One year on from the Al Aqsa Flood

From petals to property damage, rs21 Glasgow comrades report on the city’s response to the anniversary of October 7th, and argue that the year of genocide must also be recognised as a year of resistance.

For millions, October 7th 2024 was marked by deep grief at the unremitting genocide against Palestinians, and the seemingly unending escalation of Zionist aggressions, most recently upon Lebanon. However, we have also seen a year of inspiring resistance movements in Palestine. The humiliating slap to the much-trumpeted Zionist security system, a guerilla offensive of 4,500 fighters that destroyed surveillance apparatuses and broke lines of defence both psychological and material, cross-faction organisation, and now the pushback against Zionist troops as they attempt a ground invasion of Lebanon.

From October 8th, Hezbollah launched rockets from Southern Lebanon. From October 10th, Ansar Allah launched missiles at targets of the Israeli State, and targeted American and British ships bound for the occupation ports. Resistance operations in the West Bank escalated, with cell formations that have outsmarted both the Israeli Occupation Force and the repressive work of the Palestinian Authority.

The autonomy and dignity of the Palestinian resistance ignited solidarity movements across the world. While each local struggle can only grapple with its own context, each can learn from the principles of Palestinian resistance. Below we offer a few happenings from Glasgow across the week, along with a report from a workshop on Al Thawabet, the red lines of Palestinian struggle.

We need organised workplaces and direct action

On the eve of 7 October, a variety of direct actions took place across the city. Every Barclays ATM on Glasgow’s streets was put out of order, by filling key crevices with expanding foam, and at Strathclyde University, which partners with BAE Systems, ‘activists climbed the stone arches at night,’ to fly the Palestine and Lebanon flags.

On 8 October, Palestine Action smashed the windows of the Glasgow Allianz office, in a coordinated action that hit 10 sites across Scotland, England and Ireland. This is part of a strategy to make Allianz stop insuring the Israeli weapons company Elbit, making it much harder for Elbit to operate factories in Britain.

Across Scotland and England, direct action has been a key tactic in raising awareness of the ties between the Zionist war machine and Britain’s arms industry, and since starting in 2020, Palestine Action have succeeded in shutting down 4 Elbit factories. Direct action has been a strategically useful part of the movement in three ways:

The first is the material effects – the actual immediate disruption it can cause to the production or transport of things which should not be produced or transported. It diminishes the profits from genocide. Often, these material consequences of an action are easily reversed. The factory opens the next day. Smashed windows are replaced. But it is harder to reverse the cultural consequences of a direct action, which are arguably the bigger way that direct action can lead to building a mass politics.

So the second strategic reason is the cultural effects: it can raise the tenor of a struggle when people take a serious risk to disrupt business as usual, and it can be the catalyst for other people to decide, okay, maybe I’ll start working on that workplace campaign about BDS compliance now. Especially for pro-Palestine people who aren’t fully aware of the extent of Scotland’s role in the genocide, actions in Scotland raise the profile of what this country does. If the action is made public – which many are not – there’s another cultural effect which is to spread these actions as a toolkit – this is something other people can do. So one purpose of actions is to embolden more people to take such actions.

Thirdly, for the activists themselves, taking this kind of action builds militancy, skills and trust among the comrades who take risks together.

All the October 7th actions in Glasgow were ‘unaccountable‘. This represents a tactical shift in response to state repression, wherein people increasingly seek to defend themselves from arrest whilst taking useful direct action.

But to achieve a full arms embargo, there needs to be coordination with workers within key institutions, as this is essential to the long-term transition toward an anti-imperialist society. The press release from the autonomous action highlighted the role of Scottish Enterprise, an agency of the Scottish government, in providing huge financial support to the weapons companies arming Israel from Scotland.

The day after First Minister Humza Yousaf wrote to the UK Government calling for an end to UK arms sales to Israel, BAE was paid a grant worth £360,000. Scottish Enterprise also gives six-figure grants to Leonardo and Raytheon, companies which directly arm the Israeli Occupation Force.

Workers in institutions linked to arming Israel – especially those in PCS, UCU, Unite, and GMB, have a responsibility to organise against this deep betrayal of people in Scotland, and to fight against the capitalist warmongers from within our workplaces and institutions. For best effect, this work can be coordinated with direct action.

Al Thawabet – the constants of liberation struggle

For the evening of the October 7th anniversary in Glasgow, a discussion event was organised to encourage centering the resistance in our conversation, by focusing on Al Thawabet, which translates to ‘the constants.’ Al Thawabet emerged from the history of Palestinian opposition to colonialism. Upholding them can act as a bulwark against normalisation of the settler colonial occupation, and against liberalisation and reformism within the international solidarity movements.

As Hamza Jamjoum wrote, ‘for Palestinians it generally refers to the red lines of the struggle, those demands on which there can be no compromise and which have acquired a certain sanctity over the decades of struggle.’

With thanks to the workshop hosts for providing their resources, three of Al Thawabet are listed below:

Liberation from the river to the sea: Settler-colonialism requires the suppression and displacement of the indigenous populations surrounding it. This coerces the Palestinians to coexist ‘in harmony’ with their oppressors. The two state ‘solution’ justifies the crimes that Zionism has inflicted and absolves them.

Self-determination and self-autonomy: Imperial powers view the colonised as incapable of self-governance, needing external ‘care’ or ‘protection.’ This forces the resistance into a framework that is more palatable to global powers, creating dependencies on aid rather than fostering true self-determination. The domination of ‘humanitarian aid’ in Palestine, especially in Gaza and the West Bank, frames Palestinians as passive recipients of charity rather than agents of their own liberation. This principle resists all colonial paternalism and expressions of white saviourism, even when it claims to be pro-Palestine.

We are not Palestine’s saviours, nor their protecters. Palestine will liberate itself. Our role is to support them and to unequivocally uphold the resistance, and to build resistance here.

The right to resistance and revolution by any means necessary: Armed resistance is integral to national liberation. It is the only way to shake off colonialism. The imperialist media mirrors old style colonial tactics of dehumanisation. Those who resist are portrayed as rabid barbarians, whilst those who murder the resistance are portrayed as civilisers.

The event was designed to sharpen our focus on how to think about our own solidarity with Palestine as the fight continues, and also to resist the ways that mainstream discourse can subtly defang our anti-imperialist solidarity movement here.

Bilal al-Hassan, a founding member of the PFLP, described it:

‘As the people struggle, they create institutions that direct and sustain the struggle. When these institutions unify the people and enable them to struggle, protecting these institutions becomes part of the thawabet. The PLO did not become such an institution by chance, there were objective reasons. One of these was that the PLO had a charter called the Palestinian National Charter which tells our story and outlines our strategy for liberating our land and people, namely the armed struggle. The story and the strategy are what brought people to the PLO.’

Our task is to build our own institutions of resistance, with the aim to disrupt the continuation of imperialist war.

Flowers – mourn and organise

Still, it’s been a year of hospitals attacked, schools bombed, the flour massacre, endless collective punishment for no crime but being indigenous to colonised land. The urgency with which we must continue to escalate against the colonial war machine is not at the expense of grief. A culture of resistance is inseparable from a culture of remembrance, and our grief will only make us more steadfast. At Buchanan Steps on 6 October, an offering of flowers was organised at Buchanan Steps.

Building resistance in Glasgow

Glasgow, specifically, is a key city in terms of arms production for Israel. Thales manufactures parts for the Hermes Watchkeeper Drone, and Strathclyde University and the University of Glasgow both support their local arms factories with research partnerships and student recruitment. Glasgow is also located near Prestwick Airport, where US military planes regularly stop en route to the Middle East.

As the organisers of Al Thawabet workshop put it:

The CCTV that dots Glasgow, the biometrics in Glasgow airport , the drone parts which are used by the Zionist entity are all made in Glasgow by Thales. The international anti-imperialist revolution is being led by the periphery and semi-periphery. For us in the imperial core, we must open up a new front from within the belly of the beast. The capitalist-imperialists, led by the Yankee imperialists, are the enemies of the peoples of the world. That includes us too!

The anniversary of the start of the genocide, reframed as the anniversary of a new breakthrough in the Palestinian resistance movement, spurs us to renew our organising, and think about rooting our work in our own context, and build plans for the long haul of struggle.

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The Glasgow rs21 branch is running an event on 23 October at The Ark, 70 Coplaw Street, to share a meal and hear a talk about resistance movements in Lebanon. We will then organise together on a campaign to make Glasgow an apartheid-free zone, as a stepping stone to build across communities toward a full arms and energy embargo.