Thank you for the essay. I learned (or perhaps unlearned) a lot from it, and have more than enough links for further reading.

However.......

I hope that you will eventually find Hamas' line on the issue of state secularity, because "Hamas not secular!!!" honestly has been my biggest, like, liberal brainworm wrt the Palestinian liberation conflict, and the essay didn't manage to fully excise it from my noggin.

So my take on the war basically has been, "Support the PFLP and other explicitly secular leftist/anti-Zionist groups in the region; support the flight of Israeli refugees and their welcoming back to their true homelands around the world; support aid for Palestine, food, medical supplies, psychological support, so forth; support sabotage of Israeli infrastructure and economy; support strikes/resignations and sabotage at foreign weapons and munitions factories supplying Israel; agitate against Zionism; support Jewish and Palestinian communities around the world; etc." — so basically, every way to support the Palestinian cause except direct support for Hamas (which I guess is really just, like, indirect support for Hamas, anyways...)

I have seen comparisons between Palestine now and China under its occupation. Essentially the type of stuff that Lenin wrote about in A Caricature of Marxism & Imperialist Economism, which I recently listened to S4A's audiobook of. That the struggle for national liberation must be fought first before a socialist revolution can take place, and so all groups fighting for national liberation must be supported, including those which are not socialist or secular — that this lays fertile ground for socialist revolution later on. This is how things played out in China: the CPC and KMT fought alongside each other against Japan, and then the CPC fought against the KMT and pushed it to Taiwan.

This feels like a lot to gamble on, though — essentially that after the liberation conflict, there will be another conflict where the folks who we uncritically support will very definitely and certainly win — although... a free Palestine, even under a (")reactionary(") leadership, is still going to be better and more humane than the settler-colonial regime, so... What point am I even trying to make here?

...Honestly, I don't know.

Some final notes:

• Some non-leftists seem to be under the impression that non-Jewish Palestinians want to expel Jews from Palestine, and I do not understand this. Aside from the fact that Palestinians are just not bloodthirsty savages, and that Palestine has always had Jews, and all that... Once the colonial system has been torn down, its last vestige would just be millions of highly skilled and educated immigrants, which is pretty useful to have after a liberation war, right?
• The current war, I've heard, has allowed for more "parallel governance" or however you call it to emerge in the region. That as infrastructure is destroyed and the Israeli government focuses on the war effort, that common people are replacing government services with their own popular ones. I don't know much about this but it was mentioned in connection with anarchism.

I'm also curious about the history of Labor Zionism and of religious and ethnic minorities in the region, in particular Circassians. Can you point me to any good resources about these topics?