How we’ll keep fighting genocide after Election Day.

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2024/10/30/how-well-keep-fighting-genocide-after-election-day/

Every level of the Israeli government is currently pushing to intensify the genocide of Palestinians and expand its spiraling violence into the entire region. The Israeli military is bombing Iran and Lebanon, massacring Palestinians in North Gaza, starving the entire population, and just invaded the last hospital in Gaza. Meanwhile, the Israeli parliament just voted to ban UNRWA, the largest aid agency in Palestine. 

For over a year, this genocidal plan has been armed and enabled by the Biden administration and both parties in Congress. 

At the same time, we know that the outcomes of Election Day on Tuesday could have major consequences for our movements, communities, and our organizing terrain, including a new wave of rapidly escalating far-right attacks and censorship. While we don’t know what will happen, we know that our commitments don’t change: the only choice is to keep up the fight for an immediate end to U.S. weapons to Israel.

This is our strategy, regardless of who wins the election:

1. Demand and force a shift in U.S. government policy

The movement for Palestinian liberation lives in a space filled with contradictions.

The U.S. government is the main enabler of Israeli impunity, allowing the Israeli regime to continue the genocide. This makes U.S. policy an urgent target for our movement.

However, the U.S. government ultimately sees the Israeli regime as a guardian of its own interests in the region — a view encouraged with billions of dollars spent enriching military and weapons contractors, and lobbying by far-right, pro-genocide groups like AIPAC. So even as our fight for a real, permanent end to Israeli oppression of Palestinians gains power, we know that the U.S. government will be the last domino to fall.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t cracks in the consensus. A year of unending horrors and mass protest changed many people’s minds about U.S. support for Israel, and we’re not the only ones who want a change in federal policy. Recent polling shows that 77% of Democratic voters don’t want to send more weapons to Israel — neither do 62% of Independents, or 61% of everyone polled. 

Right now, the Joint Resolution of Disapproval for Israeli arms sales introduced by Senator Sanders is the most immediate opportunity we have to push our demand to stop arming Israel — and that’s why our sibling organization JVP Action has been all out to support this legislation since it was introduced.

2.  Build financial pressure on the genocide economy

While the U.S. government’s military aid to Israel continues to funnel billions right back to weapons manufacturers in the U.S., the apartheid and genocide economy of the Israeli regime is tanking. 

This is a major opportunity for our movement — and makes it all the more critical for us to escalate our ongoing strategy of boycott and divestment campaigns.

JVP’s new campaign to divest from Israel Bonds, direct investments in the Israeli government, is one example of how we can capitalize on this faltering by cutting the flow of funds to the apartheid regime. Across the country, students and people of conscience are pushing their institutions to divest from Israeli genocide and the U.S. war economy. 

Financial pressure works two ways: both materially weakening the institutions complicit in genocide, and demonstrating the growing international opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

3. Plan and organize strategic mobilizations

We’ve been fighting for a year to end this horrific genocide. Over that year, our institutions have made it remarkably clear how resistant they are to democratic pressure. 

But we’ve also had smaller wins across the country, passing ceasefire and divestment resolutions, that teach us important lessons about how we can mobilize the most effectively right now.

1.   We need to create material impact within specific campaigns. In this context, we’re most likely to make an impact through mobilizations that escalate pressure on existing targets, whether these are politicians, institutions invested in the Israeli government and the U.S. war economy, or other key pressure points. Escalating effectively will require bringing in and mobilizing new constituencies that matter to decision-makers, and demonstrate the growing mass demand to stop arming Israel.

2.   We must continue to shift the narrative in ways that expose what’s really happening. The U.S. keeps sending bombs to the Israeli military because of its financial and imperial interests — not because of Jewish safety. Actions that accessibly intervene in the mainstream narratives here build crucial pressure on elected decision-makers.

Our fight continues.

We’ll move forward with these strategic filters, regardless of who wins the election.It’s never been more important for our movement to work on multiple levels, targeting key political and financial pressure points, to advance our demand for an arms embargo.

Time won’t stop next Tuesday. Both candidates have made it clear that they intend to continue the Biden administration policy of arming Israel’s genocide. For all of us devastated and enraged by everything we’ve seen in the past year, our only choice is recommitment to the fight.

Spain cancels arms deal with Israeli company worth billions

Madrid has been vocal about Israeli war crimes and was among several European nations to recognize Palestinian statehood this year

News Desk

OCT 29, 2024

https://thecradle.co/articles/spain-cancels-arms-deal-with-israeli-company-worth-billions

The Spanish government has canceled a contract to buy ammunition for its Civil Guard police force from an Israeli defense company, Madrid announced in a statement on 29 October.

“The Spanish government maintains the commitment not to sell weapons to the Israeli state since the armed conflict broke out in the territory of Gaza,” Spain’s Interior Ministry announced. 

“Although in this case it is an acquisition of ammunition, the Interior Ministry has initiated the administrative procedure to cancel the purchase,” it added. 

It also said Israeli firms will be excluded from any outstanding tenders. 

The Cadena SER radio station reported earlier that Spain’s Civil Guard police force had agreed to a sale of over 15 million nine-millimeter rounds for $6.48 million from Guardian LTD Israel. 

The announcement comes the week after the Spanish Defense Ministry told local media that it had halted the purchase of weapons from Israel. The European country had said it would stop arms sales to Israel after the start of the war on 7 October 2023.

This decision marks the first signal that the Spanish pledge will include purchases from Israel and not just sales.

Spain has been vocal about Israel’s genocide and continuous war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as in Lebanon. 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez urged other members of the EU on 14 October to suspend the bloc’s free trade agreement with Israel. 

“The European Commission must respond once and for all to the formal request made by two [Spain and Ireland] to suspend the association agreement with Israel if it is found, as everything suggests, that human rights are being violated,” Sanchez said. 

Spain was among several countries, including Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia, that recognized Palestine as a state in late May. 

In September, Madrid hosted a high-level gathering of Muslim and European states aimed at discussing ways to end Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip and formulate a timeline for the implementation of a two-state solution.

Spain was the first European state to back the case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). 

Georgia: Election was just as much about the economy

Closer ties to Europe have not helped Tbilisi on the fiscal front, just look at the numbers

Ian Proud

Oct 28, 2024

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/georgia-elections-eu/

Indignant western armchair pundits and politicians have fallen into collective rage, signallng that the general election result in Georgia equated to the theft of a European choice.

The opposition to the apparent winner, the ruling Georgia Dream party, is now being joined by international voices, including the U.S., calling for an investigation into claims of election violations.

But Western politicians, journalists, and NGOs have cynically, and in a way, willfully ignored the wider economic picture, and have instead spun up the election as an existential struggle between Europe (European Union) and Russia. There is so much nuance here that needs to be examined and is not.

For one, study the vast amount of credible economic data and you’ll uncover the unpalatable truth that Georgia has been a net loser from closer EU economic ties thus far. And that the war in Ukraine, which the EU is helping to bankroll, has halted progress on key economic priorities in Georgia, including reducing unemployment.

Taking a step back, Georgia has become an economic dynamo since 2012 through its sovereign endeavors. This small, proud nation with a population of 3.1 million, ranks number 7 in the World Bank’s ease of doing business index, ahead of the UK and every EU country except Denmark.

Average economic growth has been a throaty 5.2%, 6.2% percent if you subtract the pandemic contraction in 2020. GDP per capita has increased by 79%. According to the World Bank, poverty reduced from 70.6% to 40.1% between 2010 and 2023, through sound macroeconomic management. There’s still more work to do to get it lower.

Georgia’s economic growth performance has largely been driven by domestic investment. As a percentage of GDP, investment has averaged a brisk 26.6% per year since 1996, compared to the EU (21.8%) and the UK (18.8%).

Yet signing the EU Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) in 2014 didn’t unleash a tidal wave of new European investment into Georgia.

EU foreign direct investment in 2024 was only $65k higher than in 2014, at an average 29.6% of total FDI in Georgia over that period. Russia is a significant but not key investment player, accounting for just 5.4% of FDI in 2023.

If we look at trade, the signing of the DCFTA, in theory at least, should have driven a mutually beneficial surge in trade. But that simply hasn’t happened.

The European Commission website proudly announces that Europe is Georgia’s biggest trade partner. But EU trade with Georgia accounts for just 20.9% of the total. And that is only because Georgia has been flooded with European exports since 2016.

In fact, western European states have been eating Georgia’s lunch when it comes to trade. On average, Georgia’s eight largest western European trade partners (including the UK) now export four times as much to Georgia than they import. The biggest culprit is Germany which in 2022 exported 7.8 times more ($673 million) to Georgia than it received in imports ($86 million). European exports to Georgia had quadrupled to 3.6 billion Euros by 2023 and are still rising.

Yet, Georgian exports to the EU have stood still. Why?

Look on the EU website and you will find 58 separate trade defense investigations by Europe against Georgia since 2021, looking to restrict imports of everything from tires to tinplate and tableware. Europe actively places barriers against Georgian imports. Georgia has been accused of helping Russia evade export sanctions, but the evidence for that is weak.

Look East and you will see a different picture. Bulgaria exports as much to Georgia as the powerful western EU nations combined, yet is the only EU trading nation that imports more from Georgia than it exports.

Because trade is all about gravity. Sofia is much closer to Tbilisi than Strasbourg. Countries trade more with those countries closer to their borders because the cost of trade is lower.

Through a mix of gravity and history, 62.2% of Georgia’s exports go to its eight biggest Eurasian trade partners (former Soviet states, Turkey, China and India). And the trade balance is more even than it is with Europe, as Eurasian states export 1.8 times more to Georgia than they import. Russia exported 2.9 times more than Georgia in 2022 because of a surge in fuel exports. However, Georgian exports to Russia have also increased by 56% since 2017 and now make up 9.4% of the total.

The major economic shock Georgia has had to confront has been the war in Ukraine. A net 87,200 people from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus emigrated to Georgia between 2022 and 2023, two thirds of them Russian. Historically, Georgia had fairly even net migration, but the war-induced influx prompted unprecedented house price inflation of around 35% with rents up by as much as 50%.

High inflation during the first two years of the Ukraine war appears to have been tamed by the National Bank of Georgia which hiked interest rates to their highest level since the Global Financial Crisis.

An economic flip side, is that Georgia saw a much needed boost in its current account which recorded its only significant surplus since the Soviet period in the third quarter of 2022. This was driven by surging service exports, that is, foreign money spent by migrants in Georgia. Foreign Exchange reserves also rose to a post-Soviet high.

But the influx of Russians fleeing the draft undoubtedly increased resentment and social tension in part driven by historical enmity, including around the 2008 Georgian war. But it runs deeper. Georgia’s impressive reduction in unemployment has also flat-lined, having dropped from 20.6% in 2009 to 11.6% in 2020. Worryingly, 26.7% of Georgia’s young people are unemployed, and have seen young, digitally nomadic, middle class Russians crowding out opportunities in high-valued-added sectors.

The West has framed the election and its results in almost Manichean terms, a battle of light and dark, between Europe and Russia. They have positioned Georgia Dream’s founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, as a Kremlin stooge. Yes, Ivanishvili, like many oligarchs, gained his wealth during the chaos of Soviet collapse. His nationalism is rooted in a conservatism that has echoes of Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary.

But his economic approach in Georgia has been driven by specifically Georgian considerations. And elections always, ultimately, get tipped by domestic issues.

By today’s election count, it would seem a majority of Georgian people chose prosperity over war. It’s time to let Georgia’s government get back to the task of strengthening their wonderful country still further.

Ian Proud

Ian Proud was a member of His Britannic Majesty's Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. Prior to Moscow, he organized the 2013 G8 Summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, working out of 10 Downing Street. He recently published his memoir, "A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019."

Israel’s Biblical Wars of ‘Self Defense’: The Myth of the ‘Seven War Fronts’

by Ramzy Baroud 

Posted on October 25, 2024

https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2024/10/24/israels-biblical-wars-of-self-defense-the-myth-of-the-seven-war-fronts/

Israeli officials keep repeating that Israel is fighting on multiple fronts. The truth is that Israel chooses to fight on multiple fronts. The two claims are fundamentally different.

Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went as far as saying that his country is fighting on seven different war fronts, all driven by the objective of “defending ourselves against… barbarism.”

These supposedly defensive wars are also carried out in the name of protecting “civilization against those who seek to impose a dark age of fanaticism on all of us,” Netanyahu said in a speech in early October.

There will be no need to counter Netanyahu’s diatribes. It should be obvious that neither genocide is classified as self-defense, nor does preserving human civilization include burning people alive, as was the case with Sha’ban Al-Dalou, who was horrifically killed alongside his family in the recent Israeli shelling of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

But is Israel being forced to fight on seven fronts?

According to Netanyahu, but also other top political and military officials, the fronts are Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and groups in Syria, Iraq and the West Bank.

Though the major fighting is only taking place in Gaza and Lebanon, the official Israeli line is keen on exaggerating the number of war fronts to continue capitalizing on the generous US and western military and political support. More wars for Israel also translate into more money.

Of course, Israel is fighting actual wars too; a war of extermination and genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, which has killed and wounded more than 150,000 people in the course of one year.

There is also a war in the West Bank, carried out with the precise aim of subduing all forms of resistance, so that Israel may accelerate its settler-colonial project in the occupied territories.

The above is not an inference, but a statement of fact, based on Netanyahu’s own declared policies. “Israel must have security control over all the territory west of the Jordan,” he said during a news conference last January. To be more precise, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” he said. ‘Security control” is an Israeli euphemism for territorial expansion.

In an interview with the European public service channel, Arte, Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich said Israel would expand “little by little” to eventually encompass the whole of the Palestinian territories, in addition to Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and other Arab countries.

“It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus,” he said.

Religious prophecies are particularly dangerous when they are embraced by unhinged extremist politicians who wield the political clout and military power to put them into action.

Netanyahu is a leading member of the same group. He has already justified his genocide in Gaza and wars everywhere according to religious texts, where he sees his army as the Israelites fighting the Amalekites.

These religious sentiments are common in Israel’s political discourses throughout history. However, they have taken center stage in recent years under a succession of far-right governments, mostly formed by Netanyahu. They see in the Gaza war an opportunity to bring about what Smotrich, then the vice-chairman of the Knesset called in 2017 as “Israel’s decisive plan”.

Ironically named ‘One Hope’, Smotrich’s plan is primarily centered on the annexation of the whole of the West Bank, which he, like Netanyahu and others, refers to as ‘Judea and Samaria’. The plan entails “imposing sovereignty on all of Judea and Samaria”, with the “concurrent acts of settlements”, as in “the establishing of cities and towns”, with the aim of “creating a clear and irreversible reality on the ground”.

Smotrich’s plan, which is being implemented, now that he is one of the two kingmakers in Netanyahu’s government – the other is Itamar Ben-Gvir – was prepared years before the ongoing war on Gaza, and is being implemented, per his own admission, “little by little” ever since.

Israel may claim that it is fighting a war on seven or seventy fronts. It may also assign itself the role of the savior of civilizations. But the truth cannot be hidden, especially when the Israelis themselves are the ones who are disclosing their sinister intentions.

Even the ongoing war on Lebanon, which Israeli leaders, along with their US backers, have dubbed a defensive war, is now being promoted by some Israeli politicians and their rightwing supporters as another expansionist war, or more accurately a quest for “Greater Israel”

There is a difference between a country fighting a defensive war on multiple fronts and another fighting for colonial expansion, for regional hegemony and for military dominance driven by religious prophecies. Those who have chosen the latter path, as Israel has, cannot claim to be in a state of self-defense.

“Self-defense in international law refers to the inherent right of a State to use of force in response to an armed attack,” the International Red Cross states on its website.  This definition does not apply to a state that is itself a military occupier, thus is in an active state of hostility and unlawful use of violence.

Netanyahu and Smotrich, however, are hardly concerned about international or humanitarian laws. They are driven by ominous, expansionist agendas. If they succeed, more deadly wars are sure to follow. The international community must do everything in its power to ensure their failure.

How the Axis of Resistance is shaping the Middle East

By Mohammad Ataie

14 October 2024

https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/middle-east-axis-resistance-shaping-how

This unprecedented mobilisation of multiple fronts - a network of allied states and movements - in support of the Palestinian resistance has been a long time coming

With Israel still in full assault on Gaza and Lebanon, the year-long multi-front war escalated sharply on 1 October 2024, when Iran launched a massive missile strike on military installations across Israel.

According to Tehran, this attack was a response to the Israeli assassinations of Iranian, Lebanese, and Palestinian figures, notably Hamas's political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

This marked Iran's second direct strike on Israel in a conflict that pro-Israel pundits describe as a "six-front war", and the convergence of Middle Eastern conflicts into "one big war".

Since 7 October 2023, Israel has waged a war from Gaza and the West Bank to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran.

As early as 8 October, Hezbollah started a calculated military escalation against Israel, which was followed by attacks from Yemen, Iran, and Iraq under the banner of "unity of fields".

This month, Iran's major missile attack on Israel marked the height of coordinated operations. Abu Obaida, spokesperson for Hamas's military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, described the moment as the convergence of the ummah's flames of resistance in the skies of Palestine.

This unprecedented mobilisation of multiple fronts in support of the Palestinian resistance has been a long time coming. It marked a culmination in the decades-long convergence of actors who together comprise the Axis of Resistance - a network of allied states and movements, including Iran, Syria, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah (also known as the Houthi movement) in Yemen, and various Iraqi forces.

Western policymakers and media dismiss the Axis of Resistance as a "terror network" with no history or context and frame it as an expansionist threat to stability in the Middle East.

Following the assassination of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah on 28 September, US President Joe Biden praised Israel's air strike in Beirut's southern suburb, describing it as a strike against "the Iranian-supported terrorist groups" and their "reign of terror".

Israeli officials have called the axis an octopus: "Iran is the head of the octopus, and you see its tentacles all around from the Houthis to Hezbollah to Hamas."

After the Israeli defence minister called Palestinians human animals, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman described the axis as an "invasive parasite". Taking the task of justifying the Israeli genocide to a new low, he wrote that Iran is a parasitoid wasp and the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are its eggs, concluding: "We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle."

Denying humanity and the agency of these actors in the region (they are typically called proxies or tentacles) goes hand in hand with denying their resistance.

While the mainstream media frequently de-historicises and dehumanises the Axis of Resistance, its ideological roots emerged before the Iranian revolution in 1979. It has centred Palestine as its ideological unifier and evolved through a transnational circulation of people, ideas, and expertise, making the axis an influential force in the region.

Iranian revolution

Palestine had an indelible imprint on the 1978-79 revolution in Iran and its global vision. From the outset, when Ayatollah Khomeini staged a revolt from within the religious establishment, the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and Israel's ties with the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, were central to his revolutionary struggle.

In 1968, Khomeini issued a religious decree in support of the Palestinian fedayeen guerrilla forces, allowing his Shia Muslim followers to donate alms (zakat) to them. During the 1970s, Fatah, which was the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), emerged as a crucial node in the transnational anti-Shah movement.

It embraced the Iranian leftist and clerical revolutionaries and provided expertise, training, and connections with liberation fighters from around the globe.

Under the leadership of experienced commanders such as Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir, Fatah stood at the apex of the PLO for its strong leadership, resources, skilled cadres, and its all-encompassing ideology.

PLO leaders and roving Iranian revolutionaries were brothers in arms in the 1970s. Following the 1979 revolution, the PLO played an essential role in the establishment of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the liberation of Palestine inspired its global vision.

Many co-founders of the IRGC - among them Mohammad Montazeri and Abbas Aqa-Zamani - received training in the Palestinian refugee camps in the 1970s.

They drew on the military training, expertise, and global ties they inherited from Fatah to build up the military arm of the revolution. Palestine was also central to the revolution's global vision, which was influenced by anti-colonial pan-Islamism and Third Worldist solidarity.

Religious revolutionaries in Iran were influenced by pan-Islamists, like Sayyid Jamaluddin al-Afghani and Hasan al-Banna, and advocated the unification of Muslims against imperialism.

Palestine, as an Islamic ecumenical cause, was at the heart of the unification to which revolutionary clerics aspired.

The 1978-79 revolution was also imbued with Third World solidarity. The Iranian revolutionaries found lessons and rejoiced in the struggles of Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt against colonialism and neocolonialism.

Palestine was at the intersection of these liberation struggles and the ecumenical vision of clerical revolutionaries. To them, it was a struggle at the core of the conflict between Islam and global arrogance (Istikbar-i Jahani/al-sticker al-ʿalami, or imperialism).

Creation of the Axis

The Axis of Resistance emerged after 1979 during several crucial events, chief among them the 1978-79 revolution in Iran, the 1980 invasion of Iran by Iraq, and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel.

Iraq, under President Saddam Hussein, was fearful of the spread of the Iranian revolution, and Israel was concerned with an emerging PLO-Iran axis in Lebanon.

These invasions, which sought to contain the revolution within Iran's borders, instead drew Iran to Syria, seeding the Axis of Resistance. Thus, unlike the prevailing narratives in western media that describe the axis as expansionist, it originated as a defensive partnership between Iran and Syria.

At the time, Iran and Syria shared geopolitical concerns regarding Saddam's ambitions in the region. They feared the fall of Lebanon to the camp of Arab regimes like Jordan and Egypt, which had recognised Israel.

Between these two factors, Israel emerged as the enduring influence in consolidating the Iranian Syrian alliance.  

In June 1982, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon, resulting in massive destruction and massacres, during which close to 50,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed.

The invasion managed to push the PLO from Lebanon, only to have it replaced with a mightier armed resistance. This marked the rise of the Islamic resistance in both the Lebanese and Palestinian spheres.

Hezbollah emerged from the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance to the Israeli invasion and managed to push out the Israeli army from Beirut and most of Lebanon's territory to southern Lebanon by 1985.

The cooperation between Iran and Syria, by providing bases, military training and arms, was crucial in Hezbollah's success against the Israeli army, which led to the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon in 2000, excluding Shebaa Farms.

These achievements climaxed in July 2006, when Israel launched an all-out attack on Lebanon after Hezbollah's fighters captured Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid, to exchange them for Lebanese prisoners in Israel.

Israel unleashed its military on Lebanon, declaring that the war would not stop until it crushed Hezbollah. Thirty-three days later, Israel agreed to a ceasefire without achieving any of its goals: no soldiers were returned, and Hezbollah emerged from the war both militarily and politically stronger.

These achievements solidified Hezbollah's image as the only armed resistance organisation to have forced Israel to surrender occupied territories. Indeed, Hezbollah obliterated Israel's long-standing red line: no compromise in the face of the armed resistance.

The PLO was influential in Hezbollah's formation. Besides the galvanising impact of the Palestinian struggle on the founders of Hezbollah, some of its key leaders, like Imad Mughniyeh or Abu Hassan Salameh, were originally members of Fatah.

Salameh, a native of Jabal Amil in southern Lebanon, exemplified Fatah's initial influence on Hezbollah, including the party's steadfast commitment to Palestinian armed resistance. He was so popular among Palestinians that Arafat gave him the nickname of the fallen Palestinian commander, Ali Hassan Salameh, who was assassinated by Mossad in 1979.

As a commander of Hezbollah from 1982 until his assassination by Israel in 1999, Abu Hassan Salameh orchestrated resistance in the south and provided extensive support to the PLO, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.

Palestinian resistance

The transformation of the Palestinian resistance, led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, has been notably shaped by the Islamic resistance in Lebanon.

The historic humiliation of Israel in 2000 was a galvanising moment for Palestinians, who had long been disillusioned with the Oslo Accords. The Second Intifada (2000-2005) flared up against this backdrop, with a resurgence of armed resistance against the Zionists. Hamas and Islamic Jihad persisted in building up their military capabilities, especially in the liberated Gaza.

Israel's 2005 disengagement from Gaza was a pivotal moment in the trajectory of the Palestinian resistance, not only for Gaza but also for advancing the broader goal of Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea.

Through collaboration with the Axis, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas and al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad, have steadily developed their military capabilities and expertise, posing a substantial challenge to the Israeli army.

From a reliance on machine guns at the time of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, their arsenal has evolved to include missile technology capable of striking Tel Aviv and beyond with significant destructive force. Upgrading such military capabilities stemmed from long cooperation with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, which shared expertise in the development of missiles and drones with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

This capability was demonstrated in different battles, notably during the 11-day Sword of Jerusalem battle of 2021, revealing the resistance's capacity to confront and disrupt Israel across its territory effectively.

Since 2000, the Axis of Resistance has unfurled in the crucible of wars and conflicts across the region. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Islamic State invasion in 2014 have brought several Iraqi militant groups into the Axis.

In the aftermath of the 2011-2012 Yemen Revolution, Ansar Allah has firmly sided with the Axis, developing bonds with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the IRGC.

Yet, Palestine, in the intersection of Islamic ecumenicalism and the Third Worldist liberation, has remained a unifying factor among the Axis's diverse actors who pursue their ideological and political agenda in various national contexts, sometimes in conflicting ways.

Tensions and conflicts

Far from being celebratory, the Axis's history has been marked by many tensions and conflicts over inter-Arab politics and the diverging pan-Arab, leftist, and Islamist leanings of its partners.

At fraught junctures, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas diverged and even collided, sparking rumours and speculations about the imminent demise of their partnerships.

During the formative years of Syrian Iranian relations in the 1980s, disagreements surfaced between Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Khomeini over a range of issues, including the Iranian link with Arafat and the Islamic opposition in Syria, over Hezbollah and Amal in Lebanon, and the Iran-Iraq war.

The revolutionary clerics in Iran sympathised with the Muslim Brotherhood and maintained ties with a faction of the Syrian Brotherhood, which worried Assad. While Iran's relationship with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood remained limited, the clergy's support for Lebanese Sunni movements and Hezbollah led to major tensions between Damascus and Tehran in Lebanon.

Assad was initially distrustful of Hezbollah and feared it would strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and back his archfoe, Arafat. Assad was also wary of an Iranian influence in Lebanon, which he saw as Syria's backyard.

Throughout the 1980s, differences and disagreements between Damascus and Tehran put Hezbollah on a collision course with Syria and led to a massacre of 28 Hezbollah members by the Syrian army in 1987.

At the same time, there was also a rivalry and conflict between Hezbollah and the pro-Syrian Amal, as the latter feared losing ground within the Shia community to the former. The Hezbollah-Amal conflict, which became known as the War of Brothers, lasted throughout the late 1980s until Syria and Iran sponsored an agreement between the two Lebanese groups in 1990.

Hezbollah recognised Syria's paramount role in Lebanon, which allowed it to protect its arms and ties to Iran.

As Tehran and Damascus consolidated their partnership in the 1990s, Iran's support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance forces became increasingly linked to its alliance with Syria. Thus, it took a decade before Tehran and Damascus reached a modus vivendi, defying many expectations about the collapse of the partnership.

However, in the wake of the 2003 US invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, tensions began to surface between Tehran and Damascus over their differing visions for a post-Saddam political order.

Syrians wanted a role for the former ruling Baath Party, while Iran actively undermined it. A common enemy was gone, giving rise to speculations about the possible demise of this partnership. Still, the partnership endured, managing to exceed expectations.

Crisis and uprisings

With the post-2010 Arab uprisings, the Axis of Resistance faced one of its most challenging crises when anti-regime protests swept Syria, and the country took a dark turn into civil war.

The crackdown against protesters and political dissidents in Syria and the subsequent role of Iran undermined the legitimacy of both regimes. Iran has also suppressed numerous activists and protesters in recent years.

As the protests in Syria militarised and developed into a war with an array of regional and international players, Hezbollah, in early 2013, began deepening its involvement in the war.

Hezbollah faced a mounting backlash both inside Lebanon and across the region for neglecting its resistance role against Israel and entering the civil war in Syria.

In early 2012, Hamas quietly abandoned its base in Syria, revealing fault lines within the Axis over Syria.

In the eyes of Assad, Hamas betrayed him and sided with his archenemy, the Muslim Brotherhood. In a moment of divide across the region, which appeared to be sectarian, losing Hamas posed a significant setback for the Axis. Yet Hamas's relationship with Iran and Hezbollah did not break.

Even the military wing of the movement, the Qassam Brigades, continued to build up its capabilities through working with the IRGC's Quds Force and Hezbollah.

In a few years, the mediation role of the former IRGC's Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani and Hezbollah's Nasrallah revived the relationship between Syria and Hamas, culminating in a Hamas leadership visit to Damascus in 2022.

These efforts unfolded as the US, under both Trump and Biden, vigorously pursued the Abraham Accords to create a new Middle East centred on normalisation with Israel. It replaced the so-called Israeli peace with Palestinians with an Israeli normalisation with the autocrats in the region, chief among them the ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and UAE.

However, Hamas's actions on 7 October not only derailed the Abraham Accords but also revived the Axis of Resistance.

Even with the assassination of Hezbollah's leader in September 2024, unravelling the Axis remains a remote possibility.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wish for a new Middle East and the revival of the Abraham Accords will need much more than air strikes, intelligence sabotage, and assassinations of resistance leaders.

'Global Palestine'

For four decades, the Axis has evolved into a significant force shaping the political landscape of the Middle East. How has the Axis survived its many contradictions and paradoxes in a volatile region which has historically seen many short-lived alliances?

What can explain the realignment of Hamas within the Axis, which, to the surprise of many observers, has derailed yet another US grand vision for the Middle East?

After all, to Zionists, the alliance between Arabs, Iranians, Sunnis, and the Shia is "unnatural", and according to their sectarian views of Middle Eastern societies and politics, it should have crumbled long ago.

It would have been difficult to imagine this longevity without the global pro-Palestine movement and the cause of liberating al-Quds, a rallying point for the ummah (the Muslim community).

In the words of the Islamic Jihad founder Fathi al-Shiqaqi: "Palestine and the unification…constitute the two sides of the Islamic agenda" in the face of "fragmentation [al-tajz'ia] and the Zionist entity; the two sides of the colonial scheme."

Beyond being a cause for Muslims, Palestine remains a quintessential Third World issue. Its connection with broader struggles for social, economic, and environmental justice continues to be one of the most unifying issues within the diverse global justice movement.

Radiating both Third Worldist solidarity and Islamic ecumenicalism, the heroes and martyrs of Palestine have unified the elements of the Axis beyond sectarian identities and political disagreements.

Since the early 1980s, the Axis's growth has notably changed the power dynamics between it and Israel.

There was a time when Israel deemed going to war a "luxury with minimal losses".

In the days leading up to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, then chief of staff of the Israeli forces, Raphael Eitan, bragged that Israel has "got a well-oiled, well-prepared military machine. Why not use it then?"

As the Israeli army advanced into Beirut, some Lebanese and Palestinian fighters buried their arms and fled.

After the 2000 liberation of Lebanon, Nasrallah recalled the story of those fighters, proclaiming that "some buried their weapons in the dirt in 1982 when the Zionist army entered Lebanon. We will bury the Israelis should they return to our land again'.

Israel's swift wars, fought with minimal losses on the lands of others and resulting in decisive victories, are a vestige of a bygone era. This change owes much to the four decades of transsectarian and transnational solidarity and cooperation between the partners of the Axis of Resistance.