Tarakum تراكم

by Nabil Mustafa

First published in The Sunday Paper, Issue 3: Resistance (July 2024)
Republished here to mark the first anniversary of the 7 October resistance operation

‘Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America.’

— Ghassan Kanafani

We have now crossed the second hundred days of genocide and witnessed Gaza upturned into a grey ramshackle of rubble. In the face of this, adversaries of imperialism everywhere must remind themselves of the critical nature of what is taking place: Gaza is liberating the whole global south. For daring to challenge the conditions of concentration and containment, its people and built environment have been slated for sacrifice to cover imperialism’s exposed loins. The operation to break the siege of Gaza broke much more than an apartheid fence. It was a material breach of the iron wall of imperialism’s West Asian outpost.

Kanafani’s words ground our anti-imperialism in an understanding of its world-embracing nature. For Kanafani, West Asia represents a load-bearing pillar of imperialism — or by another analogy, an essential vessel passing blood, oil, and commodities from the peripheries to the core. Gaza’s knife cracked the iron heart of imperialism, the ramifications of which will liberate the wretched of the earth, from Africa to Latin America, Asia, and the downtrodden of the imperial core.

The attack on October 7th was not just a trigger event with consequences well beyond the imagination of its actors. The immediate historiography of the Operation has been awash with Zionist genocidal fantasy. Framed by liberals as an outcome of the psychopathy of the brutalised, and by imperialists as a libidinal impulse of the repressed, the mainstream discourse on the Operation is attempting to sanitise it of its paradigm-shattering consequences.

Worse, still, is the trap that even supporters of the resistance tend to fall into, accusing the Palestinian liberation fighters of underestimating the possible ramifications of the attack. All these are fantasies that wittingly or unwittingly rob the colonised of their agency, the clarity of their reading of their own history, and their capacity for strategic deliberation. I will attempt to contextualise the current battle that is progressing the long march of Palestinian liberation from the vantage point of its most killable subjects, from Gaza, a small strip of land that will surely be the graveyard of the post-war Imperial order.

Live like a Porcupine

Gaza’s land is flat and only as long as a marathon. In the imagination of the enemy, Gaza stood as a sort of aquarium, its interior visible by a spying apparatus unparalleled in history. Siege, aid-dependence, and destitution are imposed through the control of the air, sea, and electromagnetic spectrum, rendering Gaza clear, predictable, and successfully contained — or so thought the occupier.

The resistance in Gaza sought to build capabilities to maximise its power despite the limitations set by the occupier. If the enemy’s power lies in its capacity to cover the sky with bombs and the earth with armour, tools must be devised to circumvent these powers.

Much remains unknown about the extent of Gaza’s tunnel network, but from all the information that has surfaced in the past eight months of war, we can confidently say the following:

Gaza’s resistance has built numerous tunnel networks, described by The Electronic Intifada journalist John Elmer as spiderwebs, stretching the length of Gaza in three dimensions. The tunnel network is vast and the majority of it unknown to the enemy. At the start of the war, Zionist media spoke of 500 kilometres of tunnels, and a few months later that number was raised to 700. Some tunnels, as we saw from the resistance’s media reports, are dug a few metres below the surface, operating as forward attack tunnels. While some have local functions, connecting points within a single neighbourhood, others can be thought of as highways, connecting different areas of the strip. Command-and-control tunnels are dug deeper than any of the currently available bunker-busting bombs can reach. Released captives reported walking for five hours in the tunnels, moving through at least five levels underground. Furthermore, Gaza’s tunnels are dynamic, living organisms, in a state of constant construction and destruction. Video reports released by the resistance clearly show freshly dug tunnel openings, appearing in the middle of the mustering positions of the enemy’s troops. The fighters prepare their tunnels with easy-to-dig access points, digging new openings, appearing behind enemy lines, and striking when most opportune. Furthermore, we have also seen the manner by which the resistance seals sections of the tunnels with blast doors, mines tunnel openings, and demolishes tunnel sections when necessary.

For Palestinians waging their war of liberation in the mid-60s, the experiences of Algeria and Vietnam stood out as powerful examples: that a people confronting the might of empire can, through sheer determination and steadfastness, prevail. In her autobiography, Leila Khaled writes of her awe at the example set by the Vietnamese:

Here was a people with an indomitable spirit, a people whose heroic deeds placed them among the gods; here was a people whose unbound humanity was a blessing to mankind.

And while these experiences inspired and motivated the Palestinians to believe in the necessity of liberation through armed struggle, the limitation imposed by geography made their own struggle categorically different. In Vietnam as in Algeria, the jungles and the deserts proved to be crucial areas of strategic depth. Fighters could retreat from battle to rest and heal before returning to the front lines; they could store and build material, and most importantly, they could preserve the command-and-control nodes of the revolution. The people of Gaza built, by their own hands and ingenuity, their own jungles and deserts. The tunnels of Gaza, the people’s strategic depth, moved the Palestinian struggle beyond overground limitations. Weapons-production workshops, training facilities, hospitals, command-and-control nodes, areas of retreat, and mustering positions have all been dug into the sands of Gaza. The defenders of Gaza move in three dimensions, manoeuvring in a world of their own making. Colonisers have long mapped the lands of the colonised, a technology they deployed to subjugate in all corners of the world. The defenders of Gaza invent their own maps, sovereigns mastering a cartography for liberation, in which the earth — their earth — is their comrade in struggle. It is for this very reason that the rain of bombs causing wanton destruction of the built environment matters little to the military capabilities of Gaza.

Fight like a Flea

When the Zionist forces aggressed on Gaza, they found themselves wholly unprepared for the battle the defenders had prepared for them. Every fighter in Gaza can singlehandedly demobilise the world’s most armoured tank. The resistance’s weapons-production innovations have been notable in this war, and three locally manufactured weapons have been extremely effective. The first is the Yassin 105, a tandem rocket-propelled grenade that can pierce more than 600mm of armour. It weighs less than five kilograms, and when launched in its effective range of under 150 metres, it renders the armoured Merkava tank defenceless. Its tandem design, having penetrated the vehicle's armour, follows with a secondary explosion that surely wreaks hellfire on the invaders inside. Each fighter, when placed correctly, can take on a multi-million-dollar tank, retreat to the tunnels, regroup, and live to destroy another murder machine. The second effective weapon is the anti-tank Shawaz Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP). Its conical shape allows its high-calibre explosion to concentrate its firepower in a single direction, sending liquid metal at high speeds to penetrate the toughest of armours. Fighters have recorded themselves traversing their destroyed cities, positioning the Shawaz within a few metres of armoured vehicles, and demobilising them with remarkable ease. Thirdly, the AlGhoul sniper rifle, with its armour-piercing 114mm bullet, has an effective range of two kilometres, a range that can place invaders anywhere on Gaza’s soil within its cross-hairs.

Recognising the asymmetries of power they face, the resistance in Gaza developed an agile defence strategy. With weapons light and effective, they have locked the enemy in an unwinnable battle of attrition.

The Gazan Hello

On the 7th of October the resistance of Gaza, for the first time since its 17-year siege, revealed the extent of its offensive capabilities. By all measures, the raid was a military success, in which several enemy positions were easily overrun and taken. The attack began with a barrage of over 4,000 missiles targeting over 160 locations. This was paired with a blinding operation that took out cameras, radar units, and automatic machine-gun posts, overwhelming several enemy positions in preparation for the crossing of the Gaza fence. Attacking over 50 positions on the Gaza envelope, the resistance fighters expertly moved from one objective to another, starting with the Beit Hanoun Crossing and seizing all the electronic devices of the jailers.

In Tal Jumeh, the resistance targeted the headquarters of the Gaza division, besting its soldiers in one-to-one combat, taking military captives and material. A few kilometres south, elite soldiers attacked the military base in Al ’Imara, the headquarters of 8200, the military intelligence unit infamous for spying on the entire Palestinian people and using their personal, intimate struggles as leverage to turn them to collaboration. Again, the resistance broke through. Even imperial stenographers of the Washington Post acknowledge that the fighters fought all the way to the spying base’s server room, presumably to seize the valuable data within. For days after the attack, the confusion and disorientation of the enemy's command and soldier core exposed glaring weaknesses in what had been articulated to the world as ‘the’ superior fighting force. As a reflection of this, the army engaged in one of the most severe mass killings of its own troops and subjects by any army in known history. Despite the fog the enemy censor has since placed on the events of the day, we can gather that the raid on October 7th was much more than an attack of pent-up passions. On the contrary, it was a military operation in a time of protracted war, and it demonstrated the feebleness of the enemy, the hollowness of its fighting doctrine, the overreliance of its troops on robots and machines, and the fragility of its (de)fences. It was not an attack seeking revenge against the civilian population of the enemy; instead, it was a military attack that saw the collapse of a myth — the superiority of the occupier. An army trained on breaking the arms of stone-throwing teenagers is no match for the determination of a people seeking to break their imprisonment.

The Unseen, Seen

The Zionist military doctrine stresses fast, overwhelming, and offensive wars. Its engagements compensate for the geography of Palestine by invading quickly, relying on air superiority to rain bombs on civilian centres, hoping to bring enemies to heel. With the resistance taking the initiative, its fighters revealed that this enemy knows only strategies of slaughter and can indeed trip and fall. The meticulous preparations for the defence of Gaza that the war has revealed, including geographic re-engineering, highly trained fighters, weapons stockpiles, and organisational capacity, prove that the resistance was prepared for a long, drawn-out war. The resistance has forced the enemy into a battle of attrition that goes against their training and military doctrine. It is no surprise that eight months into the war, for instance, we are still seeing unaccompanied armoured personnel carriers falling easy prey to Yassin archers. When the resistance announces the striking of over 1,500 vehicles throughout the war, each costing four million dollars and in limited supply, we must remember that each strike costs a fraction in comparison.

However, beyond what the war has revealed tactically, it has exposed a few vital facts that must be clear to us all. The first is that the local force projector of imperialism in West Asia, the Zionist entity, has wholly failed to defeat the most constrained of its regional enemies. This puts its utility for imperialism into question. Re-establishing Zionism's capacity for deterrence is essential for its allies. Second, the war revealed the limits of American patronage. The entity can count on unlimited financial, material, and diplomatic support, including active engagements that shield it from interstate attacks. However, the patron will not accompany it in an offensive/pre-emptive inter-state war. This is material evidence of American decline. Caught between a European quagmire and anticipating an Asian confrontation, an active engagement in West Asia will force it to retreat on other fronts. Moreover, the war has exposed the hollowness of the rules-based order and the trashing of its sacred institutions in service of genocide. This is a force-based order imposed on the oppressed through sheer violence and brutality.

These facts have awakened the world to the hypocrisy of imperialism and exposed its weaknesses. In this forgotten corner of the world, imperial planners presumed to lock away two million people. Their hubris and supremacism blinded them to the slow and meticulous preparation of the orphans of Gaza.

More than a decade-and-a-half of digging, building, manufacturing, and training developed the weakest among us into an effective fighting force, now in their eighth month of battle against the most equipped, armoured, and supported army the world has known. The fighters of Gaza have revealed that the enemy is a paper tiger, a king with no clothes, an entity that can indeed be defeated. By shattering the mythology of their enemy, they have allowed us to see the path to our own liberation in the imperial core. All we need, it seems, is Gazan determination and precision to forge that path of liberation for us all.

Contact: hello@thesundaypaper.com.au