Trap · reasoning move
◆ Allies in destruction
Sounds like: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Two movements with opposite visions, one for a secular classless society, one for a society under religious law, march together because they share an enemy. Each expects to use the other and discard it afterwards.
Signs
partners who would outlaw each other if either won; slogans shared, goals never discussed; embarrassing statements by an ally denied, reinterpreted or ignored; supporters who are welcome only while useful.
Questions to ask
What does each partner want the day after victory, and does the other survive it? Would my movement accept this ally's stated goals if they applied at home? Who gets dropped first when the alliance is tested?
Example
Western leftists marching with groups whose programmes would jail them.
The mirror
an Israeli government letting money reach Hamas to keep its rival weak.
How it works.
When two movements agree on almost nothing except who the enemy is, the alliance holds only as long as the enemy does, and each partner privately counts on coming out on top. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin's line that 'the passion for destruction is a creative passion' (1842) names the attitude that makes it possible on the left: destroy first, build later. It explains a pattern visible in this conflict: support is valued for loyalty and usefulness, not for agreement, and allies who stop being useful are dropped (see 'The purity loop').
Traps here:◆ The purity loop
The precedent: Iran, 1978–1988.
Communists (the Tudeh party), Marxist guerrillas (the Fedaian) and the Islamic-Marxist People's Mujahedin all joined Khomeini's revolution against the Shah, and Western intellectuals cheered it on. The Tudeh supported the Islamic Republic until 1983; then more than a thousand of its members were arrested, its leader was made to confess on television, and the party was banned. The Mujahedin were crushed from 1981, and in 1988 thousands of political prisoners, many of them leftists, were executed. Each side had seen the other as a tool; the Islamists won. In 1994 the British Trotskyist Chris Harman set out the tactic in 'The Prophet and the Proletariat': socialists should sometimes side with Islamists against the state, never with the state against them ⚠ (wording to verify). In 2006 the philosopher Judith Butler said that 'understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important', adding that this 'does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements'.
pressChristian Science Monitor, 'Iranian crackdown deals communist party a heavy blow' (22 July 1983) (1983) ⚠
primary documentJudith Butler, remarks at a UC Berkeley teach-in (2006), recording via Grabien (2006) ⚠
The seam in the alliance.
The Western partner's line is usually 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism; nobody here says that'. Allied voices sometimes state classic antisemitic ideas openly and sincerely, for example the chant 'Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud', which recalls Muhammad's campaign against the Jews of Khaybar, heard at Western protests since 2023 ⚠. When the two meet, the Western side denies it was said, translates it into politics ('they mean Zionists') or looks away: each keeps the alliance and loses the argument. Jewish progressives often pay first: in 2017 the Chicago Dyke March expelled marchers carrying rainbow flags with a Star of David ⚠. Queer people are a sharper test still, welcomed in Western solidarity movements whose allies abroad would persecute them (see ''Queers for Palestine' is like chickens for KFC.').
Traps here:◆ Which Zionism?
There is no single 'left', and the tool-use runs every way.
Most of the Arab left was secular and fought the Islamists: Nasser jailed and executed Muslim Brotherhood leaders, the Baath parties crushed them, and the Palestinian left (the PFLP, the DFLP) was a rival of Hamas. Much of the Western left has criticised Islamism sharply. And using Islamists as a tool isn't a leftist habit only: in the 1980s Israel tolerated and at times aided the Islamist Mujama, which became Hamas, as a counterweight to the secular PLO ⚠, and later Israeli governments allowed Qatari money into Hamas-run Gaza, in part to keep the Palestinian Authority weak. Some Christian Zionist support also treats Jews as instruments of an end-times plan (see the end-times theme). Zionism itself began largely on the left, in the kibbutzim and the labour movement, and it was the post-1967 New Left that recast Israel from a socialist experiment into a colonial outpost.
Traps here:◆ "They all…"
Why it works on us
- Coalitions against a common opponent are ordinary politics, and some have done good: the anti-apartheid movement joined very different forces.
- Both movements speak a language of liberation and resistance, so the overlap in slogans can look like an overlap in goals.
- A tradition on the revolutionary left holds that the old order has to be torn down before anything new can be built, which makes any force that tears down look like an ally.