great catastrophe befell this great nation.” He added that Sinwar kept the plan secret from the leadership abroad and made the decision with a small number of militant leaders “who lack sufficient political maturity” and who miscalculated in their plan.

The New York Times reported in February 2025 that Mousa Abu Marzouk, the co-founder of Hamas, expressed reservations about Oct. 7, which he said he had no prior knowledge of. Abu Marzouk “said in an interview with [the Times] that he would not have supported the attack if he had known of the havoc it would wreak on Gaza,” the paper wrote. He also said he was open to laying down the group’s arms.

Those shocks translated into a clear shift in tactics on the ground. Over time, Hamas became less interested in attacking Israel with rockets and more focused on a guerrilla-style insurgency, because the former was yielding low dividends. Rocket firing became increasingly sporadic, until in 2025 when all factions in Gaza combined launched a maximum of one to two rockets per week or every other week, all as mere statements of defiance to show that Israeli invasions failed to crush armed factions.

In ceasefire negotiations, Hamas became increasingly pragmatic as it shifted from resistance mode to survival mode. For instance, it unanimously decided to relinquish its government and security control in Gaza in December 2023. It moved from initially insisting on full Israeli withdrawal in return for releasing Israeli soldiers in its captivity, to accepting a phased withdrawal that left Israel in control of 54% of Gaza after the prisoner swap. It similarly compromised on the number and names of Palestinian prisoners and detainees it demanded in that swap after initially maintaining a demand for the release of Marwan Barghouti, Abdullah Barghouti, and Hassan Salameh, who are considered some of the most prominent Palestinian leaders in Fatah and Hamas.

The End of Armed Resistance in Gaza

Disarmament has long been one of Hamas’s most absolute red lines, as the weapons were the source of the movement’s influence and physical and political survival, as well as served as a baseline deterrent against Israel turning Gaza into a clone of the West Bank (e.g., daily settler pogroms, army raids, settlement expansion, assassinations). But earlier this year, Hamas accepted decommissioning its arms, and its leaders began using the rhetoric that Gaza has “done its part” and paid the utmost possible price for the Palestinian cause.

That is because armed resistance from Gaza has reached its limit and more escalations would not move the needle. “Frankly, [armed] resistance failed to create change. The resistance presented heroic examples and fought honorable wars, but the blockade wasn’t broken, the political reality didn’t change, and none of the land was liberated,” said Hamas’s deputy chief, Saleh al-Arouri, in leaked audio in October 2020 (Israel assassinated al-Arouri in 2024).

Sinwar, in a final throw of the dice, thought he could change that stalemate by using armed resistance in Gaza merely as a trigger for a wider multifront war that would draw Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. But the failure of that scenario rendered Hamas’s remaining weapons a burden; a pretext for Israel to continue its genocide and daily bombing of Gaza.

Under the roadmap Hamas accepted last July, the group would only retain personal weapons on an individual basis, licensed and registered by a technocratic Palestinian government that would take over Gaza. If some individual members choose to hide their weapons instead, they would be subject to Palestinian law, meaning if those weapons are displayed publicly or used, the new government would be authorized to take action (e.g., fines, detention, trial). At the same time, the movement maintains that this agreement doesn’t forfeit the Palestinian right to armed resistance or preclude armed actions in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. This doesn’t mean a violent escalation would be looming in the West Bank as soon as Gaza is decommissioned. Al-Arouri advocated in that 2020 recording for a popular uprising (intifada) as a better alternative to armed resistance, believing that it would unify the Palestinian public and create massive pressure on Israel.

Does Hamas Have a Future?

Israel itself admitted it failed to destroy Hamas after two years of unprecedented warfare. “The idea that it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make Hamas vanish – that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Israel’s then-army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said in 2024. This conclusion is confirmed by a RAND Corporation extensive study that examined the trajectory of 268 armed groups between 1968 and 2008 and found only 7% of them were defeated militarily. Around 40% were dismantled when local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members, but that strictly related to groups of less than 1,000 members. The largest number of groups, 43%, ended through a transition to a political process, dialogue, conversion to unarmed politics, and peaceful accommodation with their government.

Over the last four decades, Israel tried multiple times to destroy Hamas, and each time the group bounced back and reconstituted itself. In 1983, the people who later founded Hamas had first created a militant group called the “Palestinian Mujahideen” (inspired by the U.S.-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan). Israel discovered those militant formations the year after and jailed their masterminds, including Ahmad Yasin, Hamas’s founding father.

Yasin was released in a prisoner swap in 1985, and worked to reestablish that militant group along with another one called al-Majd that was under Yahya Sinwar’s command. Hamas was officially created in 1987 during the first intifada. Israel dealt a crushing blow to Hamas in 1989, arrested about a thousand of its members, and sentenced Yasin to life in prison, but the remaining members on the ground worked to recover and regroup and formed the “Qassam Brigades” in 1991. The following year, Israel exiled 418 of Hamas’s leadership to Lebanon, thinking that would end the movement, but it only led the group to escalate its attacks on Israel and start an era of bus bombings.

Israel assassinated Yasin, who had been released in 1997 under another prisoner swap, and multiple prominent leaders during the second intifada (2000-2004), but this decapitation strategy didn’t work either. Israel tried again in 2008 with a major war, “Operation Cast Lead,” that included a full-scale invasion of Gaza and vowed to “destroy Hamas brick by brick,” but the group survived and grew in size and capacity. Israel’s period of “mowing the lawn” assaults in 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 didn’t work either.

This time around, although Hamas managed, after three years of genocide, to recruit more members than it had lost, the group is struggling to articulate a strategy for what should come next after armed resistance hit a dead end.

The group is ready for political transformation if that would create a solid and genuine path toward Palestinian statehood. This wouldn’t be a far-fetched scenario since Fatah, the party that leads the Palestinian Authority, had also engaged in violent attacks on Israel until 1993. Multiple Israeli prime ministers like Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir were internationally designated terrorists before becoming politicians. Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was the commander of the al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra and under U.S. sanctions, is now being welcomed in Washington as a legitimate political actor.

Some Hamas leaders have considered rebranding or creating a new political party distanced from its militant platform. However, the twofold problem is that: first, even if Hamas transforms, they would remain a radioactive pariah for Western governments, as a senior Arab mediator put it to me. They would not be allowed to sit in the Palestinian government or the Palestine Liberation Organization because of a continued Israeli-American veto. Second, no amount of moderation by Hamas or Palestinians would push toward Palestinian statehood when both Israel’s government and the overwhelming majority of the Israeli opposition emphatically reject the two-state solution.

This leaves Palestinian political imagination restrained and hampered. As one senior Hamas member based in Doha told me, even though Hamas is reconsidering or moving away from past convictions and tactics, “the movement is in a state of strategic disorientation.” He explained that while Hamas is now in a “transitional phase” away from Algeria’s model of total liberation, it currently “cannot put forward a new vision.”

Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and political analyst from Gaza

Frank, thanks for the article by Shehada about Hamas. But it's hard to believe anything Hamas leaders say, since all their statements are guarded by keeping up appearances among the public at large and also among their own colleagues. And I don't believe the statements from political leaders in Qatar or wherever that they had no knowledge of Sinwar's plans for Oct. 7. How is that possible, that they had no inkling of such a large operation involving a large number of people and guns, etc.? It just sounds like finger-pointing that shows the organization is a mess. They screwed up badly and now try to blame it on Sinwar, who is dead. And if true, that just shows the organization was a mess BEFORE Oct. 7, that the political leadership had no inkling of what their deputy in Gaza was planning, an operation that had huge political consequences. Shehada's article makes it sound like Hamas is simply faced with picking a new strategy, that the organization will continue just like before but will simply choose a new roadmap to the future. But the disaster of Oct. 7 shows that the organization itself was, and is, a mess. The whole idea of combining religion with political organization is backward and leads to disaster. s