Kanafani also waged an unrelenting intellectual struggle against those—whether Palestinians, Arabs, or others—who opposed “external operations.” The author of the dictum “behind the enemy everywhere” continually affirmed, up to the moment of his assassination, that there is neither separation nor contradiction between the actions of the fedayeen in Palestine and across its borders and “external operations,” so long as the political strategy is unified and the enemy is one.

Kanafani was under the strict discipline and structure of a Democratic Centralist party in active warfare against its occupier. What unified political strategy was Rodriguez participating in?

What is the strategic or tactical value of what Rodriguez did? How did it advance the struggle? How did it weaken the US or the entity? What follow-up actions have emerged from it? What did it do?

Rodriguez’s operation not only revealed the limits of liberal discourse; it also restored the value of direct action as a mobilizing and agitational tool, placing everyone before their responsibilities.

Who did it mobilize? What agitation did it achieve?

Therefore, Rodriguez’s operation represents a cry in the face of the American system, and a message that resistance is not the preserve of geography, race, or color, but is an affiliation, an identity, and an ethical and political stance that allows for no compromise.

No, resistance is not an ethical stance or an identity. It is the practical process of defeating your oppressors and finding the path to victory. How did Rodriguez achieve that?

Our assessment is that the majority of the Palestinian people—inside the homeland and in the diaspora—especially in light of the massacres in Gaza, see the revival of feda’i action as a revolutionary necessity. They are calling for broader popular participation in supporting the resistance, whether political, financial, media, or cultural support, or through direct involvement. This is the popular cradle and the revolutionary driving force needed to halt the aggression, shift the balance of power, and achieve liberation.

What is the base of power and strength for Hamas, PIJ, and the PFLP? Their support in the Palestinian masses.

What is the base of power and strength for the IRGC? Their support in the Palestinian masses.

What is the base of power of the Communist parties of Cuba, Vietnam, or China? Their support in the masses of their countries.

Each of these has a true "popular cradle" from which militant revolutionary action can bloom. These were created by the immediate need to resist active violent colonization and imperialism, not moral, ethical, or identity-based stances.

What is the "popular cradle" for violent action on behalf of Palestine within the US? It does not exist at the scale necessary to maintain it. Rodriguez killed someone who didn't matter and whose death disrupted nothing. It landed him in prison, probably for the rest of his life. What could he have achieved otherwise? If he was willing to make that sacrifice, he wasted it on a flunky, a pointless functionary. High level leaders come to the US all the time, walk the streets of New York City. There his sacrifice could have achieved something. Or he could have dedicated his life to constructing a popular movement, doing the unheroic but necessary work of creating the popular cradle to actually wage revolutionary war in the United States! Instead he killed a nobody and got adoration for it while achieving nothing in material or political terms.

We have understood for over a hundred years that propaganda of the deed is ineffective, that assassinations don't win wars or revolutions, that only the masses can wield the power to change the world. Rodriguez, out of his honest and admirable desperation and bravery, made a strategic and tactical mistake. Now we have one less revolutionary organizer, which is far more valuable to us than a former IDF soldier in the US is to the zionists. I have no moral condemnation of him, but our goal must be to defeat the state at the heart of global imperialism. Only the masses, sufficiently motivated and organized, are capable of that. The Islamic Revolution was not made by assassins. Neither was the Palestinian resistance or the Russian Revolution or the Chinese or the Venezuelan... On and on. These were made by the masses.

We cannot think in terms of satisfying acts of violence but in a real path to the victory of our class over the ruling class.