[News] The gates of the great continent: Palestine, China, and the war for humanity’s future

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mronline.org
<https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2&mc_cid=f6a70740cd&mc_eid=609a648ec5>
The gates of the great continent: Palestine, China, and the war for
humanity’s future (Part 3)March 13, 2024[image:
Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-104056 AM.png]

------------------------------

*(Part 1
<https://mronline.org/2024/03/11/the-gates-of-the-great-continent/>, 2
<https://mronline.org/2024/03/12/the-fates-of-the-great-continent/>)*
Part III: Smashing Walls, Building Firewalls, and Breaking the Digital Siege

In the last section we explored the Axis of Resistance and its pursuit of
material self-sufficiency, as well as Basel al-Araj’s incisive Mao-inspired
analysis of asymmetric warfare against a technologically superior enemy.
Building on that foundation, we now turn to two intentionally under- or
misreported facets of the current conjuncture:

   1. The sovereign technological innovations developed by the Palestinian
   resistance under siege conditions in Gaza, particularly in the fields of
   weaponry, counterintelligence and counter-surveillance, and information
   warfare; and
   2. How these are enabled, reinforced, and amplified by China’s own
   project of sovereign technological development and delinking from Western
   digital monopolies—a target of renewed opprobrium since the start of the
   war.

Both phenomena are manifestations, under vastly different circumstances, of
what Max Ajl describes
<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/22779760241228157> in the context
of the Resistance Axis as “the dialectical relationship between
technological upgrading, defensive industrialization, and armed defensive
capacity to secure the space for expanded reproduction in peripheral or
embattled nation-states.”

Since October 7 the Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas) have released
a near-daily stream of videos displaying an impressive range of
indigenously developed weaponry. Most feature their use in active combat,
while some actually show selected aspects of the development, manufacture,
and/or testing process. Perhaps the most paradigmatic example—and by far
the most visible from the privileged standpoint of Israeli settlers,
especially before October 7—is the vertiginous rise in sophistication of
Hamas’s rockets. These have evolved
<https://twitter.com/jonelmer/status/1741626492960813306> from the
first-generation Qassam Q-12, which had a maximum range of around 12
kilometers, to the recently unveiled
<https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/irans-rockets-palestinian-groups>
Ayyash-250 whose 250-kilometer range puts essentially all of occupied
Palestine within reach.

Other indigenously produced weapons have made frequent appearances in
ground combat; most have been ingeniously adapted based on prior designs
from past and present allies of the Palestinian resistance. The Yassin
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/jon-elmer/how-gaza-made-weapons-are-impacting-battle-against-israeli-armored-vehicles>
anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade, for example, is based on a modified
Soviet model and features in almost every Qassam combat video. The Shawaz
<https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/hamas-unveils-groundbreaking-armor-piercing-efp-devices-in-j>
explosively formed penetrator, specially designed to penetrate Israeli
vehicles’ reinforced armor, is believed to be inspired by devices used by
the Iraqi resistance against the 2003-2011 U.S. occupation. And the
al-Ghoul sniper rifle, whose manufacture and testing feature prominently in
a Qassam video <https://twitter.com/AryJeay/status/1737537871966302685>
from late December, is based on the Iranian AM50 Sayyad design.

[image: | | MR Online]
<https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/screenshot-2024-03-12-at-10-41-36-am/>

[image: | Qassam Brigades videos showing the Yassin 105 anti tank RPG in
action top and the manufacture of the al Ghoul sniper rifle bottom via
Bilibili military analyst 黑猫星球 Black Cat Planet | MR Online]
<https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/screenshot-2024-03-12-at-10-41-29-am/>
Qassam Brigades videos showing the Yassin-105 anti-tank RPG in action (top)
and the manufacture of the al-Ghoul sniper rifle (bottom), via Bilibili
military analyst 黑猫星球 (Black Cat Planet)

Great historical significance attaches to many of these weapons’ names. Izz
ad-Din al-Qassam, the revolutionary cleric who initiated the Great Revolt
of 1936-39, gave his name both to the Brigades and to several generations
of their iconic rockets. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin co-founded Hamas in 1987. And
Yahya Ayyash and Adnan al-Ghoul were both leading engineers who pioneered
the Qassam Brigades’ bomb and missile development programs, martyred in
1996 and 2004 respectively. Indeed the organization’s engineering prowess
is no accident: as Abdaljawad Omar points out
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lc9S1HmNkU>, it was actually a product of
their religious conservatism in a way that may strike Western observers as
paradoxical, given the strong post-Enlightenment association of science and
technology with secularism. In the Palestinian context, Hamas regarded the
humanities and social sciences (with some reason) as vectors of Western
influence and bastions of the political left, and thus preferentially
steered its student cadres into engineering and the “hard” sciences.

This remarkably prescient decision preceded by decades the Hamas takeover
and Israeli siege on Gaza, which respectively enabled and necessitated the
development of such an expansive indigenous weapons industry. In its logic
and foresight we can find distant though compelling echoes in the
developmental strategies pursued by China in recent decades. For example
the Four Modernizations (in agriculture, industry, defense, and science and
technology), proposed by Zhou Enlai in 1963 and officially adopted in 1977,
set a technocratic direction of travel for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms after
the “ultra-left” ideological upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. More
recently, we can observe an intriguing parallel with the rising influence
in Chinese online discourse of the so-called “Industrial Party
<https://www.strategictranslation.org/articles/a-study-of-the-industrial-party-and-the-sentimental-party>,”
which advocates “pure” technological developmentalism as a nominally
non-ideological alternative to both the Maoist and New Left and the liberal
Right (both of which it categorizes pejoratively as the “Sentimental
Party”).

Another constant throughline in the history of Gaza’s homegrown arms
industry is the ingenious sourcing of materials repurposed from former and
current colonial foes. Specifically, a 2020 Al-Jazeera documentary revealed
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200915-hamas-recycles-shells-from-british-ships-sunk-off-gaza-during-wwi/>
that the Qassam Brigades have routinely recycled unexploded shells left
over from previous Israeli bombing campaigns, and even from wrecked British
warships that were sunk off the coast of Gaza during World War I. They have
also produced rocket casings using pipes that were installed during the
pre-2005 occupation to siphon water into Israel from Gaza’s heavily
depleted aquifer. Per a recent report in the *New York Times*, Israeli
intelligence officials believe that “unexploded ordnance is a main source
of explosives for Hamas,” particularly those used to devastating effect on
October 7. Between this recycling and outright expropriation from Israeli
bases, they admit,

we are fueling our enemies with our own weapons.

In this respect too we can discern a historical irony reminiscent of the
Chinese experience. In the final phase of the civil war, the nascent
People’s Liberation Army captured billions of dollars’ worth of U.S.
weapons supplied to the KMT; one veteran recalled
<http://gr.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/gyzg/> that “nearly 95 percent” of the
arms displayed in the 1949 victory parade were of Western or Japanese
manufacture. In subsequent decades, China would rely on Soviet models as
the basis for a domestic arms industry that it eventually employed to
defend against potential attack from the Soviets themselves. With the
vertiginous rise and equally dramatic collapse in relations with the United
States, this cycle then repeated itself with Western prototypes—partially
sourced from Israel itself, as noted in Part I, due to reliable
battle-testing against Soviet systems.

These advances in resistance arms production—miraculous as they were,
especially under Gaza’s extreme conditions of technological dependency and
de-development even before October 7—obviously could not come close to
matching the enemy. Indeed Israel has long distinguished itself not only as
the region’s only nuclear-armed state, and by far the world’s largest
recipient of U.S. military aid, but as a self-styled “startup nation” at
the cutting edge of high-tech surveillance, information warfare,
counterinsurgency, and the automation of mass death. Just as crucial to the
success of Al-Aqsa Flood as Hamas’s own capabilities were their efforts to
conceal them, and to neutralize Israel’s advantages by cultivating a false
sense of security in its own insuperable technological dominance.

Nowhere was the Zionist regime more spectacularly humbled for this colonial
hubris than in the simultaneous disabling
<https://mronline.org/2023/11/27/gaza-2023-high-tech-war-revisited/> of the
Iron Dome and the Gaza “smart wall” on October 7. In a combined arms
operation executed simultaneously at over thirty distinct locations, the
former was overwhelmed by rocket fire, which “drowned out the sound of
gunfire from Hamas snipers, who shot at the string of cameras on the border
fence, and explosions from more than 100 remotely operated Hamas drones,
that destroyed watchtowers.” After the wall was breached, so precise was
the Qassam Brigades’ intelligence that within an hour they had overrun
eight military bases including the one housing the elite signals
intelligence Unit 8200. At every location their first step was to cut off
communications, in a poetic reversal of the blackouts Israel has so
routinely inflicted on Gaza before and since.

Those blackouts were just one manifestation of Israel’s near-total control
over and intentional de-development of Gaza’s communications system. As
Nour Naim writes in her essay “Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for
Restoring Palestinian Rights” (in *Gaza Writes Back*, 2021): “The
dependence of the Palestinian infrastructure on Israel’s infrastructure,
whether that entail the internet, landlines, or cellular communications,
has given Israel as an occupying power enormous monitoring capabilities.”
In order to conceal the years of preparation that laid the groundwork for
October 7, the resistance adapted accordingly in a way that exploited
Israel’s own narcissistic techno-solutionism. As the *Financial Times*
reports <https://www.ft.com/content/913d366e-0ace-4463-a004-d293aa49c673>,

Hamas has maintained operational security by going ‘stone age’ and using
hard-wired phone lines while eschewing devices that are hackable or emit an
electronic signature.

Elsewhere in her essay, Naim notes that “while Israel uses 5G technology
and prepares for 6G, Israeli restrictions limit people in Gaza to 2G.” This
practice recalls the United States’ largely failed efforts to thwart the
large-scale deployment of 5G infrastructure by Chinese firm Huawei,
especially throughout the Global South. Its parallel campaign to force
Huawei out of at least Western smartphone markets through sanctions and
export controls proved rather more successful. As with Israel—albeit with
less extreme methods and more global scope—both moves quite transparently
aimed to de-develop an enemy while preserving U.S. surveillance
capabilities in its captive export markets. (Amusingly, the resulting lack
of direct Western experience with Huawei phones led to unfounded speculation
<https://stratnewsglobal.com/articles/were-alternative-communications-tech-used-during-october-7-attacks/>
that Hamas had used them to evade Israeli surveillance—an incredible
marketing pitch if it were only true!)

In the wake of the utter debacle suffered by the entire Israeli state
apparatus on October 7, various exculpatory narratives have arisen in order
to absolve key actors of responsibility. One floated
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html>
in the *New York Times* by self-interested “dissident” officials, which
nonetheless arguably has some measure of validity, is that Benjamin
Netanyahu intentionally helped “prop up” the Hamas administration in Gaza
for most of his time in office. As the claim goes, he hoped to keep the
organization “focused on governing, not fighting,” entrenching the
political divide with the Fatah-led West Bank and foreclosing the
possibility of a viable Palestinian state. Hamas for its part was perfectly
content to appear “contained” while using the breathing room thus acquired
to plan for Al-Aqsa Flood.

Here again we see a loose though compelling parallel with China, in
particular the decades-long U.S. strategy of “engagement
<https://www.qiaocollective.com/articles/end-of-engagement>” beginning with
President Nixon’s rapprochement in the early 1970s. There the intent was to
further entrench the already terminal Sino-Soviet split within the
socialist camp, directly enlist the PRC into a U.S.-led anti-Soviet bloc,
and contain it for the foreseeable future to the periphery of the
capitalist world system. China, conversely, appeared to accede to this plan
while conscientiously pursuing a complementary strategy of “hiding its
strength and biding its time” (韬光养晦)—with results that are now plain for
all to see.

Incidentally, per the aforementioned *New York Times* story, one concrete
form of assistance allegedly rendered by Netanyahu was to cover up a
“money-laundering operation for Hamas run through the Bank of China.” This
was an early-2010s instantiation of what has since October 7 become a
veritable cottage industry of Western media narratives accusing China of
direct material support for the Palestinian resistance. For the
anti-imperialist left such stories may serve as a form of wish-fulfillment,
but we must of course recognize their primarily Sinophobic function in an
ideological environment that normatively and legally equates resistance
with “terrorism” of a distinctly “antisemitic” nature.

On the more substantive end of the spectrum, there are strong indications
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/israel-s-advanced-defenses-are-pierced-by-makeshift-hamas-drones-in-gaza-war>
that many of the relatively inexpensive drones used to disable the Gaza
“smart wall” on October 7 were sourced from Chinese commercial manufacturer
DJI. If true, as seems highly plausible, this simply testifies to China’s
economies of scale and the transformative leveling effects of asymmetric
drone warfare in general—also on prominent display in Ansarallah’s
celebrated use
<https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/19/missile-drone-pentagon-houthi-attacks-iran-00132480>
of $2000 drones, each of which the U.S. Navy requires a $2 million missile
to intercept. A similar dynamic is at play with reports
<https://www.thedefensepost.com/2024/01/02/chinese-weapons-found-gaza/>
from Israeli TV channel N12 claiming that the occupation army had
discovered a “‘massive’ cache of Chinese-made weapons being used by Hamas
militants in Gaza.” Even this highly questionable source admitted that the
origin of this alleged arsenal was most likely the large second-hand and/or
black market rather than direct provision approved by the Chinese state.

More speculatively, the notorious Israeli “China watcher” Tuvia Gering has
suggested <https://twitter.com/GeringTuvia/status/1736742111754461521> that
Ansarallah’s anti-ship ballistic missiles are based on a decades-old
Chinese design, the HQ-2, adapted by Iran into the Fateh-110 and supplied
to Yemen in modified form as the Khalij Fars-2. (He derives this assessment
from a self-described Chinese “military analyst” on Douyin whose actual
qualifications are in question.) Whatever the case may be, the U.S. navy
has claimed
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240221-houthis-first-entity-in-the-history-of-the-world-to-use-anti-ship-ballistic-missiles/>
that Ansarallah is the first entity ever to use such missiles in combat. If
so, this would join the “first known instance of combat
<https://gizmodo.com/israel-houthi-missile-first-battle-in-space-1850999081>
occurring in space” as a most unlikely technological milestone by Yemen,
the poorest country in the Arab region and one of the only *de facto* state
governments in the world acting fully on its obligations under the Genocide
Convention.

Other reports in Israeli media highlight the growing perceived “security
threat” from the country’s extensive economic entanglement with China, an
ironic consequence of the latter’s drive toward full normalization starting
in the 1990s. One such story
<https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/b1ze7rrda> claimed that Israeli
electronics firms have since October 7 faced significantly heightened
“bureaucratic obstacles” from PRC-based suppliers: “The Chinese are
imposing a kind of sanction on us. They don’t officially declare it, but
they are delaying shipments to Israel.” A co-founder of Shin Bet’s cyber
unit has also warned
<https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/y68ajpeml> that “when it
decides the time is right, China may be able to stop the operations of
critical infrastructures in Israel,” such as the Chinese-operated port of
Haifa.

Within the repressive domestic political environment of the United States,
on the other hand, a more insidious narrative has emerged that sees a
controlling Chinese hand behind the vast and sustained outpouring of
popular solidarity with Palestine. This has included innumerable campus
walkouts and sit-ins, dramatic traffic stoppages, direct actions targeting
weapons manufacturers and other institutions complicit in Zionist genocide,
and mass mobilizations including two marches in Washington, D.C. that drew
300,000 to 500,000 people. As early as October 2023, former Speaker of the
House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi was recorded telling pro-ceasefire
protestors to “go back to China where your headquarters is”—referencing a
notorious *New York Times* hit piece
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html>
from August which smeared numerous anti-imperialist organizations as CPC
front groups, including protest organizers Code Pink.

Pelosi’s almost cartoonishly McCarthyist jibe hewed closely to what has
been probably the most enduring genre of Sinophobic narratives since
October 7. These are specifically directed at China’s remarkably successful
project of safeguarding its digital sovereignty by building the so-called
“Great Firewall,” delinking from Western platform monopolies, and carefully
cultivating its own domestic platforms especially for social media. (Indeed
the University of Bonn’s Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and
Integration Studies ranks China second only to the United States in
its “Digital
Dependence <https://digitaldependence.eu/en/>” index.) In mainstream
Western media these features of the Chinese internet are almost universally
derided as the creations of a paranoid and totalitarian surveillance state,
with an all-encompassing censorship apparatus that enjoys near-total
control over online public expression.

In fact this narrative stems from seething resentment that China has
created a media and information environment for over a billion internet
users that is relatively insulated from Zionist hasbara and entirely free
from Western platform censorship. (Admittedly, and inevitably given the
size of its user base, the Chinese internet does have its own share of
pro-Israel influence operations. But their actual impact
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/class-and-intellectual-divide-how-israel-s-war-on-gaza-has-split-china-its-social-media/3081564>
has been sharply delineated along class lines, and largely restricted to an
increasingly embattled stratum of “rightist” intellectuals still enamored
with the civilizational discourses of Western liberalism.) This general
phenomenon also manifests to some extent outside China, with Palestinian
resistance factions like the Qassam Brigades and Saraya al-Quds enjoying
relatively unrestricted access to Russia-based Telegram as a platform for
their communications. The contrast with, for example, Meta’s censorship of
even “moderate” pro-Palestinian content—so extreme as to draw harsh rebukes
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship-palestine-content>
even from Human Rights Watch—is painfully obvious.

[image: | Side by side comparison of Google and Baidu Maps representations
of Palestine and its surroundings | MR Online]

Side-by-side comparison of Google and Baidu Maps’ representations of
Palestine and its surroundings.

Especially in the fevered early months of Western coverage regarding the
war, a number of absurdly overblown stories in this vein gained traction
and then rapidly faded away. One of these in early November alleged that
two of China’s largest homegrown mapping apps, created by Alibaba and
Baidu, had removed
<https://www.pekingnology.com/p/did-china-recently-remove-israels> Israel’s
country name from regional maps in the aftermath of October 7. (The viral
claim seems to have originated with a Falun Gong-linked Twitter account and
then spread like wildfire to supposedly “reputable” Western media outlets.)
The truth was that owing to Israel’s own illegal occupation of the
territories seized in 1967, and its calculated refusal to define its own
borders, its name had not been visible on either app since at least May
2021. Interestingly, Baidu Maps displays the 1947 UN Partition Plan
boundaries in addition to Israel’s much more expansive *de facto* borders
after the Nakba of 1948—possibly an oblique acknowledgment of the latter’s
manifest illegitimacy.

Looking instead at the dominant Western (and global) rival to Alibaba and
Baidu Maps, Yarden Katz has shown
<https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/how-google-advances-the-zionist-colonization-of-palestine/>
that a totalizing Zionist settler ideology is firmly embedded in Google’s
mapping operations at all levels. In 2013 the company paid $1.1 billion to
acquire Waze, which directly “emerged from the Israeli army’s Unit 8200.”
Even more consequentially,

Google Maps similarly gives a Zionist view of the land. For Google Maps,
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and the terms ‘West Bank’ and ‘Gaza’
have in the past been replaced with ‘Israel.’ Google Maps has also
displayed large swaths of the West Bank as blanks, reminiscent of Google
co-founder [Sergey Brin]’s sense that what isn’t Israel is ‘just dirt.’

Around the same time, the fallout of October 7 reignited the ongoing
Sinophobic witch hunt directed at TikTok due to its ownership by
China-headquartered company ByteDance. In an op-ed entitled “Why Do Young
Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok,” Republican U.S. Representative
Mike Gallagher cited
<https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-gallag> a
Harvard/Harris poll indicating that a remarkable 51% of Americans aged 18
to 24 believe that the October 7 Palestinian resistance operation was
justified. For this “morally bankrupt view of the world,” he placed the
blame not on younger generations’ extraordinary political maturity in the
face of the Zionist propaganda offensive, but squarely on TikTok: a vector
for political socialization supposedly “controlled by America’s foremost
adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP).” In a measured but laconic riposte, the company
itself was forced to respond
<https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/the-truth-about-tiktok-hashtags-and-content-during-the-israel-hamas-war>
by pointing out that “attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine
long before TikTok existed.”

Interestingly, Gallagher extended a backhanded compliment of sorts to
China’s attainment of digital sovereignty elsewhere in the article: “We
know of TikTok’s predatory nature because the app has several versions. In
China, there is a safely sanitized version called Douyin… Put differently,
ByteDance and the CCP have decided that China’s children get spinach, and
America’s get digital fentanyl.” Putting aside the absurd and racist
invocation of a reverse “Opium War,” this line betrays a fundamental unease
among Western ideologues—tied to the mast of a rapidly crumbling Zionist
hegemony—that the Chinese internet remains, by design, maddeningly beyond
their grasp.

[image: | The Great Flood 大洪水 by Chinese web artist 羊咩咩衣JY posted to Weibo
on October 17 2023 | MR Online]
<https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/screenshot-2024-03-12-at-10-40-56-am/>

[image: | Top The Great Flood 大洪水 by Chinese web artist 羊咩咩衣JY posted to
Weibo on October 17 2023 Bottom Tribute by Chinese web artist Wuheqilin
乌合麒麟 to US airman Aaron Bushnell | MR Online]
<https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/screenshot-2024-03-12-at-10-40-45-am/>
Top: “The Great Flood” (大洪水) by Chinese web artist 羊咩咩衣JY, posted to Weibo
on October 17, 2023. Bottom: Tribute by Chinese web artist Wuheqilin (乌合麒麟)
to U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell.

Another contribution to this genre came from the U.S. state-owned
propaganda outlet Voice of America, which in late December reported
<https://www.voanews.com/a/chinese-vloggers-glorify-hamas-with-cosplay-and-posts/7405159.html>
that “over the past two months, netizens in China have cheered for Hamas
and shared cartoons featuring Hamas fighters on Bilibili and other Chinese
social media platforms.” The story conveniently neglected to add that said
cartoons originated on English-language Twitter
<https://twitter.com/nationaljuche>, where they received an equally
rapturous response before propagating across the Great Firewall. That said,
it did acknowledge the growing community of Chinese armchair military
analysts who enthusiastically dissect combat videos from the Palestinian
resistance for domestic audiences, such as Bilibili user 黑猫星球
<https://space.bilibili.com/11146869> (Black Cat Planet) whose work has
already graced this article. In this author’s personal estimation, they are
every bit the equal of Jon Elmer’s excellent resistance dispatches for the
Electronic Intifada.

What such stories actually convey to bona fide anti-imperialists (not VOA’s
target audience of course) is just how little fundamentally separates us
across national, linguistic, and technological divides. Other examples over
the past months include a veritable tidal wave of translations of “If I
Must Die,” a poem by martyred Gazan writer and English professor Refaat
Alareer, into other languages beginning with one in Chinese
<https://twitter.com/blkpaws/status/1732954318657974669>. More recently,
Chinese netizens saluted the sacrifice of U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell, who
self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. on
February 25, 2024 in protest of the genocide, with an outpouring of
heartfelt <https://twitter.com/magne_toes/status/1762219467507945956>
tributes <https://twitter.com/nellodee/status/1762229686271348956> and
striking visual <https://twitter.com/wuheqilin/status/1762991686672908307>
art <https://twitter.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1762857407489986941>.

And try as they might to propagate a narrative of rampant online
antisemitism, even Voice of America could not obscure the real historical
basis for ordinary Chinese people’s enduring solidarity with the
Palestinian cause. “In the comment section of these videos,” the
aforementioned story notes,

netizens left messages praising Hamas. They compared Hamas’s attacks on the
Israeli army to the Chinese Communist Party’s counterattack against the
Japanese during World War II. One highly liked comment read, ‘It can be
said that in them, we can see the figures of the Northeast Anti-Japanese
United Army fighters among the white mountains and black waters in the old
days.’

*Monthly Review* does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed
in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of
left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or
useful.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20240314/24eda4fa/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-104056 AM.png
Type: image/png
Size: 135568 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20240314/24eda4fa/attachment-0001.png>