The horror of the (largely one sided) slaughter in the Israeli-Gaza war has seized the attention of the world opinion, funneled into this channel by politicians and a salacious media machine.
Have we forgotten the other war in Europe? Did we ever remember the dozen other wars raging from the Sahel through to Sudan; the (DRC)Congo to Yemen, Nagorno-Karabakh to Myanmar?
The slaughterhouse is worldwide. Where our attention is led is as political as the conflicts themselves. The Ukraine is the West’s new bastion on Europe’s eastern frontier, Israel, it historic one in the Middle East.
That the Islamist jihadis of Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities can only be denied by fellow Islamist fanatics, fascists and anti-Semites. The more important question than how did they get out from the Gaza siege is how they ended up controlling Gaza in the first place? The answer paradoxically is Israel.
For 30 years from the 1970s onwards, Israel’s Palestine policy backed by the West, was the eradication of the secular resistance to the occupation. National Liberation and Pan-Arabism was seen at the height of the Cold War as a military arm of Soviet foreign policy.
Their war against the Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) factions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), included mass detentions without trial, assassinations at home and abroad and the bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Their successful expulsion of the PLO cost 30,000 lives, including 3.000 civilians massacred by their Christian militia allies at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut.
It suited this policy to encourage the emerging Islamist opposition to sow division to further undermine the PLO and force them into negotiations. The Oslo Accords from 1993 turned fighters into civil administrators of what became the Palestinian Authority.
30 years of peace withering on the vine followed with broken promises, continuing evictions and illegal settlement, backed by brute force and discrimination. A de facto two tier one state system rather than the two state ‘solution’.
The analogy of the South African ‘Apartheid’ regime is often drawn. Racism is as rife in Israel as anywhere else. It also has a hierarchy of European Jews, East European Jews, airlifted East African Jews, and ‘other’ Jews. The relations inside it are torn by racism even within the Jewish communities. Racism is even more focused on the 20% of Israelis who are Arabs, against whom the far right – with representatives in the government – is calling for attacks on, regardless of age.
The occupied Palestinian diaspora don’t even register enough for categorisation for a ‘separate development’ plan as under apartheid. Analogy serves less well than the reality of occupation, racism and discrimination. Whatever words one searches for to describe it are less relevant than the impact – pain, dislocation and despair. Hopelessness defies analogy.
Against this background emerged a largely compliant Palestinian administration and the rebellious zealots of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Occupation, periodic rebellion, terrorism and repression have ruled ever since.
Israel’s decade long march to the populist right has added fuel to the tinder and October 7th saw the ignition. The Israeli Rights hubristic sense of superiority through provocation left it blind to this barbaric assault.
“This is the battle of civilisation” Nentanyahu announced on the eve of invasion that will hugely add to the 16,000 existing casualties, including 4,000 dead in Gaza and 75 on the West Bank.
The assault is already relentless. While the culprit of the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing may be disputed, that Israel has continued to bomb southern Gaza despite forcing 1 million people to move down there for safety, is not.
Hamas has said it is not holding hostages, just “prisoners of war”, including children, babies, the elderly and disabled. Both sides see everyone as a combatant. The workers of the ‘Palestinian Street’ are as vulnerable (if more numerous) as the youths slaughtered by Hamas at a peace festival to the warmongers of the Israeli state and the Hamas Islamic Statelet.
The ruthless hypocrisy of capitalist power and their wars is demonstrated in the Wests response. While suspiciously quiet about their war in Ukraine – perhaps grateful for the diversion from Ukraine’s failing offensive – they line up as Gaza is flattened to praise Israel for what they denounced war crimes in Ukraine.
That two nuclear armed states are invading their neighbours should terrify us all. Especially as this conflict risks drawing Iran in, Russia’s s principle ally in its invasion and an aspiring nuclear power itself. Such a situation could tempt the US, through its proxy Israel, to kill two birds with one stone while protecting Israeli skies and quietening Russian forces in Syria with its carrier fleet off the Israeli coast.
They want us to see only one war. We might start joining the dots if we linked the totality of what’s going on. Their drive to war is real and growing, the casualties on all sides of those conflicts will be the same. People like us, workers and producers with no stake in the system and everything to lose.
At home we pay through austerity, our will fight against it is also the fight against their wars, their capacity to fight war, our refusal to fight it for them. No war but the class war must be our response!