The idea that the Palestinian people have only been able to persist because of their religion is ridiculous to me. They are resisting because colonialism, apartheid and genocide are very bad things to which nobody would want to be subjected, not because of Islam. If Palestinians were atheists, is he suggesting that they wouldn’t have the strength or the will to resist? Would their lack of a belief in the supernatural turn them into doormats for Isn’treal?
I like Hakim’s content, but his position on religion is quite frustrating. He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second. Also, Joram van Klaveren is still a right-winger.
People are really taking his comment about Islam being a driving force in the Palestinian national liberation struggle to mean the main driving force or even worse, the only driving force are not reading the comment correctly. Every single national liberation struggle has an ideological component which drives the struggle alongside material conditions. Even something like “restoring our once glorious empire,” which various factions of the Chinese national liberation struggle embraced, counts as ideology. The material component of the Palestinian national liberation struggle should be a given and frankly deserves little mention for how obvious it is. The Palestinians are blowing up tanks and merking IOF goons because Palestinians don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. There, that’s your material analysis. It doesn’t need to be longer than a sentence. It’s the ideological motivation that’s far more interesting and that actually warrants paragraphs to outline, which Hakim did. The material motivations are obvious to all, even to people who refuse to accept Marxism, while the ideological motivations aren’t as obvious to an Anglophonic audience that isn’t predominately Muslim.
As for the recommendation of the Quran, well no shit, it turns out the Islamic Resistance Movement uses the Quran as its foundational text, and it would behoove anyone attempting to make a critical analysis of a political group or movement to read that groups’ foundational text. Imagine someone criticizing an ML party or even Marxism-Leninism in general without ever reading State and Revolution or criticizing Marxism without reading any text by Marx a la Jordan Peterson. The gigachad who planted the warhead on the tank did it while reciting a Quranic verse. I would think that it should inspire people to actually read the Quran to understand why he would recite it instead of going, “opium of the masses” like some Reddit atheist. And you can’t just wave around “material conditions” as if that would automatically lead people to perform acts of great courage. Material conditions might provide the clay, but it’s ideology that molds the clay.
At the end of the day, the community note isn’t an all-encompassing analysis. It’s, as Hakim himself stated, merely providing context to the Palestinians’ ideology (political Islam) for people who might not have pick up on it because they aren’t Muslim (his audience).