Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Yahya Sinwar: Living and Dying for National Liberation

Episode Date: June 7, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Oct 19, 2024 Alyson and Breht reflect on the life and death of the Palestinian resistance leader Yahya Sinwar. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/  

Hello, everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. All right, for this episode, Allison and I sort of, you know, jumped at the last minute to cover a very timely and very important, you know, current event that just occurred. It was the death of Yaya Sinwar in northern Gaza. I believe it was northern Gaza fighting against the IDF. He was taken out. It has been the main topic of discussion amongst people on the Marxist revolutionary national liberation left, but also across the board, as this is a huge sort of inflection point in this brutal conflict that's going on right now. And so Allison and I wanted to talk about Sinwar, talk about what we can learn from the life.

of Sinwar, seeing him and framing him as a sort of fanonian, a quintessentially fananian figure. We're going to talk a little bit about his life, about his death, you know, and about his sacrifice, and what it might mean for the conflict going forward. This is going to be a ludous organic conversation. Obviously, it just happened. We're still wrestling with the emotions and, like, the ideas of the implications of what comes next. But, you know, that's what I think Allison and I hopefully excel at as in these moments of inflection points historically that we can jump on here you know say some things that resonate with people emotionally and also help with the analysis of the of the current event as well as pushing back against propaganda and the propaganda

that we're going to hear from liberals but from people across the board you know it's very predictable it's going to go something like you are trying to glorify um an a jihadi an islamist who, whatever, fill in the blanks here, hated gay people, had, you know, terrible, regressive social views, and this is the person that you're holding up as, as somebody that, you know, was heroic. And so we just wanted to touch on that first and foremost before we get into his life. And I think that the way that we should think about that is these people are fighting for their life, their land, and their future. For a comfortable westerner whose governments, you're paying with your tax dollars to murder, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,

of people in the region to sit back and smugly judge the viewpoints that are sort of materially irrelevant in the national liberation themselves, I think is really just grotesque in its own right. The important thing to remember, the metric by which we decide whether or not a person, a human being, a national liberation fighter, is worth supporting and uplifting, especially against the 24-7 onslaught of propaganda you're going to hear against them is the actual historical role that they played. They do not need to agree with Allison or I on every single viewpoint, right? We're not living in a society and trying to decide LGBTQ policy with Yaya Sinwar. Yaya Sinwar is a militant in a national liberation struggle against a fascist

settler colonial force, and it is on that level that we are taking him in, analyzing him, in appreciating this world historic role that he's playing and that, you know, the forces that he helps lead are playing. And so I always kind of cringe a little bit when the metric for just literally sometimes seeing that humanity in somebody like Sinmore is reduced to whether or not they agree with so and so on every single point. I don't, we don't need these people to be perfect. They come from very different contexts. They have very different life experiences. There are a million things. that Allison and I would disagree about with, you know, go through the entire history of

anti-colonial, decolonial, anti-imperial forces and individuals, they're human beings. So they're going to come from the full spectrum of humanity with bad views and good views and everything in between. But the thing that we're focused on is the historical role that Sinwar actually played in the material world, and that is one of a national liberation, fighter, militant, leader, hero, and ultimately martyr. So before we get into his life, And is there anything you wanted to add to that? Yeah, I mean, I think all of that's really important. I think as Marxists for us, we think about the world in terms of what contradictions exist and how those contradictions are resolved.

And I think, you know, you and I both have been very clear that we agree with the analysis of Lenin that in our current moment, the form of capitalism that exists is imperialism, right? That is the global structure of capitalism. And so when we want to analyze the life of someone who fought against imperialism, the question is it one. of morality. It's not one of abstract ideals. It's a question of a concrete relationship to those contradictions that exist. And within the contradictions of imperialism, there's no question in my mind that Yaya Sinwar was on the side of the people, on the side of history moving forward and getting past its current moment. And so I think that's the framing that this needs to be understood in. And we'll get into this as we discuss his life. But I also just think, like, you know,

if you're asking why are two Marxists sitting here talking about this figure, I think, I think, think when you learn about this figure, you feel like for his death to happen, you have to say something. He was such a man of intensity and commitment and just dedication that it would be wrong not to comment on it in a certain sense as people who believe in a tradition of revolutionary struggle. I'll also say for the people who would try to say, you know, it's not worth thinking about this figure. He's a petty bourgeois nationalist or whatever the various other things are. But again, we need to think about what contradictions are at play here from what matters. If you want to see the overthrow of capitalism in Palestine, then sure,

that this, you know, I think I think everyone would agree with it. The question is, what are the prerequisites to get there, right? And that is not going to happen while an active genocide and occupation are occurring. So those things have to be resolved first. The last thing I'll say is, you know, if you want to talk about views on social issues or whatever and get into all of that, plenty of the communist figures that I look up to, that I revere, that I know Brett and I both care about, had regressive views on these things, right? You know, Che, infinitely was not super the best about LGBT people. But that doesn't change the role that Che played in history. It does not change where things are. And it does not change the fact

that the state that Che helped establish now has become one of the most progressive states in the country on that issue, right? Or sorry, in the world, on that issue. So I don't think we can get caught up in those things. And that's kind of broadly why I think this is a conversation that is worth having. And yeah, and anytime there's this bourgeois moralism trying to denigrate freedom fighters in the world, I mean, it is first and foremost bourgeois moralism, but also there's the implicit belief that there is some sort of cultural superiority in the West and the attack on the people who fight U.S. imperialism and colonialism around the world, they are being denigrated in a context in which they're fighting against a brutal, bloody, blood-soaked empire held bent

on world domination. And so if your only engagement with this is around the specific views you hold and whether or not the people who are fighting the death machine on this planet meet your standards of social view perfection, I think it's, yeah, I think it's naive. I think it's immature. But at the same time, we're also not, we're not saying that that's not real. That's the thing that I think we should have to wrestle with on some level. But on the other level, the important material factor, I think is what we're always going to lead with. The historical role that they're actually playing is what we're going to lead with. And we are going to reject any attempts to use and weaponize bourgeois moralism to denigrate people who are literally fighting against the greatest evil on this earth and are giving their lives and their futures. And in some cases, their entire families in the pursuit of liberation and freedom. And so I think we're going to just draw a line in the sand there. And if, you know, certain people, Radlibs, liberals, various people, you know, don't want to accept that, that's totally fine. It's not like Allison and I are new to to making enemies or having

people disagree with us. So it is what it is. But I do want to say getting into the actual substance of the, of the conversation, and Allison's going to walk us a little bit through the biography. I think one of the things that immediately jumped out to me is that, you know, Sinwar is, you know, killed with a kfea wrapped around his head, militant fatigues, you know, with one arm clutching his AK-47 and the other defiantly throwing a. stick at the drone coming to finish him off. And this really tells the lie. It really reveals the lie of the propaganda that we've heard out of Israel in the U.S. since October 7th, but far before as well, wherein the leaders of Hamas are these detached, super rich billionaires living

comfortably in luxury in Jordan or in Qatar or in some other country, far away from the conflict, cynically using, you know, cynically creating a context in which Palestinians are killed in mass and in which they are completely separate from the conflict. And this is just not at all the truth. And there's something sort of startling in Israel releasing this footage, which really, which really proves that that whole framing is a lie. You know, he is a leader that is fighting and dying with his people, giving his life and his future, being willingly martyred, fighting in Gaza, place in one of the most dangerous places in the world right now, if not the single most dangerous place in the world right now. So that was just one of the things that I think immediately

jumped out to me is like all the things that were told about the Hamas leaders, that they're these pampered elites, you know, parasitically sucking off the suffering of, you know, the Palestinian people and living in luxury, which is complete bullshit. And that's just, of course, a long list of bullshit propaganda lies that we can deconstruct. But that jumped out to me immediately. But, yeah, Alison, if you want to add on that and then just get a into the biography, perhaps? Yeah, I'll go ahead and just jump into the biography, I think, because it will lead into all of those thoughts, I think. So, you know, I want to talk a little bit about who Yaya Sinwar was, what his life was. For many people, they may have heard of him

only relatively recently when he was named to replace Ismail Hania as the head of the political wing of Hamas after Hania's assassination, I believe in July of this year. But the history of Yaya Sinwar and his relationship to the resistance goes back much further. He was born in 1962 in Con Unis at the time refugee camp within Gaza, and, you know, like many people, was born into this

situation of instability in the wake of the wars that had led to the Nakhba and the displacement of the Palestinian people. Again, this is someone who from the very first moments of his life feels displacement, feels the effects of occupation and ethnic cleansing that have been occurring in this situation.

His entrance into politics, really starts in the 1980s. He actually begins a lot of his political career in some organizations that form prior to the full consolidation of Hamas. And he became somewhat infamous, actually, for taking on a role within organizations that were focused on finding Palestinians who had given information to the Israelis become collaborators or were open informants with the Israelis. Sinwar earned a reputation, again, as a very intense and in many ways dangerous man for the interrogations that he performed on people who had been discovered to be working with the Israelis. And in 1988, he ends up getting arrested and sit to prison as a result of these

activities having, you know, yeah, prior to this, he integrates with Hamas as an organization as it becomes formalized. And within prison, he's a very important figure and, you know, figure from Hamas within the Israeli prison system. He's in prison for 25 years until 2011. And During that time, the stories that we hear about Senoir stories that continue to speak to a person who just truly was dedicated to the cause and who was really completely dedicated to knowing that someday he would get out of that prison and that the fight was going to continue. During his time in prison, he was noted for leading hunger strikes, for leading resistance of various prisoners.

He was noted also for the level of education that he pursued through university courses he was able to take learning detailed history of the Jewish people. actually in the history of Israel, history of the Holocaust, and all of these important conditions that were, of course, leading into this situation. He learned to speak Hebrew fluently during his time in prison, and reports say that he consistently watched Israeli news as often as he could in the attempt to essentially study what was being said on the other side of the fight. In addition to that, he also translated works for the resistance during his time in prison, and again, was this very important figure. He finally gets out of prison in 2011 during a prisoner exchange. His brother

on the outside ends up being a pretty big figure for getting him out. But one of the most important things I think to note here is that Sinwar actually for quite some time within the prison during this exchange was opposed to more moderate approaches that Hamas wanted to take with less maximalist demands for prisoners. He wanted to get most people out as possible and really insisted that Hamas should be trying to get out people who were serving potential life. sentences who never would be able to get out otherwise. And so in this exchange in 2011, he gets out and he goes back to Gaza and becomes an important figure within Hamas. Under Sinmar's time, we actually see some interesting things. There's a period of time

when he actually spoke about a support for nonviolent resistance and kind of ran politically on that framework. He was influential in the march of return in the various border marches, which again acted as a form of non-violence resistance, which were met by fire from Israeli snipers, right? And I think one has to imagine that seeing the failure of that certainly shaped how things would shape up moving forward. It is generally believed, and there's no way to really confirm this, that Sinwar was probably the person who did most of the high-level planning behind the October 7th attacks. The Israeli media refers to him as the mastermind of the attacks, again, it's hard to say, but his involvement is certain. And we really

in those attacks see the culmination of, you know, I think his strategy, this idea that it is possible to go on the offensive, that it is possible to provoke a strike that will bring this crisis back into national attention and bring it into something where action can be forced. And so that happens in October 7th. We all know the story there. We have talked about it on this podcast plenty. The next kind of important note in his life again comes in July of this year when Ismail Heinea is assassinated by the Israelis. And, And Sinwar is put in his place by Hamas as the head of the political wing of the party. And I remember seeing the news about that. And I remember people saying, oh my gosh, you know, Israel doesn't know what they've done because Hania compared to Sinwar, right? It is a very different man. Sinwar is a man who is ready for this fight. He's a man who is very ready to go in there and not compromise. We've seen that throughout his life as the kind of person he is. And it turns out that that very much was true. The fighting has continued. He did not back down in the face of just unbelievable repression that we've seen. Finally, on October 16th, 24, three days before we record this episode,

we don't know all of the details, but from what I've pieced together reading various accounts, both within the Israeli media and kind of international media on the whole, a IDF forward deployment in Gaza found themselves engaged in gunfire with a unit that they did not know who they were engaging with. They called in a tank which fired a shell into the building where that unit was. We now know that as a result of that, Sinmore was in that building, and he was injured in the blast from that tank shell. It appears to have blown off part of his arm, actually. Based on the fact that they found his body with what appears to be a wire tourniquet tied around that arm, it would seem that he tourniqueted himself and made his way to the second floor of that building,

sitting down in a chair, which he will have seen if you've seen the video of his final moments. According to the reports that I was reading, Israeli troops then entered the building, and Sinwar from that second floor managed to throw three grenades down the stairs at them, actually, while injured and bleeding up there. The Israeli forces backed out, and as they often do, they decided to send a drone in to survey the situation. And it's from that drone that we've seen the last moments of Yahya Sinwar's life,

as the drone flies in and the edited. video from the IDF, they circle Sinwar so you can see them. One of his arms is missing, and we see him kind of defiantly hold up a plank of wood and throw it at the drone that is filming him. After this, according to reports that I've read, a second shell was fired into the building, killing him. They did not realize it was him until they came back the next day, at which point his body was identified as Yaya Sinwar. And so that is a brief history and biography of who Yaya Senwar is and how he died. I think, again, the thing that I want to emphasize is a story that we've been told all along that the resistance leaders are these

pampered, petty bourgeois individuals with no skin in the game. But that's not the case. He was on the ground fighting. He was on the ground embedded with the people actively resisting. He died not as a politician hiding away somewhere, but as a warrior fighting to the very last moment. The last thing we see of Yaya Senwar's life is an act of defiance throwing that piece of wood at the drone that is filming him. We see someone who refused to break, and we see someone who wasn't scared of death, who knew that this is how things were going to end. The moment October 7th happened, there's no doubt that Yaya Senwar knew that this would end here. And he did not run from it. He died like a human being, asserting his humanity through defiance to colonialism,

down to the very last seconds of his life. And that's who Yaya Senmar was. Yeah, I mean, beautifully, beautifully said. And he was only the chairman, you know, for a couple months, right? He got inaugurated in like August and he's dead in October. But he's been the leader of Hamas and the Gaza Strip for many, many years. One thing that I admire about a figure like him, and I think it is sort of inseparable from, and I've made this point many times. And Allison and I, you know, we sometimes get grief for our non-hatred of religion. And quite the contrary, we find a lot. of value in certain types of religious orientations and beauty in every religious tradition and you know you can't separate this stoicism this this austere way of being this this commitment and ultimately this complete lack of of fear of death which i think art comes from a lack of of of ego obsession right this a transcendence of the small self and this belief in something bigger not only in god but in this movement and willing to come completely give your life and future for something bigger than yourself. It's anathema to come to people in the West who, you know, have been stripped of a belief in anything bigger than themselves and only believe in the self and what the self desires and what the self can obtain and get. It's unfathomable that somebody could give up their life willingly, you know, in a struggle for for other people, many of whom are strangers, right? But they're his people. And so I don't think that can be separated. And then I also wanted to point out that.

that the resistance is multifaceted, right? You do have Marxist groups, you have nationalist groups, you have Islamist groups. These figures, as we were kind of talking about in the intro to this episode, will have serious disagreements on various issues. But the one thing they're all united in is like before those differences are even materially considerable, we have to get the boot off of our people's necks. And so that is why there is this widespread support for each other's factions. And in fact, the DFLP, which, you know, it was founded, it was a split from the PFLP or the popular friend for the liberation of Palestine, established by the one and only George Habalash.

They split off from the more Marxist-Lennonist PFLP informed, you know what some people can see is the Marxist-Lennonist Maoist DFLP, but they are communist, they're Marxists, you know, their left wing, they're Palestinian liberationists for damn sure. And they put out a statement. And I think it's interesting to highlight Marxists on the ground in Palestine, part of the resistance, how they saw Sinwar, right? So here's the DFLP statement, slightly refraised for clarity, because if you just completely translate something, certain nuances can get lost. So the quote is, the esteemed national leader, Yaya Sinwar was martyred, giving his life in defense of Palestine, fighting until his last breath. A committed and selfless fighter, he remained loyal to. to his people and dedicated to protecting their national dignity. He refused to surrender or compromise, continuing to raise the banner of resistance, perseverance, and steadfastness. At the forefront of his resilient people, he led the struggle against an impressive army, always believing that a fighter's path leads to one of two outcomes, victory or martyrdom. Yaya Sinwar, who succeeded his comrade in the struggle, the martyr Ishmael

Hanaia, as head of Hamas's political bureau, was a leader whose action spoke louder than words. He was a man of integrity, known for truthfulness, and his leadership of the flood of the free was recognized not only in Palestine, but worldwide. We stand in solidarity with our brothers in the Islamic Resistance Movement, aka Hamas, and with all of our people and the free people of the world in mourning his loss. His martyrdom will only strengthen our resolve, motivating our resilient people and courageous resistance to continue on the path of struggle. This tragedy pushes us toward greater unity and determination

in our fight against the American-Israeli alliance and its destructive agenda. We remain faithful to the message of Yaya Sinwar delivered on the dot on October 7th, ensuring that the flood of resistance reaches every part of Palestine, securing a free homeland, and driving away the

occupation and its settlers, marked by the shame of their defeat. End quote. So, I mean, from a Marxist perspective, I think it is very important to highlight what are the Marxists on the ground in the resistance saying about this figure? And there you have it. And they're not pulling any punches. They're not emphasizing their various disagreements. They are saying we are in a life or death struggle for liberation. He was a leader who laid down his life in that struggle.

And I think that is the approach that we take as well, hands down. And the other thing I wanted to mention, you touched on his prison sentence. I mean, this is an impressive person. We know so many figures. Right, throughout history from Malcolm X, Bobby Sands, you know, leaders of the Black Panther Party, go down the list of figures who, you know, were either radicalized in prison or when they were in prison used that time to sharpen their theoretical understanding, continuing to build up the resistance to whatever oppression that they happen to be facing. And this is somebody who, in his time in prison, became fluent in Hebrew. He studied Hebrew so deeply because he needed to understand in some Sun Tzu Art of War type, you know, level of maturity that he needed to deeply understand his enemies. And so he taught himself Hebrew, he taught himself to speak fluently, and then he would study Israeli politics and Israeli culture to understand Israeli society at the deepest levels possible, which you really can't do unless you do have some fluency in the language, right? And he was also known as I'm going to butcher the way this is probably pronounced in Arabic, but a Hafiz, which was somebody who completely memorized the Quran. So from front to back in his head, he could recite it from front to back.

I mean, that just speaks not only to a freedom fighter, but a really profound intellect and somebody, again, whose life is utterly and completely dedicated to the liberation of his people. The last thing I'll read really quickly before I toss it over to you is a Palestinian who put this out, I believe. on Twitter or on Instagram, it doesn't really matter. The sentiment is what matters. They said, quote, I thought, they talking about the West. They thought our leaders are like them, sending young men to die while they lavish in comfort and abundance. But they found Yaya Sinwar a martyr soldier, fighting on the front lines with his men. He was an indigenous son of the land, a son of Palestine's fabled ancient past, of her trees and rivers and wind. He was a king among the wretched of the earth, a refugee, a political prisoner, a fighter, a man of faith and resolve,

and bottomless love for his people. Colonizers can never understand the native, but we understand them well. They think the resistance dies with the martyrdom of leaders, as if the burning yearn for liberty, home, and heritage in our chests can be extinguished when they break our hearts. Farewell, noble son. So, I mean, I find that incredibly moving. And again, another testament to the actual role that that sin war played and then the last thing i'll say is i added to this on instagram it was a thought i had that sinwar is what the west wants us to think zalinski is and what every leader from the u.s uk israel germany or france will never ever be which is a real leader standing up in the most courageous way to the world's worst tyrants and criminals and giving

his whole life and future for his people the pampered narcissists and chest thumping cowards who run the West could never comprehend such bravery and sacrifice. And I think that is the position of this podcast as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, one thing that I want to touch on to you that I think is relevant in this context is like the meaning of death and martyrdom, right? And, you know, again, like this idea that I believe is true, that Sinwar knew this is how it was going to end and that didn't scare him, that didn't give him hesitation, that didn't stop anything because he knew this was bigger than him, right? And there's this incredible video of him, actually, from several years back, basically saying,

I know that this meeting that I'm in right now is being watched by the Israelis. If you assassinate me, it would be the greatest gift that you could give to the movement, right? And he says, I'm going to be leaving this meeting in 10 minutes. I have a 30-minute walk home. Come and assassinate me. I won't even blink an eye, right? This is a man who was not afraid of what martyrdom meant and understood that martyrdom is this bigger thing. And I think there's something worth talking about when we use.

use that word Vardardom, which has really come into meaning in the last year and become a term that I see used very frequently. You know, part of what's important to understand about the meaning of death in this case really does come down to death having greater significance beyond the individual and beyond the ego, like you said, Brett. And, you know, you noted his own intense religiosity and his own, you know, kind of piety that is very clearly on display in his life and how that can provide that. But I also think that is just an inherent part of decolonization and decolonial struggle, right?

This is kind of a thing in Phon, if you go back and read on violence that I think is really fascinating, is that Phonon kind of gestures towards this idea that, you know, it might be better to die fighting back as a human being than to live as someone completely dehumanized, right? And so in the act of decolonization, even if one dies, one dies having achieved a status that has been denied to you for your whole life, right? And there's an inherent significance to that that I think we see in a figure like Sinwar. Outside of Phenon, I also think of the words of Mao, right? And this distinction between a death that is, you know, when someone dies serving the people,

that is as weighty as Mount Thai. But when someone dies serving the fascist, it's as light as a feather, right? This differentiation. And this is a death that is as weighty as Mount Thai. And I think what's fascinating is that, again, touching on the Fanonian side, one of the things that's been wild in the last couple days to see is the way that colonialism twists the mind of the colonizer, so they can't see what this is for what it is. Because for one, I think if you watch the video from that drone footage, you have to ask the question that myself and everyone have asked, which is, why would Israel release this? Why would they let the world see this? This looks like the death of a martyr. It looks heroic. Why would they see it? But then I see the comments from Israelis on the internet. And when they watch that video, they don't see it. The comments that I see is, oh, he died alone, slumped over in a chair, or he died like a dog, blah, blah, blah, all of these things. And obviously they're lying. Obviously, they're trying to propagandize. But I think to the mind of the colonizer, that is kind of what they see, right? Their vision is so twisted that they're not living for something greater than themselves, right? They're

are living for kind of the base pleasures of life that colonization offers the colonizer. And so when they see a death like that, they can't understand the weight of it. They can't understand it for what it is. They only see it as as light as a feather. They only see it as, oh, well, you know, you died. That's the end of your story. But it's not, right? Because Yaya Senwar was born into Con Unis. He was born in a refugee camp. And Conunus has been turned into a concentration camp. And despite that, in the last year, how many children have been born in communists, right? Who will see that video, Senwar, who will remember his sacrifice, and who will find inspiration in that. And that's the thing that's unthinkable to the colonizer.

They think that if you kill the resistance leaders, the resistance goes away. But that's not how it works, and that's not ever how it works, and that's not how it will work, because death isn't the end of the story. We as individuals are not what matters. And those who take the time to actually engage in decolonization, they learn that firsthand. And that's how you have someone who can face the kind of death that Sinbar faced, I think. Absolutely. And I've said this many times, but there is something deep in the human spirit that will just not allow itself to be oppressed indefinitely. And there is something in the colonizer or the imperialist or the exploiter's mind, the tyrant's mind, that thinks if I just brutalize them enough, if I just eat them at bay enough, if I just put them in enough prisons, I restrict their calories, I make their lives as miserable as possible enough that maybe we can have an infinite or indefinite situation in which our boot stays firmly on their neck.

But humanity throughout our entire history, probably before we were properly almost sapiens, we would refuse to be in a state of perpetual oppression. And people are willing to die and reasonably so. And, you know, we're talking about religion, but, you know, there are plenty of atheists or people of all different religions or complicated thoughts on religion that if your family was being murdered, you grew up in a concentration camp. I mean, he was born in a refugee camp that still exists to this day. If you lived in that context where your family, the people you love more than anything in the world, your own children are in constant threat of being brutalized by this smug, violent machinery of death, whose people, again, compared to your own and just a couple miles away, live in extreme comfort. They have full freedom.

You know, a Democratic say in their government, they spend their days leisure, you know, sipping tea and sitting on the beach and hanging out with friends while you're dodging bombs and bullets and trying to find enough to eat? What would you do? What would you do? Would you fight back? You know, this quote is often attributed to Emiliano Zapata. Some say it was probably the Cuban Jose Marty, who originally said it, but the quote, I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. That speaks to something deep within the human spirit. One of the best traits about our species is this dogged refusal to have anybody else's boot

on our fucking necks and whenever I see another human being with a heart beating intensely that is willing to give their own life for others and for the possible not even the guarantee the possibility of freedom how can you not be inspired by it

and how can you not spit in the face of anyone who defends the oppressor in this context and tries to shit on this person you go into the comments from Israelis and you just see fascism because the ideological superstructure of settler colonialism is fascism.

You're trying to build an ethno-supremicist state on somebody else's land that can only foster the attitude, the casual attitude of brutal fascism. We saw a month ago, the podcast, two nice Jewish boys or two good Jewish boys, this Israeli podcast,

and they were sitting there casually, totally comfortable, I assume in Tel Aviv, you know, in a nice well-decorated apartment laughing at the death of Palestinians and saying, most Israelis won't tell you this,

but all my family and friends, I've asked them this question, if there was a magic button that you could push right now that would wipe every Palestinian off the face of the earth, would you push it? And they were laughing saying 95% of Israelis would push that button. Most won't admit it, but 95% would not even think twice before hitting that button.

That is a sickness. And then to say you're doing this in the name of Judaism, this multi-millennial long tradition of fighting back against oppression, of being the most despised people in a given society, many societies for century after century facing the horrors of the Holocaust, and you're trying to tie that tradition into the fascist, settler, colonial apartheid, mass murdering, quote-unquote, tradition that is brutal Zionism, I mean, it's, it's sickening, and that's what we say, you know, it's anti-Semitic to tie this tradition to this brutal colonial regime and the psychology that it fosters, you know, in the people that live in that society. But again, it's sort of unavoidable. Any settler colonial society, you go and you see what the mainstream ideological views of the settlers are. And they're always insanely racist, right? Because that is necessary.

That's a necessity of settler colonialism to have that ideological current within it. You can't have a freedom-loving, liberatory-loving, universalist settler colonial ideology. You know, it's anathema to the entire material project that is happening. Go back and look at American settlers and the way that they thought about, you know, the indigenous Native Americans at the time. Or go back and look at French colonizers of Algeria. Do it again and again and again. And you'll see the same sort of sentiment. but but this one is is is really just wild because it's not in the 1800s it's not in the 1700s you know this is an ongoing and of course the settler colonial project of the US is an ongoing project as well but the starkness the unceasing violence the mass the daily mass murder happening and this really brings the entire history of settler colonialism to our faces we can look on our phones and see oh this is what settler colonialism in violent action looks at

like. It's not an abstract theory. It's not a historical exam. It's real fucking life. And to see people who, you know, you walk down the street, they just look like regular people saying the most insane Hitlerite shit possible and as casual a way as possible. It's incredibly stark. And our rulers, our leaders are trying to beat into our heads that this is okay, that this is good, that Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself. And yeah, maybe they go a little far sometimes, but that this is a fundamentally legitimate project when Kamala Harris was just asked about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. She immediately turned over and said the most horrific thing that's ever happened in this conflict is October 7. As a 100,000 people are dead and

multiple countries are being bombed, this is who our leaders are. And so this is an untenable situation, right? We don't know where it's going to go next, but this is an untenable situation as all fascist and ultimately settler colonial projects are, in the long run that are untenable, right? The Nazi Reich didn't last forever for a reason. These fascist brutal regimes cannot and do not last indefinitely. And so as Israel circles the drain, interestingly, and perhaps with a lag, U.S. Empire does as well. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, I think there's so many levels there.

And who knows where this goes, but I do remain quite committed to my view that this does not mean. the end of the resistance, the way that people talk about it, right? That is how the Israelis are talking about it. That is how Biden and Harris have talked about, oh, now the Sinwar is dead, they're going to be forced to the table, blah, blah, blah. And that's not the case. Israel has been assassinating leaders of the resistance since the beginning of Israel, right? And it has never gone anywhere, and this will be no different, even though this was, again, quite a leader in so many ways, but it will not change that. And the other thing I think is like the messaging from the leaders of the imperialist West really gives away the game, right? You know, this fascinating thing

of, you know, Biden, Harris, the Chancellor of Germany, all these others coming out and saying, no one should be mourning the death of Yaya Sinwar. And the reason they have to say that is because people are mourning it, right? Because people do see this for what it is. People do see his life for what it was. And the imperialist leaders have to try to collide back with whatever they can, brand him a terrorist, put whatever label they can put on it to make it so that he's outside, of this shared condition that you and I and the people of the world know called humanity, right? And we know that he was a part of that, and they have to do everything they can to try to put him outside of that. And this is really the whole story of colonialism. This is the whole story of what

is done to the colonized, to make them less than human, to make doing anything to them justifiable. And the reason that they have to make these statements is because the people of the world are seeing through it. Progressive forces in every country on this globe don't see the death of a non-human terrorist. They see the death of a human being, and they see his humanity in his resistance precisely. And that is what is so terrifying for the imperialist system. That is what is so terrifying for settler colonialism. And just think that really needs to be emphasized. And because of that humanity, that is precisely why the resistance is not going to go away. Because as you said, Brett, something fundamental to who we are, right? It's that we fight back.

We don't indefinitely take abuse. That is not what humans do and so as long as colonialism exists there will be resistance to it there will be fighting that goes on and this is not the end of that story even for a second despite what the colonizers want us to think absolutely and i think part of what alison and i have tried to do this entire time and are trying to do it this episode is to fully humanize the very people that our government our leaders the ideological mainstream of our societies in the west are constantly dehumanizing Just putting the word terrorist on somebody, if they can get you to believe that, they're saying this person is actually less than a criminal. Their lives are worse than an animal's life.

You would feel worse about an innocent dog being killed than this human being because they are a terrorist. And again, this is propaganda momentum from post-9-11 American society where these buzzwords and these framings were sort of imbived uncritically by the masses of Americans. And they're turning around and they're clicking that little switch. They planted in your head 20 years ago, clicking that switch once again. And so what we're doing is despite these people's imperfections as human beings, I'm imperfect, Allison's imperfect, right? These people are imperfect. They're human beings. Right.

And we're humanizing them in a context in which our entire societies with all the money, all the wealth, all the power, all the leverage, insist on dehumanizing these people. This is an war was born in 1962, again, in a refugee camp, that's 14 years. after the original Nakhba. His parents were displaced in the Nakhba. All he's ever known is suffering and oppression and misery and domination and in his fight for

liberation. Even in prison, right? He said he's even on his Wikipedia's page, Sinwar, respected for his resourcefulness among the fellow inmates, attempted multiple escapes, including digging a hole at his cell floor to tunnel under the prison. He collaborated with Hamas leaders outside,

smuggling cell phones into the prison, and using visitors to relay messages and it goes on and on and on. This is, of course, just on Wikipedia, but it just shows this never dying commitment to liberation in that Sinwar, far from the spooky dehumanized terrorist that we're supposed to accept was a human being. And he's one of those little boys that Allison and I have talked about in previous episodes that grew up in this context. Beautiful, precious, innocent little children born into the unthinkable and shaped by the unthinkable. And then the people who inflicted that unthinking misery on him and his family his entire life, call him a dog in his death. Call him

a terrorist, not worthy of life, not worthy of a future from the moment he was born. He was written off by the people who own this world as not worthy of life. And so, you know, if we're doing anything, we're rejecting that entire framing. We're putting it on its head, right, as Marxists should do, flipping it on his head and saying, no, he was more human than the people who killed him. And that is, I think, what we're always going to be screaming. And, you know, it's not a popular message in a society dominated by the exact opposite ideology. And people hate us for it.

And we get, you know, disgusting comments. And if this makes, you know, the rounds and the wrong online echo chambers, you know, we're certainly going to be vilified. That's nothing in comparison to what the people in Palestine. have to live through. And if we have any platform at all, and we're not using it to express and triple down unapologetically on their humanity and to fight every last syllable of the propaganda that Israel and the U.S. is trying to shove into our heads, so be it. And we'll do that incredibly gladly. And again, I just refuse to dehumanize these people that have been dehumanized

for their entire life. I refuse to look away. I refuse to follow even a fucking millimeter of of propaganda to to shit on them in any way to denigrate them in any way they are living in conditions that you and i cannot imagine and they are being courageous and fighting back in those conditions despite their human imperfections they're again giving rise to the most human aspect of us and so i relate to it it resonates with me as a human being um you know and and we will we will never apologize for for taking these stands we know that we are on the right side of history. We know that this is disgusting, no matter how many

multi-millionaires on CNN and MSNBC and, you know, the Associated Press and the New York Times tell us that we're wrong about everything. We know where our hearts are and we know what is right and what is wrong and we will never stop saying it. Yeah,

I think that is really the re-humanization and the face of dehumanization is exactly what I want to hit on. And I fucking hate that word terrorist so much. I hate hate what that word does. I hate how it turns people's brains off. I hate how once you apply it to someone, you can do anything to them, right? Like, what a technology of colonialism that is. Fuck that word. Fuck the entire ideology behind it. We have to say no to it in the strongest terms. And I guess it's like, you know, if you are not sympathetic to our position, you probably have not made it this far in the episode, right? But if you are still listening and you are not sympathetic to our position, you know, here's that I want to say, right? And I really want to emphasize this, which is that, yeah, Yaya Sinwar was a hard man, right? I think that's a fair way to describe him. He was an intense

man. He was even a brutal man, right? And I don't mean that in moral terms, right? That is just a description of the kind of man that he was. And you may not like that. And you may think that that is inherently a problem. And so I guess the challenge that I posed to you is that if you don't think that men like that should exist, support the fight against the conditions. which force people to be that, right? Support the fight against a world which molds people into that. Because Brad's right, he was a child once. He was born into a refugee camp.

The city he was born in is rubble now, right? This is still ongoing. What other life could he have had, right? What other life is possible in those conditions? And it's fascinating reading about his life and thinking in another world without this fucking occupation and settler colonial entity. this man probably would have been a scholar, right? He probably would have been an incredible theorist and academic, and that is not the life that he got to live because that was foreclosed

by settler colonialism and all that it brings about. And so I really do want to say, like, if you don't agree with us, if you don't agree that there's any way of seeing Sinwar's life as redemptive, then the fault for that lies at the feet of imperialism and colonialism, right? And you have to see the end of those things in order to see the end of the conditions which force men to become hard and brutal men who fight back. That has to change. And I think, you know, at least one of the last things that I will say, I think in Sinwar's own words, this is how he was thinking about everything. This is how he was thinking about what he was fighting for, for the youth of Gaza, right? There's this interview, I don't know if you've read

it, right, going around with YNet News with an Italian reporter. It's an interview with Symbar from 2018. And it's very fascinating. And one of his responses, he asks the reporter, you are a war correspondent, do you like war? And the reporter says, no, not at all. Simwar says, and so why should I? Whoever knows what war is, doesn't like war. The reporter responds, but you've been fighting all your life. And Sinwar responds, I'm not saying I won't fight anymore. Indeed, I am saying that I don't want war anymore. I want the end of this siege. You walk to the beach at the sunset and you see these teenagers on the shore chatting, wondering what the world looks like across the sea, what life looks like. It is breaking, and it should break everyone. I want them

free. The reporter responds, borders have been basically sealed off for 11 years. Gaza doesn't even have water anymore. Only see. How is living here? And he says, what do you think? Fifty-five percent of the population is under 15. We are not speaking of terrorists. We are speaking of kids. They have no political affiliation. They have just fear. And I want them free. And I think in that you see a man again who sees himself in those youth and sees that he did not get to find out what life looks like elsewhere or what life looks like at all in a sense. And what he was fighting for, the reason he hardened himself and became the kind of man he was, is so that others wouldn't have to do that so that the youth of his country could have a life and have a future. And if you can't respect that, I just think you're fucking lost, you know? I don't know. Absolutely. And, you know, think about the men on the other side. You know, we talk about

Sinoir as like this person that we're supposed to be told is this terrible man and then Allison and I are humanizing in him by showing all of his life experiences and the brutality that he had to sort of take into his personality just to exist and live and lead the fight. But look at the other side of it. These comfortable, rich, hampered fucking scumbags. Think of Netanyahu. Think of Lindsay Graham. Think of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Matt Miller, Anthony Blinken, Smoltrich, Ben-Gavir. These people that have not faced a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what one day in the life of Sinwar was, pretending that they're the real men, they're the chest-thumping alpha males that are fighting, these brutal terrorists. That's who you are citing with when you don't humanize these resistance fighters, Hamas, the PFLP, DFLP, whatever, this higher resistance movement, the people that are born in this horrific condition. And at the same time, look at the, you know, just figures on the American right. What goes around in these circles?

Well, hard times create hard men, you know, hard men create good times, good times. You know, that whole bullshit they sit and they think that they're the ones that are the hard men. These are the hard men that are actually facing hard times doing everything they can to liberate their families, their children, their people from this horrific situation. And it is these hampered, soft, rich, assholes living in luxury they do not deserve that are sending the money and sending the weapons and calling the shots to kill people like this, to destroy them. And then with blood-soaked smiles, looking at you and me and saying, they're the villains, they're the bad guys, another terrorist killed. We rejected wholeheartedly and we'll never stop rejecting it. And our vision, our vision, as much as, you know, communists are dehumanized and told we're stupid and we're morally bankrupt and look at all the crimes of our truth, you know, all the shit that we hear all the time. What is our vision? Our vision is a world in which there is no more colonialism. There is no more imperialism. There is no more domination of one person over another. A world where nobody's boot is on anybody else's throat. A world in which it is not divided between the rich and the powerful. and the poor and powerless, or the exploiter and the exploited, the colonizer, the colonized,

but a world in which all humanity is respected and human beings work together across, you know, national histories and cultures to create the highest quality of life for the most amount of human beings possible. That's our vision. And that vision must be degraded by the rulers of the status quo. They must be by the people that dominate and run a system that is antithetic, to that basic impulse. And you might say that that vision is naive, that there is something deep in humanity that makes us greedy and shitty and evil and wanting to hurt other people. But we're saying the part of humanity that we're siding with is precisely that part of humanity that pushes

the boot off the neck and that part of humanity that can sit across the world and look at complete strangers who speak a different language than we speak, who are in a different culture than we are in who worship a different God, then we might worship and feel nothing but deep love, compassion, resonance in them and their struggle and to actually see ourselves in them. That is the part of humanity that we're fighting for. That's our vision. And so it must be shit on. It must be cartoonized and caricatured. It must be degraded as the greatest evil in all of history because the people who run this world, the sort of world that's the exact opposite of our vision, a world that we see today with misery and injustice and suffering and babies being

killed and the richest, most powerful, most comfortable people in the world telling us it's fine. This is how things are supposed to be. In fact, this is human nature. We reject that and we hold out a vision in which people like Sinwar don't have to spend their entire lives becoming hard, brutal men. They can actually live their lives and express their full humanity and contribute to the human species without worrying about bombs dropping on their heads or Israeli assassins shooting them in the back of their head, you know, when they're walking down the street or any other number of

ways in which the people with all the money, power, and control in this world try to dominate and maintain the status quo. So we're holding out our vision. We refuse any accusations that we are inhuman, that we're evil, that we're stupid. No, we are citing with the best of the human spirit while they try to convince us that the worst of the human spirit is all there is. I don't know that I have much to add to that other than, you know, we've signed off a few episodes saying this in our position is glory to the martyrs, right? And when we say that, we don't just mean the people who fought. We also mean the innocents who were killed, right? Glory to all of them, because all of their lives are a testament to the evil of colonialism and give us, you know, the reason to fucking fight against this thing and fight for the world that Brett is talking about.

And so that phrase in my mind encapsulates all the hopes, all the. the fears, all of this, and the commitment to keep going forward. So glory to the martyrs. I don't know.