Just over two years ago I wrote this: Events in Israel-Palestine, October 2023
“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.”
Like most healthy observers, I watched with horror and growing incredulity as they did just that. At least a hundred thousand civilians have perished in Gaza, the West Bank and neighbouring territories struck by Israeli munitions. Sixty for each Israeli life lost, of whom sixty percent must be children, a little higher than could be accounted for by random collateral damage. The IDF are claiming a third of them were combatants, but I’m sure if Hamas ever had that many, the state of Israel would be a distant memory by now.
The charge of genocide has been laid, but not taken up by the major neo-colonial powers. Whole families have been wiped out, their names lost forever. Amid the carnage it has often gone unnoticed that the state of Israel not only targets schools and hospitals but archaeological sites and buildings containing collections of antiquities. Their intent is not only to annihilate Palestinians but to erase their history and culture, which goes back over 3000 years. They always use the same crappy excuse and no-one believes a word of it, you can describe anything lobbed over the fence as aimed at terrorists. The Turkish state did much the same thing in Kurdistan. Western discourse has become accustomed to ethnic cleansing; it happened in Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Xinjiang and Myanmar, and is still going on in Yemen and Sudan. We all know it when we see it.
The received wisdom is that it is simply antisemitic to suggest that a Palestinian life is equivalent to an Israeli one. Israel has the right to defend itself, but against what? The inhabitants of a territory it overran in 1967, that had fled to Egypt in 1948. The six-day war, which destroyed the air forces of Egypt and Syria and cost around twenty-thousand lives, established Israel as the dominant player in conventional warfare of the Middle East, leaving only guerrilla tactics to its Arab neighbours and over a million displaced people who found themselves de-facto hostages in the occupied territories.
It would be antisemitic to talk about numbers. The most serious attack on Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust killed significantly fewer humans than the IDF’s last major incursion into Gaza, “operation cast lead” in 2014. More perished in the bogus humanitarian aid distros than on 7th October 2023. There are precedents for waging total war on a lightly armed civil insurrection. The British state did it in Kenya, with carpet-bombing, mass displacement, concentration camps and torture. Russia did it in Chechnya, which at least was within its recognised borders, against Islamists, so no one bothered about it that much.
As I type, a ceasefire is in effect, alongside a hostage exchange between the Israeli government and Hamas, brokered by the onomatopoeic flatulence in the White House with other regional interests. He acheived this by engaging Netanyahu in a megalomania-off. Of the two demagogues, Trump believes his own bullshit, but Netanyahu? He’s not even a convincing liar. With the eloquence of a primary-school bully he will have reminded the self-appointed leader of the Jews who is keeping his little racket going, and why, something no other US president ever had the bad taste to do.
The IDF’s boss was then ritually humiliated by being made to read out a dictated apology to the Qatari royal family, with the president on the other line to make sure he didn’t miss anything out. President Guff’s relentless self-aggrandisement is presently accompanied by a chorus of sycophancy inflating his ego to the point where it may well explode and blow his syrup off. He mistakenly thinks he can nominate himself for a Nobel Peace Prize – these days as relevant as a Jim’ll Fix it badge – like Napoleon putting the crown on his own head. He was too late this time and those philistines of the Nobel committee wouldn’t change the rules to accommodate his exceptionality so they kicked the can down the road by giving it to one of his mates.
Will it last? Of course not; the IDF interprets ceasefire as only shooting half a dozen civilians per day as opposed to hundreds, Hamas interprets it as only shooting its political rivals. The great orange arse-bugle hopes to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, assisted by the region’s dictators and kings, and mendacious war-criminal Tony Blair, who has been responsible for more civilian deaths than Netanyahu, Trump, and Hamas put together.
As in Iraq, no-one is going to lift a finger unless they see a profit, and no one will represent the people of Gaza. Hamas may be defeated militarily, but the views they hold are still current. The demand for Palestinian independence will not go away and has been repeatedly endorsed by the international community. So long as the Israeli state refuses, they will be enemies. Remember when PIRA turned their arms over to that Canadian geezer and he poured concrete on them? They retained enough firepower to shut down the self-styled Real IRA after the Omagh bombing. A terrorist action closely overlooked by the security services of two countries, which saved the Good Friday Agreement. History shows that any movement with wide popular support can quickly establish a military force.
The “peace deal” is predicated on two independent states but neither belligerent supports them. Hamas would like Jews to live in a majority Islamic Palestinian state, alongside returning refugees, whereas the Netanyahu government do not accept Palestinian statehood at all, or their right to return. So this is going nowhere. If Hamas must be excluded from the politics of the region then so must the Israeli Likud and their ilk, for precisely the same reasons – times sixty. On the one hand a movement that fetishises martyrdom, on the other, one that values the rotting corpses of its citizens over the lives of starving children. Necrophilia is no basis for peace.
Liberal democracies have a love-hate relationship with terrorism; arguably they could not function without it. It gives them an excuse to break their own rules, and may frighten their subjects into accepting extraordinary repression providing they manage to contain it. If they are seen to fail, a change of leadership usually follows.
As part of the cold war Western alliance, the state of Israel will have been informed by the counter-insurgency theory and practice of its allies, much of it inherited from the Bolsheviks and the Third Reich: Kitson’s manuals, Cointelpro and so forth. The relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa is well documented. Kitson believed any political outcome could be sustained as long as the government controlled the propaganda narrative and crucially, that this was the task of the army.
In counter-terrorist operations, nothing is out of bounds, and that includes pitting one terrorist outfit against another. Those who have studied the Irish conflict are familiar with collusion, and the practice of assassinating non-combatants peripheral to the conflict, to exacerbate community tensions.
I have unanswered questions: we know the IDF chose to ignore their own reports of military build-up across the border. Their low-ranking spotters were told to shut up about it and even threatened with disciplinary action. This was reported by many mainstream media outlets. The choice of targets was odd; kibbutzim in Southern Israel were mostly sympathetic to Palestine, unlike the fanatical West bank settlers. A music festival with mostly young people, not Netanyahu’s constituency either. Lastly, why film your own war crimes? I don’t doubt that Hamas were behind the action, with support from Palestine Islamic Jihad, but there may have been collusion through agents provocateurs, there are other armed groups in Gaza, some are controlled by the IDF, others are just in it for the money.
The last two years have done Netanyahu no harm at all, he couldn’t get any more unpopular. By frequent changes of direction, double-dealing, playing his fellow politicians against each other and prolonging the conflict he has swerved jail for corruption, bribery and fraud. The outcome of the 21st Century Holocaust is the celebration of two pantomime villains in their second childhoods, two constipated* old men blowing toxic smoke out of their arses.
* Diagnosis based entirely on their facial expressions, I’m not a doctor.
Wessex Solidarity