Meet the Fatties for a Free Palestine, a project of Hannah Moushabeck who is, she writes, unapologetically fat and a Palestinian American. Moushabeck created Fatties for Palestine when she discovered a pitiful lack of protest garments ‘for those in larger bodies’. So she created ‘Fatties for a Free Palestine’ garments with slogans emblazoned on the white tops in red, green and black, wreathed with watermelons and three tubby activists shaking their fists.

Moushabeck says her ‘project’ is a way of activating her fellow fat liberationists about the ‘genocide’ in Palestine and raising money for aid in Gaza. She warns that anyone commenting on her project negatively or in a fatphobic way should know they are harming a Palestinian American. There are several photos of fatties on the Free Fatties for Palestine Instagram page including one taken in Australia of a fattie wearing a Moushabeck sweatshirt with the obligatory keffiyeh and a placard portraying a drink carton with a straw labelled ’Zionist tears’. Next to the fattie is a friend who is not a fattie (a thinnie?) who is an Aboriginal activist proudly carrying a placard that reads ‘Zio Scum Outta Naarm’ (Naarm is the city still known as Melbourne except in ABC broadcasts and on Qantas flights). Obviously, it’s okay for fatties to comment negatively about ‘Zio Scum’. They are blissfully indifferent to the irony of an Aboriginal activist using the term ‘Zio’ which was first popularised by David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and America’s most famous white supremacist and antisemite.

Another member of the Fatties for Palestine is ‘Smokii, a Ktunaxa two-spirit transgender man’ and poet with blue hair and of course, a keffiyeh fetchingly draped over his shoulder. His tee-shirt is not large enough to cover the belly he inhabits. As Israeli writer Etana Hecht commented, Smokii ‘should hop on over to Gaza and she’ll probably be really warmly welcomed’. ‘Hard to believe he doesn’t already have a post in Biden’s cabinet’, commented someone else.

GenZionist, a casual spot for pro-Israel discussion and memes among Gen Z seemed more amused than worried by the new group. They discussed the announcement that Fatties for Palestine had raised more than $14,000. ‘So Fatties for Palestine raised a bunch of money for fat Palestinians in Qatar? It’s like a blubber fest,’ wrote one. ‘You know that money is staying with the fatties lol’, wrote another. ‘They’ll probably just eat it all’, speculated a third. ‘Now go to Gaza to lose the weight! Win-win’, suggested a fourth. Will the Fatties for Palestine join the Princeton students going on a hunger strike, wondered one person. How long will that last? This is that moment when something Karl Marx said turns out to be true – when the repetition of history descends into farce.

But if all this seems like a weird parody of the Vietnam student protests of the 1960s that’s not a coincidence. The Hamas massacre of 7 October was based on the Tet offensive of the Viet Cong who launched a surprise attack on 30 January 1968 against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic, the US armed forces, and allies like Australia.

While the Tet offensive was a complete tactical failure in military terms, it was a strategic victory. Why? Because students, Hollywood, and the mainstream media used the offensive to claim that the Vietnam war should not be fought and could not be won.

The lesson of the Tet Offensive was that the United States could be defeated by a militarily inferior power not on the battlefields of Vietnam but in the streets, campuses, and on the television screens of the West.

Hamas has followed the Viet Cong strategy down to its tunnels which were based on the Củ Chi tunnels which the Viet Cong used as the base from which to launch and fight the Tet offensive.

The difference is that the Hamas tunnels – the Gaza metro as the Israel Defence Forces call it – have been built on a far larger scale, with Hamas boasting in 2021 that it had built 500 kilometres of tunnels, all with aid money no doubt. The IDF said in 2021 that they had destroyed 100 kilometres of tunnels (20 per cent) during the conflict that year. Hamas claimed it was only 5 per cent. Who knows where the truth lies or how many more kilometres of tunnels have been built or rebuilt since then? As with the Viet Cong, the tunnels are used to store rockets and ammunition and to serve as the operational network and command and control headquarters for Hamas.

Yet the single greatest asset that Hamas has is its civilian population and its ability to turn them into casualties. The brutality of the 7 October massacre was calculated as a maximum provocation of Israel to ensure that it would launch a full-scale retaliation. Since then Hamas has repeatedly launched attacks from civilian areas to ensure that Israel has to kill Gaza civilians. The more, the better, as far as Hamas is concerned. None are allowed to shelter in the Gaza metro. Moreover, twice this week Hamas fired projectiles from the Rafah area toward the areas of the Kerem Shalom Crossing to prevent the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The strategy has worked a treat in mobilising useful idiots in Hollywood, the mainstream media, and on campuses to side with the genocidal terrorists in Gaza calling for peace, and the ‘liberation’ of Palestine, ie. the destruction of Israel. Columbia University played a pivotal role in 1968 in student protests and is the epicentre of student protests in the United States today. Then as now Columbia students barricaded themselves into Hamilton Hall and got themselves evicted on 30 April, 56 years apart to the day.

There’s just one problem. This isn’t the Vietnam war. There aren’t US or Australian soldiers coming home in body bags. There aren’t millions marching in moratorium rallies. In Israel, where soldiers are dying, this is an existential war. The deaths of Gaza civilians are one more tragic reason to destroy the last Hamas battalions in Rafah.

Americans want the war to end, but Israelis know this is a war they must win. As one Israeli official put it to the Jerusalem Post this week, ‘I hope that those two things can converge’. That’s why, as the official explained, Israel has gone ahead with the invasion of Rafah while negotiating the release of the remaining 132 hostages many of whom may already be dead. Israel is determined to achieve its objectives: the destruction of the Hamas military and its capacity to govern, the release of the hostages, and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel and the civilised world.

And all the blue-haired, two-spirit fatties in the world can’t do a thing about it.