Amid the hand-wringing, wishful thinking, and selective blindness, it’s time for a bit of rational analysis. The two-state solution has been dead for years, since the ‘leadership’ on both sides would not accept it. Military victory by either side is impossible and would be meaningless so long as there are Arabs and Jews in the world. Obviously I’d advocate a no-state solution but that would require a popular uprising and we see how these are often defeated when the Working Class put too much faith in authoritarians. Gazans may give credit to Hamas for taking the fight to the enemy, at last.

There is a grim logic to the Hamas incursion into Israeli-occupied territory this month. It meets the United Nations definition of a ‘war crime’ as set out in the various Geneva Conventions, breaching these in several different clauses. Under these statutes, the Israeli state has been committing ‘war crimes’ in the region since its inception in 1948 and has defied UN resolutions with impunity since 1967.

Unfortunately, International Law is only enforceable by the winning side in a war, and only the losers are ever held to account, by such wars’ referees. Israel-Palestine is America’s aircraft carrier in the region, and testing ground for the kind of low-intensity munitions all states rely on nowadays to contain their own people. It saves the ruling classes a lot of blood and treasure.

Hamas grew out of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, winner of that country’s first election in two millennia, overthrown a year later in a military coup. Such parties used to be cultivated by the West, and even Israel, as a counterweight to the aggressively secular post-Stalinist independence movements that emerged after the war. It turned out that religious fundamentalism was a better vehicle for aggrieved ill-informed populations to resist colonialism than Marxism-Leninism, with just a hint of the Maoist “protracted peasant war” about it.

Hamas operatives in Gaza are precisely what you would expect of people who’ve grown up in the world’s largest concentration camp, regularly used for target practice by a military-industrial power. The drones fly constantly over Gaza, most are not armed, but they look and sound the same. If one blows your roof off (called the “knock”) you theoretically have two minutes to evacuate the ramshackle three or four-storey building before an F16 demolishes it. The state can take a child from its bed and hold it for six months without bringing it before a court or telling anyone where it is. Ambulances taking Elderly Gazans to hospital are regularly detained at army checkpoints until the patient is dead.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right”, you say? Indeed, but there’s more to it than that. By pushing Israeli casualties into four figures, Hamas have made it impossible for the IDF to maintain its customary sixty-to-one kill ratio without committing an act of inarguable genocide. This could only be explained under cover of a protracted land war, drawing the IDF into street fighting against some very experienced urban guerrillas in the rabbit warren of Gaza City, which may feel something like Barcelona in 1936, or Free Derry in the 1970’s.

And then what? If the IDF succeeds in eliminating the dysfunctional Hamas administration, is direct rule even theoretically possible? That would entail at least rebuilding and maintaining the infrastructure it so painstakingly levelled. Hamas acted as a buffer for the Israeli government, allowing two gangs of self-aggrandising demagogues to blame each other for the misery of the people. An ‘Israeli Gaza’ would have to be run as a full-on concentration camp, much as the British state did in Kenya, but without the benefit of loyalist collaborators. The losers will be Working Class Jews in the cities of the west, subject to the violent fantasies of vengeful hotheads.

Perhaps they aim for a second Nakba, driving the Palestinians out through Egypt, to wander the earth in perpetuity as refugees. That won’t work either, you can’t wage war on a Diaspora; they ought to know that.

What’s more, Israel has been known to release a thousand prisoners in return for one of its citizens, so taking a hundred hostages, whilst reprehensible and illegal, made more sense than just shooting them. Netanyahu is in the shit, and his constituents will not forgive his failure to recover their people.

So I’d have to disagree with my Comrade Martin Lux that these spiteful attacks were motivated by mindless religious fanaticism, I think they were well thought out, executed by people prepared to be martyred – and probably willing to martyr thousands of their own countrymen into the bargain – in a desperate final gamble to make Israel-Palestine unsustainable. After all they’ve been through; the people of Gaza may yet say they are not afraid of ruins.

October 17, 2023
Categories: Palestine, U.S.A. . Tags: Anti fascist, fascist, International, No Borders, Prison, racism, Solidarity . Author: wessexsolidarity . Comments: Leave a comment