‘Palestinians Provoked Their Genociders’: The AWL’s Deplorable Message at ‘Ideas for Freedom’ 2025
We objected at their recent London event
On 23 November 2025, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty discussed Palestine-Israel peace at their annual event. The main hall featured Jasr Kawkby, a British-Palestinian activist, and Asaf Yakir from Standing Together. I was there. What I heard was clarifying in the worst possible way.
Kawkby told the audience that Palestinian armed resistance “weakens the peace camp within Israel” and “strengthens the nationalist factions in Israel.” He argued that Hamas bears “responsibility for triggering” the genocide in Gaza. Because Palestinians are “too weak to defend ourselves,” he said, “we have the responsibility” not to “provoke” actions that might trigger Israeli retaliation. He also mistakenly claimed that the major British left parties, the SWP and CPB, did not criticise Hamas.
I challenged him in the Q&A session. I read those comments back to Kawkby. He confirmed: “Yes, I meant every word I said”. I responded, saying I think it’s deplorable to blame the victims in this way. Daniel Randall, a steward at the AWL event, took the microphone to accuse me of misrepresenting Kawkby’s remarks, and drew attention the SWP’s response to October 7, which enraged the Socialist Party. But, as I said to Daniel when buttonholing him on the way out, Kawkby had confirmed what I had written down.
Randall’s instinct to deny tells us something. Even the AWL struggles to stomach its own politics when stated plainly.
The Perfect Victim
In Cristian Parrino’s forthcoming memoir of three months in Palestine, he describes a taxi ride during which he and a Palestinian friend discussed October 7. The driver, misunderstanding their English conversation, “interjected angrily in Arabic, furious that foreigners always talk about the Hamas attack as if it were the beginning of history.” Parrino’s friend tried to explain, but Parrino stopped him: “mashi, huwa sah.” It’s okay, he’s right.
The conversation turned to what Parrino calls “Perfect Victims and the notion that Palestinians can only have a voice if they give up their right to be angry, their right to resist oppression with strength.”
Kawkby is the AWL’s perfect victim. He has surrendered the right to anger, the right to resistance, the right to hold the coloniser responsible for colonisation. In exchange, he receives a platform. He tells his people that their resistance caused their own genocide. He counsels patience while Israeli liberals find their conscience. He locates agency for Palestinian liberation everywhere except in Palestinian hands.
The AWL did not platform a random Palestinian. They found one who would say what they needed said.
The Shell Game
The AWL presents itself as even-handed. Two nations, two states, equal rights for both peoples. They oppose both Netanyahu and Hamas. They reject what they call “reflexive anti-imperialism” and “vicarious Arab chauvinism.” They champion Standing Together as proof that Jewish-Arab unity is possible within the framework of Israeli civil society.
This sounds reasonable. It is not. The AWL’s framework constructs symmetry especially where it benefits Israel and asymmetry where it would benefit Palestinians. The equivalences are tactical; the inequivalences are structural.
Consider the Right of Return. The AWL supports the Israeli state’s Law of Return, which grants any Jew worldwide, regardless of ancestral connection to Palestine, the right to Israeli citizenship. A Brooklyn accountant whose family left Minsk in 1890 can claim Israeli nationality tomorrow. But the AWL opposes the Palestinian Right of Return for refugees ethnically cleansed in 1948, many of whom are still alive, whose villages are still mapped and named, whose keys their grandchildren still hold. Sean Matgamna, the AWL’s theoretical leader, calls this demand “one of the many codes for in fact demanding the self-abolition of the Jewish state.”
Parrino’s memoir ends with a taxi driver in Amman, Palestinian, “born in a refugee camp in Jordan. His family had never been able to return after Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation of the rest of Palestine.” This man asked Parrino to describe the places he had seen, “how they looked, how they made me feel.” He has never set foot in his homeland. The AWL’s framework says he has no right to return. But any Jewish person from anywhere in the world does.
The asymmetry is breathtaking. Return for those with no connection in living memory: legitimate. Return for those expelled within living memory: a threat to be resisted.
Whose Violence Counts
The same logic governs the AWL’s treatment of violence. Israeli state violence is regrettable, excessive, sometimes criminal, but fundamentally comprehensible as the action of a nation defending itself. Palestinian armed resistance is morally culpable and strategically disastrous. It “triggers” Israeli responses. It “weakens” the Israeli peace camp. It must stop so that Israeli liberals can do their work.
Kawkby made this explicit. “I give Hamas its share of responsibility for triggering this,” he said of the genocide. Palestinians, being “too weak to defend ourselves,” have “the responsibility” to avoid provoking Israel. Military attacks are “the only cause for the radicalization of Israel.” No, worse than that: not the only cause, he acknowledged, but the cause within Palestinian control. The cause Palestinians can address by choosing submission.
In Wadi al-Samen, near Hebron, Parrino visited a children’s centre. The children were asked to draw their biggest fear. “In the West,” he writes, “children might draw monsters, ghosts, or how they imagine the boogeyman. Here, every drawing depicted occupation soldiers: breaking into homes to steal toys, trampling gardens, being humiliated at checkpoints or dragging fathers and brothers away at night. This was not imagined fear, it was memory. Their fear was that it would happen again.”
These children did not “trigger” the soldiers who raid their homes at night. They did not “provoke” the checkpoints where they watch their parents humiliated. They did not “weaken the peace camp” by existing under occupation. The occupation generates the trauma; the trauma does not generate the occupation.
This inverts causality entirely. Israel did not begin its colonial project in response to Hamas rockets. The Nakba preceded Palestinian armed resistance by decades. The settlements expand regardless of whether rockets fall. To counsel the colonised to abandon armed struggle because it “weakens the peace camp” in the colonising society is to make Palestinian liberation conditional on Israeli permission.
Compare Ukraine. The AWL vigorously supports Ukrainian armed resistance against Russian occupation. They do not tell Ukrainians that their resistance “triggers” Russian atrocities, or that they bear “responsibility” for Russian escalation, or that they should wait for the Russian peace movement to transform Russian society from within. The asymmetry is instructive.
The Burning Building
AWL members have deployed Issac Deutscher’s allegory to explain 1948. Jews fleeing the Holocaust were like someone escaping a burning building who lands on a passerby when jumping from the window. The tragedy is real; the injury to the Palestinian bystander is real; but what else could the fleeing person do?
Grant the comparison for a moment. It might generate some sympathy for the circumstances of 1948. But here is what the analogy cannot explain: why does Israel keep climbing back into the building so it can land on Palestinians day after day?
The settlers ascending the hills of the West Bank are not fleeing any burning building. The IDF soldiers demolishing homes in Sheikh Jarrah are not escaping pogroms. The bombs falling on Gaza are not emergency landings. If 1948 was a tragic accident, everything since has been a choice. Israel keeps climbing back through that window, year after year, dunam by dunam, settlement by settlement, choosing to land on Palestinians because the landing serves the Zionist project of territorial expansion.
Parrino, standing at the edge of Ramallah looking at the illegal settlement of Psagot, asks the question the AWL cannot answer: “How many settlers would choose to live on this land without Zionism, without supremacy, without domination? Without the subsidies and benefits offered in exchange for becoming the first line of enforcement of the occupation? Would they stay to live in peace, as equals among the native Palestinian population, like Palestinian Jews did before Zionism? Or would they go back to their original countries?”
The AWL’s analogy, meant to generate sympathy for Israel’s founding, actually indicts everything that followed.
Whose Agency Matters
The deepest asymmetry concerns agency itself. In the AWL’s framework, who has the power to transform political reality?
The answer is clear from the forum. Israeli civil society, particularly Standing Together, is “the key force for change.” The Israeli working class possesses potential power in key sectors and industries. The task of international solidarity is to support these Israeli forces, amplify their voices, help them shift Israeli politics from within.
And Palestinians? Their agency is reduced to not making things harder for Israeli liberals. Don’t resist violently: it radicalises Israelis. Don’t support BDS: it hardens the siege mentality. Don’t demand the Right of Return: it existentialises the conflict. Palestinian action is measured entirely by its effect on Israeli political dynamics. Palestinians exist, in this framework, to help the Zionist left.
Kawkby’s formulation was explicit: “I see our best allies are people like those in Standing Together.” The path forward requires “watching an alliance, a Jewish-Palestinian Alliance” that works to “de-radicalise the Israeli government, the Israeli society, because this is the only way forward.” Palestinian agency is subordinated entirely to Israeli transformation. Liberation waits on Israeli permission.
This is why the AWL opposes BDS. Not because boycotts are ineffective; the South African precedent suggests otherwise. But because BDS operates independently of Israeli civil society. It applies external pressure rather than waiting for internal transformation. It treats Israel as a regime to be isolated rather than a society to be reformed. For the AWL, this is intolerable: it bypasses the Israeli working class, the only legitimate agent of change.
The Third Camp Trap
The AWL’s politics descend from the Shachtmanite tradition: the “Third Camp” that rejected both Washington and Moscow during the Cold War. In its original context, this meant refusing to choose between capitalist imperialism and Stalinist bureaucracy. The working class would forge its own path.
But the Third Camp methodology translates poorly to colonial contexts. You cannot be equidistant between the boot and the face it stands on. The AWL’s insistence on treating Israeli Jews and Palestinians as symmetrical nations with equivalent claims produces a framework where the coloniser’s “rights” constrain the colonised’s liberation.
The AWL argues that Israeli Jews constitute a “Hebrew nation” that has crystallised over three generations, regardless of how it was formed. Just as the United States and Australia emerged from genocide but are now recognised nations, Israel has solidified into a legitimate national entity. To deny Israeli self-determination while championing Palestinian self-determination would be discriminatory.
But settler-colonial populations do not automatically acquire national rights that supersede those of the indigenous population they displaced. The pieds-noirs in Algeria, the Rhodesian whites, the Ulster Protestant ascendancy: none of these constituted “nations” whose “self-determination” could legitimate continued domination. The AWL’s framework effectively grants the fruits of the Nakba constitutional protection.
The Collaborator’s Logic
When you subordinate Palestinian liberation to Israeli political dynamics, you need Palestinians who will counsel their own people to wait for Israeli permission. When you frame Palestinian armed resistance as the obstacle to peace, you need Palestinians who will denounce that resistance. When you locate agency for transformation exclusively in Israeli civil society, you need Palestinians whose role is to assist Israeli liberals.
Kawkby calls himself a “consequentialist” and a “pragmatist.” But his pragmatism operates entirely within a frame that accepts the permanence of Israeli power and asks only how Palestinians might soften that power’s exercise. He told the forum: “I personally cannot force Israel to give us our rights, to allow us to live as equal citizens. We don’t have the power. We don’t have military power. We don’t have political power. And no country really cares about us.”
This is not strategy. It is despair dressed in radical language. The colonised intellectual who has internalised the coloniser’s perspective, who sees his own people’s resistance as the problem, who waits for the oppressor to grant liberation from above. Fanon diagnosed this tendency sixty years ago. The AWL provides it a home.
The Alternative
The Fourth International’s approach begins from different premises. Israel is not merely a flawed democracy requiring internal reform but a settler-colonial state whose structure produces the violence we witness. The Nakba was not a tragic accident but the foundation of an ongoing project. Palestinian resistance, whatever its tactical or political limitations, represents the struggle of an oppressed nation against colonial dispossession.
This does not mean uncritical support for Hamas or any other Palestinian formation. The Fourth International has always distinguished between unconditional defence of oppressed nations and political support for their leaderships. We can defend Palestine while criticising Hamas’s Islamism, just as we defended Iraq against American invasion while opposing Saddam Hussein.
But the critique operates in the opposite direction from the AWL’s. We ask: does this leadership advance or retard the struggle for national liberation and social transformation? Not: does this leadership make Israeli liberals comfortable?
Standing Together does important solidarity work within Israel. But the AWL’s elevation of Standing Together to “the key force for change” has a political function: it redirects solidarity away from the forms that Israel actually fears. BDS campaigns, arms embargoes, institutional pressure, international isolation: these threaten Israel’s standing in ways that internal peace movements, however admirable, have proven unable to match over seven decades of failure.
The Position Stated Plainly
Randall’s defensive reflex when I quoted Kawkby accurately reveals something important. The AWL cannot defend its position when stated without euphemism.
So let us state it plainly. The AWL believes that Jews from anywhere in the world have a right to “return” to a land their ancestors may have left millennia ago, while Palestinians ethnically cleansed within living memory must abandon their right of return to preserve Israel’s Jewish majority. The AWL believes that Palestinian armed resistance bears “responsibility” for triggering genocide, while Israeli violence is comprehensible self-defence. The AWL believes that Palestinian agency should be limited to assisting Israeli liberals, while Israeli civil society holds the key to transformation.
This is not “consistent democracy.” It is consistent defence of the colonial status quo dressed in the language of workers’ unity. The “two nations, equal rights” formula is a shell game. Where equivalence would benefit Palestinians, it is denied. Where equivalence benefits Israel, it is insisted upon.
The AWL found a Palestinian willing to tell his people that their resistance caused their own massacre. That they should wait for Israeli permission to be free. That their role is to help the Zionist left. This is not solidarity. It is the politics of the house slave mistaken for liberation.
The building is still burning. Israel keeps climbing back in so it can land on Palestinians again. The AWL asks Palestinians to lie still and wait.
By Duncan Chapel
This just strengthens my personal feeling that borders are a danger wherever they exist, particularly once the arguments get going. I have never felt comfortable with the cosy acceptance of patriotism.