Resistance networks often talk about is the unity of the fields. This is—very generally—the idea that all battlefields are connected, and coordinated, albeit not in a centralized way. It's the idea that there are many spokes in the Axis of Resistance, all moving in one direction. Like a wheel, making a revolution. And—as in Ezekiel's vision—there are wheels within wheels. As the Bible said, “for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.” This is the unity of the fields.

The center of the big wheel is in Palestine, where there is one unity of the fields. The Resistance in Palestine has many spokes (Hamas, the PLFP, Islamic Jihad), turning along their own revolutionary course. Around them, in the region, there is a larger wheel—Iran, Hezbollah, Yemen, Syria, Iraqis—which is literally called the Axis of Resistance. And so it turns. Around that again there is the world—outraged at the genocide of Gaza and the complicity and lies of the larger White Empire—and that is turning too. From the actions of South Africa, Nicaragua, China, and Colombia as states to students within the Empire stating their case, and getting beaten and expelled for their troubles. This is the growing unity of the fields, coming to a campus green near you. There are wheels within wheels, and for once they're not grinding against each other. They're moving in unison. This is historically unusual but welcome.

The 'unity of the fields' has been a theoretical concept for years and a vague dream for millennia but after October 7th, it has become facts on the ground. The Palestinians have toiled alone for so long—sowing their land with blood and watering it with tears—but now their struggle is the axis regional resistance spins upon, and the wheel that breaks the White Empire's (America, 'Israel', same thing) hold on the world. But what is the unity of the fields, and how did it actually happen?

What Is The Unity Of The Fields

When I read Resistance media—much of it in autotranslation—I come across the same phrases repeated over and over. ‘Weak as a spider's web,’ ‘a jihad of victory or martyrdom,’ ‘among the believers are men who have been true to their covenant with Allah. Some of them have fulfilled their vow, and some are still waiting, and they have not changed in the least.’ Most of these phrases are Quranic but, AFAIK, 'the unity of the fields' is not.

The 'unity of the fields' is a modern concept, borne of modern circumstances, forged in the cruel crucible of carbon colonialism. It's an adaptation to a century of constant assassination, infiltration, and surveillance, which has made centralized organization largely impossible. It's also a reaction to thousands of years of internal divisions within the Arab/Muslim community, which has made such unity implausible. As Abdaljawad Omar said (in translation):

The concept of the unity of fields embodies in our imagination that which is possible, but which in reality remains latent — the ability [of the resistance] to rise above a number of tensions and divisions, not only within Palestine’s fragmented geography but also in the region as a whole, in order to reach a kind of unity in the decision of war and peace. This is why this concept is a threat to the colonizer, because it is no less than the reproduction of an old Arab dream, albeit in a different shape and form, and within different historical parameters.

Note the part about a decision of war and peace. The vital function of a central authority is deciding when and where to fight and the challenge is how to do this in a decentralized way, when any leadership is constantly being murdered or spied upon. Keep that in mind, we'll return to it later. As Omar continues:

It is the dream of building Arab and Islamic societies that are capable of challenging the Zionist presence and putting an end to it. This is no easy task, as it requires surpassing a number of isolationist and narrow nationalist tendencies, and because it comes at a time when there are forces seeking to root out Palestine from the Arab psyche.

But it can be said that the embodiment of this unity in the field of war, and in fact the redefinition of every geography as a field of war, is in and of itself an act that has already robbed those geographies of their isolationist tendencies and narrow interests.

Now we see the emergence of a new imagined cartography, one that turns Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem all into fields of battle, with a single common orientation and promise.

This all seems somewhat obvious now that Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem are united 'as a field of war', but remember that Omar wrote this in May 2023, before shit popped off. Just a year ago, the such unity was still largely theoretical, 'embodied in our imagination' as Omar said, not an 'embodiment' on the ground (beneath, Allah knows, so many unwashed and unburied bones). To be honest, this unity hasn't been imaginary for merely years, it's been a dream for millennia. You can find sources from a thousand years ago talking about, in words that sadly still ring true today. Time is a flat circle, and we seem to have circled round.

Background

When Omar talks about the ‘old Arab dream’ it reminds me of Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. Maalouf quotes a lot of original sources (in translation), including Abu Sa'ad al-Harawi from 1099, which might as well be 1999. It's still depressingly relevant. al-Harawi said:

'How dare you slumber in the shade of complacent safety', he began, 'leading lives as frivolous as garden flowers, while your brothers in Syria have no dwelling place save the saddles of camels and the bellies of vultures? Blood has been spilled! Beautiful young girls have been shamed, and must now hide their sweet faces in their hands! Shall the valorous Arabs resign themselves to insult, and the valiant Persians accept dishonour?'

Are we not being asked the same question now? Not just Arabs and Persians, but anyone with eyes and a conscience? al-Harawi was talking about the Crusaders (the Franj), but the battle against modern Carbon Crusaders is much the same. Hell, the Franj (the French) are still being awful. The same question is thus being directly posed to the same people—Arabs and Persians, most of them still trapped behind impotent potentates—a thousand years later. “Shall the valorous Arabs resign themselves to insult, and the valiant Persians accept dishonour?” That's the question on the tip of every tongue in the 'Arab street' being answered by the point of every RPG wielded by the Resistance.

Ohhhh, violence. Shut the fuck up. The fact is that 'Western Civilization' was always imposed by superior violence, not superior civilization. As Samuel P. Huntington said, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” In another case of the misery-go-round repeating itself, we can find the same sentiment nearly a thousand years earlier, in accounts of the first Crusades. Usamah Ibn Munqidh said, “All those who were well-informed about the Franj saw them as beasts superior in courage and fighting ardour but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.” That's all Western Civilization is. Everything else—the claims on Christianity, on Democracy™, on Freedom©—is just marketing.

The key here is organized violence, being the only language power understands (as Frederick Douglass said, a demand). It is precisely the disorganization of violence that doomed the Arab/Muslim world both now and then. At the turn of the last millennia, Sultan Kilij Arslan of Rum actually turned the Crusaders back, but then got distracted by his cousins and lost in the end. There was no unity of the fields and they lost the field completely. As Maalouf wrote, after his initial victory…

The sultan felt that it was time to return to the major preoccupations of the hour—in other words, to the merciless struggle he had long been waging against the other Turkish princes, his neighbours. It was there, and nowhere else, that his fate and that of his realm would be decided. The clashes with the Rum or with their foreign Franj auxiliaries would never be more than an interlude...

Kilij Arslan was more than a little proud to belong to such a prestigious family, but he had no illusions about the apparent unity of the Turkish empire. There was no hint of solidarity among the Seljuk cousins: to survive, you had to kill.

If you're fighting your cousins while the Franj are fighting all of you (in turns), none of you are going to survive. Disorganized violence will lose to organized violence every time. This is what happened in the first Crusades. The divided defenders of the Middle East could not maintain a unity of the fields, which was why they lost against attackers they outnumbered, in terrain they knew and commanded. They were divided and conquered. This is the secret of Western Civilization. A little organized violence can triumph over a lot of disorganized violence any day, with a little corruption and lying to turn castles into sand.

The secret to the modern Carbon Crusades is the same. They're fine with the Middle East being violent (indeed, armed to the teeth) as long as it's disorganized violence. As long as they're fighting each other, and not the greater White Empire bleeding them for oil, or the 'Israel' injected there to stop the blood from ever clotting. As Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah said (in 1986): 'Israel' “was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world. We are not only against the partition of Lebanon, but also against the partition of the Muslim world; this explains why we see no alternative to fighting Israel, with all means at our disposal, until it ceases to exist.”

At the time Nasrallah said this, however, the region was totally divided and this seemed like a fantasy, like the 'unity of the fields' in general, or 'the old Arab dream'. His Lebanon was in the middle of a civil war, Iran was fighting Iraq, the unity of the Six-Day War was a distant memory. The region was thoroughly divided and conquered, seemingly eternally. Even a generation later, it seemed like everyone in the region had given up, that they were content to just make money and play with their football teams.

Even into this century, Sunni vs Shia was a big divide, most notably Saudi Arabia vs Iran, who weren't even speaking. In Palestine, fighting was still internecine, with bloody street battles between Hamas and Fatah (ie, Gaza vs the West Bank). And, in the region, NATO (new word for Crusaders with a new secular religion) had smashed Libya, America was occupying Syria, and in Iraq they simply refused to leave. The once hopeful Arab Spring now seemed hopeless, as counter-revolution wrenched back the wheel. None of this was promising for the fields ever unifying. Nasrallah's words seemed like a fantasy, that 'old Arab dream.' The 'unity of the fields' might as well be the Elysian Fields, some place you got when you were dead. Filthy lucre ruled the living. But times change. You can talk about things forever, but then one action can change everything.

Battleground

The 'unity of the fields' became a reality when Hamas took the field on October 7th. The 'unity of the fields' went from an ‘imagined cartography’ to a reality because of October 7th. All of the wheels within wheels started spinning when the Palestinians turned the tables on 'Israel', broke out of the concentration camp of Gaza, and attacked the occupiers, shattering decades of deterrence in 60 minutes. As Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas keeps saying, “we proudly and honorably faced the occupation, breaking its will and foiling its plans.” They answered the question al-Harawi asked nearly a thousand years ago, not with words, but with deeds.

Hamas was able—without a formal state or a written statement—to declare war. This is what Abdaljawad Omar talked about in 2023, the ability to “reach a kind of unity in the decision of war and peace.” And the Palestinian Resistance was immediately on board, as was the regional Axis, and enough of the global periphery. This is the unity of the fields. When communications are corrupted and monitored, they communicate through deeds.

As the Resistance News Network explained in a statement addressed to university students in America, France, and Swaziland:

The Unity of the Fields is a concept championed by the Palestinian resistance through its history of waging the struggle against imperialism on multiple fronts. Despite the various ideologies, short-term objectives, and locations of the factions participating in the struggle, the crux of this philosophy is that all can work towards one common goal without being placed under the same structure of governance. Unity of the Fields does not entail establishing a bureaucracy, though groups may remain in contact with one another to coordinate operations. Rather, it leverages the instant exchange of information available to us today to take facts on the ground and purpose them as “signals.” For instance, when news is confirmed that negotiations have ended between the Palestinian resistance and mediators, the resistance in Lebanon may intensify its strikes to apply pressure. When Lebanon is bombed heavily, Yemen or Iraq may respond with force.

Hence when the Palestinians took to the field on October 7th, Hezbollah almost immediately started firing rockets to the north, Yemen shortly afterwards blockaded the south, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces started hitting American bases, and Iran helped everyone. While these groups are in constant contact, they are not bound together by a bureaucracy or central control, Iranian or otherwise. They are bound by purpose and have been getting ready for decades. Just look at the extent of underground tunnels, the sheer firepower of Hezbollah, the indestructibility of Yemen, and the industrial power of Iran. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day, and these guys have been working at it diligently.

What's fascinating is that all of these players likely didn't know about October 7th until it happened. In the lead-up to the Al Aqsa Flood (the name for October 7th), it's not clear how much Hamas even knew about it. The military wings of all the Palestinian Resistance movements are independent by 'Israeli' design (they keep killing/corrupting everybody). The political wing generally doesn't know what the military wing is doing and the Al Aqsa Flood operation was even more secret than usual. Even people within the military wing (Al Qassam Brigades) didn't seem to know what they were training for. The action was the communication. The Palestinians presented themselves, their allies, and the whole world with a fait accompli. And, mashallah, their allies immediately took the field.

This was the unity of the fields, and it's spreading to campus greens. A mortar from a martyr means much more, but the sacrifice of students is not nothing. That is why the Resistance talks about it. These are all wheels within wheels, and they are all turning in the same revolutionary direction. For once the fields are not being divided and conquered. They're uniting and resisting. This is the unity of the fields. It's really not a theoretical construct but a practical activity, not theory but praxis. And it's happening. As G-d showed Ezekiel in a vision long ago, “When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose.”