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WHAT A 20TH-CENTURY REVOLUTIONARY CAN TEACH US ABOUT RESISTING
GENOCIDE TODAY  
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Dana Mills
January 27, 2025
+972 Magazine
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_ Over a century after Rosa Luxemburg was assassinated for opposing
German militarism, her spirit lives on through those disrupting
Israel’s war machine. _

Rosa Luxemburg addressing a crowd during the International Socialist
Congress, in Stuttgart, 1907. (Wikimedia Commons),

 

On Jan. 12, thousands joined an annual commemorative march in Berlin
to honor the memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — two
revolutionaries murdered 106 years ago on Jan. 15, 1919 by
centrist-backed proto-fascists. For decades, the march
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taken place on the second Sunday of January, bringing together
activists, trade unionists, feminists, and others who make up the
German radical left. Among the marchers, those who perhaps best
embodied Luxemburg’s spirit of anti-imperialism were a bloc of
pro-Palestinian demonstrators who walked through the streets chanting,
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” before being
attacked
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German police officers.

Germany’s tradition of cracking down on left-wing activists harks
back to Luxemburg’s time. In 1913, on the eve of World War I,
Luxemburg gave a series of famous speeches across Germany in which she
called on soldiers to refuse to serve the German war machine. She
would be put on trial
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year later in the Frankfurt Criminal Court for these speeches and
other acts of alleged “incitement,” and was sentenced to one year
in prison, which she served from February 1915 to February 1916. At
the end of that devastating war — with 40 million dead, and Germany
defeated — and following the crushing of the January uprising in
Berlin, she and Leibknecht were assassinated
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a gang of right-wing army officers, with the tacit approval of leaders
of the SPD party, in which she had been active her entire political
life before its rightward swing.

Luxemburg left behind a rich and radical intellectual legacy.
In “The Accumulation of Capital,” published in 1913 and widely
considered her most important contribution to Marxist theory, she drew
critical links between capitalism, imperialism, and militarism. In
order to create new markets, Luxemburg argued, capitalism requires the
expansion of the nation state beyond its borders, which manifests
through a process of militaristic imperialism. 

Tackling militarism head-on thus becomes a necessary imperative to
bring down this unholy triad, and a particularly effective way of
doing so is through refusing to be complicit. “We are aware that as
long as capitalism exists, we cannot abolish war,” she declared in
the speech that would lead to her imprisonment. “But we will defeat
capitalism if we fight the war with all our might.”

The context at the time Luxemburg was writing, over a century ago, was
starkly different. Yet Israel’s policies in Gaza over the past 15
months, for which decades of occupation laid the groundwork, display
the same militaristic impulse for expansionism and power that the
revolutionary warned against.

 
Flowers laid at the grave of Rosa Luxemburg, during the annual
commemorative march in Berlin, Jan. 12, 2025.  (Photo: Jan van
Aken/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0  //  +972 Magazine)
As such, there is much inspiration we can still take from
Luxemburg’s insights into the symbiotic relationship between
capitalism, imperialism, and militarism, and how this triad can be
resisted. Indeed, many around the world — and even a few inside
Israel — have put her teachings into action.

A TOOLBOX OF REFUSAL

Militarism has long been a pillar of Israeli society, but this has
dramatically intensified in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks —
both as an ethos and as fuel for Israel’s internationally renowned
arms industry [[link removed]]. Over
the course of the war, Israel’s arms sales have broken new records
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reaching $13 billion in 2023, and the profits of the security
industry
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also leapt.

The assault on Gaza, which was framed as “self defense”
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October 7 attack, swiftly morphed into another iteration of
imperialism: territorial expansion. The mass killing, ethnic
cleansing [[link removed]], unprecedented wreckage
of infrastructure, starvation, and plans for Jewish settlement in
Gaza [[link removed]],
along with the expulsion of dozens of Palestinian communities
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the West Bank, are all manifestations of the attempt to expand Israeli
power by military means, further entrenching Jewish supremacy
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and the sea. 

We can imagine how Luxemburg might have viewed today’s events by
considering a famous letter
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wrote to her friend and fellow socialist Sophie Liebknecht, (who was
also the wife of Karl), from her prison cell in Breslau in 1917.  She
described a heart-wrenching scene from the prison yard: buffalos
returning from the war’s frontlines, weighted with the bloody
clothes of fallen and wounded soldiers.

“The attending soldier, a brutal character, began to beat away at
the animals with the heavy end of his whip so savagely that the
overseer indignantly called him to account. ‘Don’t you have any
pity for the animals?’ ‘No one has any pity for us people
either!’ he answered with an evil laugh.” Staring into the
buffalo’s eyes, Luxemburg sees the essential cruelty of militarism,
which seeps into every corner of the earth and spares no living
creature. “We both,” Rosa added, “stand here so powerless and
spiritless and are united only in pain, in powerlessness, and in
longing.”

 
A mural of Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin with a quotation from her
pamphlet “The Russian Revolution,” which reads “Freedom is
always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.”  (Photo:
Julia Tulke/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0  //  +972 Magazine)
Even throughout her years of imprisonment, Luxemburg never wavered or
lost her spirit. She believed she could always fight back — and she
saw refusal as a critical tool of civil disobedience to disrupt
militarism, and in turn, capitalism and imperialism. And at the crux
of militarism and capitalism, perhaps the most powerful manifestation
of refusal is the one available to all workers: the general strike.

Against the backdrop of the failure of the international community to
put an end to the genocide in Gaza, we’ve seen a wave of civil
disobedience and labor actions seeking to disrupt international arms
transfers to Israel. These actions have used the “block the boat
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tactic, drawing from the toolbox that was central to the struggle
against apartheid in South Africa. 

In November 2023, shortly after the assault on Gaza began,
Belgian port workers refused
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load weapons shipped to Israel. In February, India’s maritime labor
force, the Water Transport Workers Federation, representing 14,000
workers, declared
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it would refuse to handle weapons destined for Israel. At the 2024
May Day march in London — a key event for the labor movement
since Luxemburg’s own days
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protesters blockaded
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Department for Business and Trade to oppose arms sales to Israel. And
in October, Greek dockworkers stopped a truck
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North Macedonia carrying ammunition to Israel from entering the port
in Piraeus.

There have also been direct actions at factories exporting arms to
Israel and profiting from the genocide. In November 2023, union
demonstrators in Kent blocked
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manufactures and exports arms to Israel. Following the International
Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, activists petitioned the
UK Supreme Court
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ban British arms sales to Israel. And in its landmark case
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International Court of Justice earlier in 2024, Nicaragua pointed to
German weapons sales to Israel as evidence of its breach of the
genocide convention.

The pressure is starting to yield fruit. In February, a Dutch
court ordered [[link removed]] a
halt to F-35 jet parts exported to Israel, followed by courts in
Belgium, Spain, and Italy. In September, the UK suspended
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arms export licenses due to “humanitarian concerns” — the same
day the UN General Assembly approved with a large majority of 124
countries an arms embargo
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Israel.
Activists in front of the UK Department for Business and Trade near
London’s Trafalgar Square protest at the departments’ continued
licensing and approval for arms exports to Israel, May 1, 2024.
 (Photo: Alisdare Hickson/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0  //  +972 Magazine)
UNSETTLING THE WAR MACHINE

Even inside Israel, where the discourse of “security” and
exhortations to support this supposedly “just” and “necessary”
war suffuse every aspect of our individual and collective existence, a
brave few have resisted. Losing one’s ability to make ethical
judgments is one of the heftiest prices of living in a militarized
state like Israel. But, as Luxemburg reminds us, refusal is the very
precondition for creating an alternative future.

Indeed, since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza, a small yet
significant number of young people have refused to be drafted
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the military. Conscientious objection is exceptionally rare in Israel,
and even more so since the October 7 attacks as Israelis rallied
around the military. And although their immediate impact may be
limited, these young objectors have formed a new vanguard for refusal,
opening up a crack in the wall of Israeli militarism.

Reflecting on Luxemburg’s legacy offers us inspiration to rethink
our own modes of resistance. A variety of actions drawn from the
toolbox of civil disobedience, from tax mutiny to general strikes, aim
to unsettle the war machine
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goes to the heart of militarism, is the most subversive of them all.

Over a century on, as Israel’s leaders threaten to resume the
genocide
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Gaza after the first phase of the ceasefire, the words of one of
Luxemburg’s 1913 speeches resonate with a desperate urgency:
“Workers! Party comrades! Women of the people! How long will you
watch quietly and undisturbed this specter of hell? How long will you
suffer silently the crimes of butchery, need and hunger? Be aware, as
long as the people do not move to express their will, the genocide
will not cease.”

_[DANA MILLS is a writer, activist, dancer, and the +972/ Local Call
resource development manager. She is the author of Dance and
Politics: Moving beyond Boundaries (2016), Rosa
Luxemburg (2020), Dance and Activism (2021), and One Woman's
War (2024).]_

* Israel
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* Israeli army refusers
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* IDF refuseniks
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* Israeli refusniks
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* Israeli military
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* Germany
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* Afd
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* Rosa Luxemburg
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* GI resistance
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* Israeli peace movement
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Oct. 7
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* Israel-Palestine
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* Palestinians
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* Palestine
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* German militarism
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* World War I
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* World War II
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* Fascism
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* nazism
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* zionism
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* Israeli right-wing
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* Israeli settlers
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* Occupied Territories
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* Genocide
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