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A great deal of nonsense has been talked about terrain. The history of these wars shows that almost any terrain is suitable for guerrilla warfare: provided always that the warfare is sufficiently rooted in the sympathies and support of the people who inhabit the terrain in question. What at first sight may seem, on the other hand, to be the ‘best’ particular sort of terrain for operations of this kind can often prove to be the worst. During 1944, as one example, a group of brave but misguided French officers decided to establish a strong resistance base in the mountainous ramparts of the Vercors massif of south-eastern France. They assembled men and arms in relatively large quantities, and were helped in this by the parachuting of stores from Allied bases in Italy and elsewhere. The Germans replied by blockading the few passes into and out of that rock-bound plateau, and the consequences were disastrous for the French.

At much the same moment, as it happened, Yugoslav partisan detachments were operating with outstanding success in the wide plains that lie immediately to the west and north-west of the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, then strongly in German hands. In those plains of Srem — and I myself spent some twelve months of 1943-4 with partisan detachments fighting there — enemy garrisons were so thick on the ground as seldom to be more than a dozen miles apart, and often much less. Roads were good and plentiful. And, to crown it all, down through those plains there ran the main strategic railway connecting Germany with the southern Balkans, a railway with no cover on either side that was patrolled both by night and day. Yet in this apparently impossible guerrilla territory we moved and operated night by night and week by week. That railway was blown up, often with great segments of rail levered and twisted down its embankment, not once but on scores of occasions. We even succeeded in evacuating severely wounded fighters to hospitals in liberated Italy under the very noses of the enemy. All through that June of 1944, with the help of the Royal Air Force flying in DC3s from Bari, we kept open an airstrip, usable at night by the flares of maize-stalks, that was only five miles from the nearest enemy garrison, a fairly large one at Ruma, and fewer than twenty miles from the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Belgrade. Standing there in the darkness before the DC3s came down, we could even see the distant glow of city lights.

How was it done? On nights when we used our airstrip, the roads leading to it were ambushed by partisan fighters. The wounded who were to be sent to Italy were gathered from neighbouring villages where the peasants had hidden them — from Popinci, Karlovci and others, big villages lying four-square on roads patrolled and searched by the enemy in daytime. The planes came down along our flarepath of burning maize heaps, stayed for the hour that was needed to lift our wounded into them, and departed well before dawn. At dawn the enemy arrived. But we had vanished from the scene, hidden in twos and threes by peasants who had dug more or less well-hidden holes in the ground of their farmyards. The secret was a simple one. It lay in staunch peasant support. Where that is present, any kind of terrain is good terrain.

— No Fist Is Big Enough To Hide The Sky by Basil Davidson, Aristides Pereira, Amílcar Cabral

PIJ’s romanticizing of the past is not limited to its perception of the state, but is also extended to, and reflected in, the very logic of its armed resistance. As it stresses resistance as the protection of culture, traditions, and identity, PIJ consequently portrays violence as preservative rather than transformative. We may hence question whether the movement is in fact revolutionary, although it is described as such by existing research.

— History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad by Erik Skare (Page 207)

it is … somewhat misguided to say that PIJ seeks the establishment of an Islamic state in the traditional understanding of the term. As I have demonstrated, [for PIJ] the state should be exempt from religious matters as it is the main contender and threat to Islamic values that the movement attempts to preserve as guidelines for societal development and order. Instead of seeking a strong Islamic state through which policies are implemented from the top down, values are maintained and preserved through civil society from the bottom up. As Abu Taha postulated, the state in an ideal society “becomes a functional state and not a divine state or a sovereign state; nor a theocratic state, a Marxist state or an Islamic state, no. It becomes a functional state apparatus that serves the people.” The function of the state will thus be limited to that of an executive branch of power. Although the institution of scholars emerges as an institution of state-like power through its legislative function, the scholars are nevertheless portrayed as exterior to structures of the state in PIJ’s political philosophy.

— History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad by Erik Skare (Page 202 - 203)

With the fall of Communism, the unification of Europe and the transformation of its economies, the existing friend–enemy structure was swept away. Up to 1989, each side had an opponent against which to unite: for the right, communist totalitarianism; for the left, capitalist exploitation. In the new moral universe of the “end of history,” there was one abomination—the Jewish genocide—that all could unite to condemn; equally important, it was now firmly in the past. For the new Europe, the commemoration of the Jewish genocide would serve both to sacralize the new Europe’s liberal-humanist tolerance of “the Other (who is like us)” and to redefine “the Other (who is different from us)” in terms of Muslim fundamentalism.

— The myths of liberal Zionism by Yitzhak Laor

What we see, once we start looking for it, is that “globalization vs. populist nationalism” may loom large in those publicized clashes that dominate our political news—but cannot be any fundamental contradiction of the system because the capitalist ruling class needs, uses and coordinates, and is behind both sides—both globalization and resurgent nationalism. Any more than you can say that big corporations versus state-incorporated trade unions are a principal class contradiction, when both forms of class activity are needed, shaped, and coordinated in symphony by the same ruling class and its state.

— The Shape of Things to Come by J. Sakai (Page 306 - 307)

with neo-colonial “Globalization” the u.s. empire and its capitalist rivals and enemies interpenetrate each other and develop within each other. While the Republican Party right wing is screaming about China as the main threat to evaporating u.s. military hegemony over the Pacific, major defense contractors like Boeing and Hughes are also becoming key aerospace contractors in and for the new capitalist China. In that role these two giant corporations “accidentally” gave their Chinese selves the technology of the advanced u.s. ICBMs, so that the Chinese military could leap into a new generation of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (both corporations just agreed to pay fines in the many millions of dollars to settle federal charges on this little boo-boo which was kept out of the TV News and front-page headlines).

The Chinese and u.s. empires are rivals but also increasingly partners, like the u.s. and France or Putin’s Great Russia and the reunified Germany. For that matter, president Bush’s younger brother Neil has joined Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese “Communist” president Jiang Zemin, on the board of Jiang’s new Grace semiconductor corporation in China, uniting a new generation of u.s. and Chinese capitalist dynasties. Just as General Motors has asked China’s Shanghai Automobile Corporation to be its partner in taking over South Korea’s large Daewoo auto corporation.

— The Shape of Things to Come by J. Sakai (Page 213 - 214)

smaller local bourgeoisies and petit-bourgeoisies are now trying to recapture their “abandoned” regions and neo-colonies and are starting “anti-imperialist” campaigns and wars of morphed nationalism against global imperialism.

These struggles—which everywhere attract mass support from the dispossessed male classes—can range politically from neo-fascist and clerical fascist to the authoritarian left, but are usually far-right. These are intra-capitalist wars of local capitalist insurgencies trying to win back control of “their” nations from the Great Powers.

So the u.s. empire is actually being attacked in a series of conflicts by popular clerical-fascist movements in the former Third World, as at the same time a growing neo-fascist opposition is being “normalized” within the Western bourgeois democracies. Two expressions of the same trend.

You can see this legitimation of pro-fascist sentiment once lightly camouflaged in the u.s. Anti-War activities, where joint demonstrations with far-right Muslim groups who advocate the enslavement of women and genocide against ethnic minorities is common—and where anyone who questions allying with islamic clerical fascism is attacked as “racist.”

This unexpected “normalization” and mass acceptance of widely different forms of neo-fascism is the most significant political development in current world politics.

— The Shape of Things to Come by J. Sakai (Page 215)

prisons exacerbated and strengthened the underlying contradictions that existed within the Palestinian nationalist armed resistance, represented by the PLO, which lacked a coherent and rigidly outlined ideology. As violence was the source of national identity for these movements outside of prison, this source seemingly deteriorated once its possibility disappeared. While secularists, Marxists, and practicing Muslims united by the rifle outside of prison, on the inside distinct groups began to crystallize along diverging ideological lines.

— History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad by Erik Skare (Page 73 - 74)

the PLO in general and Fatah in particular never were theoretically driven movements guided by strict ideological tenets. Instead, as Yezid Sayigh notes, they tended to a simple nationalism that lacked ideological depth with violence constituting the main source of political legitimacy and national identity. With a focus on practice without substantial theoretical underpinnings, what divided the different secular factions in the 1960s and 1970s were questions not so much of what ideology should prevail after liberation, but instead of how to liberate Palestine, who was to liberate Palestine, and how much of it. Thus, as the PLO and its factions became practical fronts to wage armed resistance against the Israeli occupation… they incorporated a number of members who did not necessarily adhere to its secularist postulations.

[…] little suggests that the [political] prisoners who belonged to the secular factions were particularly sensitive to their more religious coprisoners, and [ex-Fatah Hamas leader Muhammad] Abu Tayr writes that “in my room were ʿUmar al-Qasim, a member of the political bureau of DFLP, and ʿAbd al-Latif al-Ghayth, a leader of PFLP in Jerusalem, and they sarcastically mocked anything connected to religion.”

As a number of militants such as Abu Husayra and [Ahmad] Muhanna began reading Islamic literature in prison, it appears this endeavor was in fact a direct response to the attacks and mocking by the Marxist revolutionaries in PFLP and DFLP.

— History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad by Erik Skare (Page 72 - 73)

Al-Shiqaqi and the other founding fathers of PIJ … succeeded because of their presence on the ground and being part of the Gazan social and political fabric – necessary to create vertical ties between the leadership and the local population. Combined with strong horizontal ties, this enabled the PIJ nucleus to develop into a locally grounded armed movement. Yet… an additional important factor for this development was the Israeli prisons and the recruitment of former secular-nationalist militants.

— History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad by Erik Skare (Page 69)

Because of Israel’s nature as a colonial entity in the region, and not merely as an occupying power, [PIJ founder Fathi] al-Shiqaqi concluded that all Arabs and Muslims would persist in their state of dependence on the West on the intellectual, political, economic, and military levels as long as Israel exists. Israel is then the very precondition and source for continued instability and wars in the region. It is consequently through al-Shiqaqi’s analysis of Israel as a colonial entity, and as an extended part of colonialism in its entirety, that we understand why PIJ asserts that recognizing any part of it, or giving up any inch of Palestine, is unlawful. For al-Shiqaqi, to have two states, where one is a precondition for continued Western domination, is an oxymoron. Because of the very existence of Israel, the Global South in general and the Islamic community in particular will never be able to revive.

There is then, for al-Shiqaqi, no distinguishing between the colonial campaigns of Napoleon and Israel. Instead, the latter is a direct (modern) continuation of the former. By ending the State of Israel, the first step toward ending colonial domination in the region, and weakening its presence in the world, is taken. This gives the Palestinian cause its particularity and makes it the central cause for the contemporary Islamic movement:

The debate about what comes first, confronting dependency, Westernization, and fragmentation, or confronting the Zionist entity, is a theoretical debate governed by calculations of immediate gains and loss instead of a serious endeavor to build an integrated and coherent strategy for the contemporary Islamic renaissance’s project.

— History of Palestinian Islamic Jihad by Erik Skare (Page 42 - 43)