The only anti-colonial group left in Gaza that is actively fighting back against colonialist oppression is Hamas, an Muslim organization whose religion is their primary guiding force. If you read their 2017 charter they very much have demands and a strategy that agree with a materialist understanding of the situation (as close as it matters). As a people and an organization indigenous to the area, it is important to understand how they specifically think, and their religion and religious thought is an important part of that.

Just because something “isn’t materialist” doesn’t mean that “it doesn’t work”. I would highly recommend you take a course or two on the study of religion, because that kind of phrasing and thinking has been used to ignore, oppress, and extinguish very useful and valid cultures, traditions, and ways of viewing the world from native indigenous populations. I don’t have the book name on me, but I did a course on the medical and religious traditions of various African cultures and how those indigenous traditions solve shortfalls that allopathic medicine even today is still struggling to fix. For example, one tradition had a very big emphasis on understanding the person as a whole, within the community they interacted in. This stands in stark contrast to allopathic medicine’s view of “solving medical problems as they come up”, and we’re realizing now that that has limits.

What I’m trying to say is you can come to the same answer through different means. We have lots of historical examples of native indigenous people coming up with something without ‘science’ or materialism that white European settlers wouldn’t come up with until centuries later. A materialist analysis of history proves this is the case. Materialism may be more likely to come to a correct answer, but it’s reductionist and frankly just asshole-ish to be like “hurr durr religion is when ur dumb” when religious traditions are so much more rich that than. Materialism and Marxism are a single way of looking at and analyzing the world. If you are dismissing any other method of analysis solely because it does not agree with western European notions of what ‘materialism’ is, you are going to miss a lot of beauty and nuance in the world, and frankly people just aren’t going to want to talk to you.

Placebo works though. That is why we named the effect.

Going to mosqu with your homies and helping eachother feel better in culturally relevant ways is better organizing than most of us in the west get up to.