Review of The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm (Verso, 2025)
Andreas Malm–the author of the work under review–is currently a professor of human ecology at Lund University in his native Sweden. He is a scholar whose writing shows some notable flaws but also shows great analytical gifts. He writes in a graceful and highly readable manner. Like another Verso author, the late Mike Davis, Malm obviously has an immense store of knowledge that has marked him as a dynamic radical left thinker.
He has produced numerous books within the last decade, almost all of them focused on environmental questions. His most provocative book, How to Blow up a Pipeline, was published in 2021. Although a non-fiction work, the book inspired a critically acclaimed 2022 film of the same title with a fictional story consisting of characters inspired by the principles laid out in Malm’s book.
The basic principle of the book version of How to Blow up a Pipeline is that violence against property should be utilized as a tactic in the fight against climate change and fossil fuel pollution. Malm describes his own participation in environmental activist vandalism–one activity was taking part in groups that conducted nighttime raids on wealthy neighborhoods in Sweden in order to deflate the tires of SUVs parked therein. Another activity was taking part in a group conducting vandalism on an electricity plant powered by so-called “brown coal” in eastern Germany. He lauds the small-scale arson attacks on the Dakota Access pipeline in the upper midwest United States launched by Catholic Worker activists Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya in 2016 and 2017.
He believes that sabotage, vandalism and other acts of violence can serve the purposes of the environmental movement: this violence by environmental extremists could potentially scare the ruling class of western nations into making concessions to the demands of more moderate and respectable environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion (XR). Whatever the flaws in this argument, to his credit he makes the important point that the best chance for property destruction or economic sabotage to play a role in advancing environmental causes is if masses of ordinary people are actively mobilized to support such causes. Otherwise,it is likely that the only result of property destruction by isolated groups will be state repression and discrediting of the group’s cause.
Part of How to Blow up a Pipeline is a polemic against XR’s UK leadership who have piously stressed their adherence to Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience, pointing to the British suffragettes of the early 20th century as supposed exemplars of respectable nonviolent social activism. In contrast, Malm points out that the UK suffragettes were actually notable for engaging in acts of vandalism, arson and assault in their efforts to terrorize the British ruling class into granting the right to vote to UK women.
Malm argues that for all the pieties about non-violent protest on the part of mainstream environmentalists like Bill Mckibben and the leaders of XR, these folks are oblivious to the fact that acts of violence have played a role in the activism of oppressed groups. He notes that various groups–ranging from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the late 1960’s to Nigerian activists resisting environmental destruction in the Niger Delta in the 2000’s and anti-Mubarak rebels in Egypt in 2011–have all engaged in attacks on oil pipelines. While he catalogues attacks on oil infrastructure and other acts of violence carried out by groups representing oppressed communities, he largely neglects to illuminate for his readers what the practical effects of these acts of violence were in advancing the causes of the communities. When he does deign to address practical effects, he is unsatisfying. For example, he mentions the ghetto rebellions of the 1960’s as compelling the American ruling class to make concessions to African American communities but this argument seems to me to be a little glib. While it is true that rebellions–or “riots” as they have usually been described in mainstream culture–spurred more funding for jobs programs or similar concessions in the short term–in the long term they did nothing to stop mass incarceration and the neoliberal hollowing out of jobs and social services in black communities.
Palestinian Armed Struggle
Malm’s most recent work–a book of less than 150 pages called The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth– illustrates similar characteristics to How to Blow up a Pipeline: extraordinarily lucid and deeply informed analysis of current and historical events with a certain glibness about the tactic of violence in political struggle.
Malm’s The Destruction of Palestine-–mostly consisting of a manuscript of a talk he gave at the American University of Beirut in April 2024–is substantially permeated with cheerleading for Hamas and smaller allied groups like the PFLP who have engaged in armed resistance to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip.
It must be said for Malm that his advocacy of violent Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism and genocide has more than a little solid ground under it. For decades since the Nakba of 1948, Israel has sought to establish Jewish supremacy over the land and resources of Palestine, establishing a “neo-colonialist” subordination of Palestinians to Israel in the words of Shlomo Ben Ami in 1998, shortly before he became Israeli foreign minister. In the West Bank and Gaza after 1967, Israel established an extremely brutal military occupation, imposing serious limitations on Palestinian economic development, expropriating the best Palestinian land and resources for the benefit of Jewish settlers. After the First Intifada erupted in December 1987, Israeli military checkpoints spread throughout the West Bank, severely limiting Palestinian freedom of movement and allowing Israeli soldiers to regularly abuse and humiliate Palestinian civilians on security pretexts. In the West Bank, Jewish supremacist settlers regularly commit KKK style pogroms against Palestinian villages with the collaboration of the Israeli military.
Malm notes that Palestinians have had little to no opportunity since the Nakba of 1948–and especially since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967– to obtain a non-violent redress of Israel’s suppression of their human rights. Israel’s violent repression of Palestinian civil and human rights has made armed struggle seemingly the only viable avenue for them. Malm notes that when Palestinians suffering under the years-long Israeli military blockade iof Gaza in 2018 attempted the peaceful March of Return to protest their conditions, the Israeli military massacred several hundred of them. Malm’s analysis has been echoed by multiple prominent Israeli establishment figures, including former Mossad chief Ami Ayalon, who stated that if he were Palestinian, he would join armed resistance to Israel.
But what of the massacres and kidnappings perpetrated by Hamas and its allies inside Israel on October 7th? Malm allows that the murder of Israeli civilians on that day struck him unpleasantly; at the same time he celebrates October 7th as a blow by oppressed Palestinians against the US backed Israeli military machine that had kept them under conditions of near starvation since 2007. He dismisses the idea that the October 7th atrocities played into Israel’s hand and provided it with justifications for its subsequent exterminationist campaign. He implies that Israel would have responded with the genocidal violence that it did even if Hamas & co. had scrupulously observed every letter of the Geneva Conventions on October 7th. The attacks caused the Israeli ruling class–and its US backers–such humiliation that it was inevitable that it would respond with apocalyptic mass slaughter to try to restore the credibility of its military capacity for crushing Palestinians.
Malm stresses that Palestinians–being subjected to colonial and racist occupation by Israel–have the right under the Geneva Conventions and the UN charter to launch armed resistance to obtain their freedom. For him, if Israeli civilians are killed or injured as a result of this resistance it is regrettable but it is also an inevitable dynamic under the conditions in which Palestinians are forced to try to secure their freedom.
Malm compares the predicament of Palestinians to that of South African blacks under apartheid. He writes that since the violently repressive apartheid regime presented blacks with no opportunity for peaceful avenues through which to resist their own oppression, armed struggle was inevitable. He references a car bomb planted by the military wing of the African National Congress outside a military and intelligence facility of the apartheid regime in Pretoria in 1983. The bomb killed 19 people, including white civilians. Malm quotes Nelson Mandela as later remembering his personal “profound horror of the death toll” but at the same time feeling that such casualties were inevitable because of the “armed struggle….imposed on us by the violence of the apartheid regime.”
Malm also attempts to encourage anti-imperialists around the world to be supportive of Hamas’s armed struggle. He argues that Hamas has come a long way from the “deranged and inexcusable anti-semitism” of its 1988 founding charter as well the suicide bombings which killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in the 90’s and 00s. Hamas’s revised 2017 charter excludes previous attacks on Jewish people and not states that it has no quarrel with Judaism or Jewish people but with Zionist colonialism. It has greatly stepped back on its desire to impose its interpretation of traditional Islamic patriarchy on Gazan women as well as de-emphasized religious themes in general. He praises the public speeches since October 7th of Hamas spokesperson Abu Obeida, arguing that while they have contained some traditional banal religious rhetoric they are also full of stimulating stuff for the radical left anti-imperialists of the world: “they are laden with anti-colonial, anti-fascist rhetoric.” Regarding Obeida’s speeches, he urges: “don’t be scared! It’s great stuff, listen in.” He also recommends the Hamas organization’s general daily communiques as also containing similarly agreeable material for radical leftists
If leftists are put off by Hamas’s religiosity, he recommends that they cheer instead for the PFLP and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), two long active self-described Marxist organizations of the old PLO rejectionist front that have fought alongside Hamas in Gaza against Israel’s barbarism.
More Nuance Needed
Hamas, the PFLP and DFLP are undeniably well within their rights to exercise armed resistance against Israel’s apocalyptic war crimes. In many ways it seems indecent to criticize the operating philosophies of these organizations as their members try to survive in the literal hell-on-earth that is the Gaza Strip.
Nonetheless, it is not completely unreasonable to offer criticisms of the resistance organizations and question whether their operating philosophy and tactics offer the best way forward for the achievement of justice for the Palestinians. In contrast to Malm’s cheerleading, I prefer the more nuanced take onHamas recently offered by Omar Hassan in the Australia based Marxist Left Review. Hassan notes that Hamas is a conservative bourgeois nationalist party whose leadership has grown wealthy in alliance with capitalist forces in Turkey and the Gulf states while their people in Gaza have struggled with basic survival under the post-2007 Israeli siege. Hassan argues persuasively that bourgeois nationalism–whether of Hamas or the decaying remnants of Israel’s Fatah collaborators in Ramallah on the West Bank–has long ago run its course for Palestinians. Only a thoroughgoing socialist revolutionary philosophy that mobilizes the Palestinian masses in struggle has the best chance of achieving anything remotely resembling Palestinian freedom.
As for the PFLP and DFLP, more questions need to be asked of them. Malm praises both groups for calling themselves Marxist; he praises the PFLP for offering an intelligent analysis of Israel’s relationship to US imperialism and lauds the DFLP for having a special brigade of armed female fighters. But I think more issues not raised by Malm need to be addressed. How hindered are both organizations by old school Stalinist organizational practices, by years of repression by Israel and being forced at various points in recent history to rely on external sources of support like the odious Assad regime? Does either organization have a mindset that might allow them in the right circumstances to mobilize the Palestinians masses in a participatory fashion for both struggle against Israel and socialist revolution?
Malm on Israel and US Imperialism
In addition to Malm’s discourse celebrating armed Palestinian struggle, The Destruction of Palestine contains a much stronger portion, one which explores Israel’s position as a strategic asset for US imperialism. Malm dismisses the theory that the US supports Israel merely because AIPAC bribes US leaders or threatens its politicians or media figures with anti-semitism smears if they criticize Israel. Similar to Noam Chomsky, he argues that Israel acts as a linchpin of U.S. efforts to keep control of MIddle Eastern oil. The Palestinian freedom struggle inspires the Arab masses to revolt against US backed dictatorships that are key for the heavy US influence over the oil rich Arab states. Thus the US supports Israel as a reliable pro-western force in opposition to the radical Arab nationalism that might threaten its imperial influence in the Middle East.
Most of Malm’s argument about Israel’s role in imperialism focuses on one single point in time: 1840 in the Middle East. This was when the British navy destroyed the threat that Mohammed Ali, the ruler of Egypt, posed to British economic domination of the region through his attempts to develop indigenous Egyptian industry, particularly cotton manufacturing. It was at this point that the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, along with multiple Christian Zionist allies among the British aristocracy, began arguing for the immigration of Jewish settlers to Palestine so they could form a pro-European beachhead for British imperialism in the unruly Arab world. These pro-Zionist arguments lay mostly dormant among the British ruling class until the British defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War I and they found the then ascendant Zionist movement as a resource to help solidify its control of the oil-rich MIddle East. The Americans found Israel as a similar resource when they became the Middle East’s dominant power after World War II.
In spite of my criticisms of Malm’s discourse about armed struggle, I will conclude by reiterating that he is clearly a scholar of great gifts. As inequality, poverty and exploitation worsen in the coming years, and it becomes more difficult than ever if not completely impossible to resolve these issues through mainstream channels, it is highly possible–for better or for worse–that his arguments about armed struggle will attain much greater traction.
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