By John Pickard
The war in Gaza is a pivotal moment for Israel, the Palestinian people and for the Middle East as a whole. War has not impacted so dramatically on the civilian population of Israel since the foundation of the state, by civil war, 75 years ago, and the consequences of the present Hamas incursion will reverberate widely for many years. It has rocked Israel, like a ‘9/11 moment’, only bigger.
While the opposition of Palestinians to the longstanding Israeli seige of Gaza has been taken as read, few expected that Hamas had the military or organisational capacity to launch such a large-scale attack on Israel as we have seen in the last few days. Almost fifty years to the day after the start of the Yom Kippur War – when a combination of Arab states, led by Syria and Egypt launced a surprise attack on israel – the scale and ferocity of the Hamas attack seems to have taken everyone in Israel by surprise, not least its much-vaunted intelligence community.
There is a fast-moving situation in the war as we write, but already as many as six hundred Israelis have been killed, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, and over two thousand injured. Some of these casualties have come from the Hamas rocket attacks, but the big majority have come from the incursion of hundreds of Hamas militants into israel, with vehicles, fast boats and even motorised hang-gliders.
Hamas militants were able to attack scores of civilian towns and settlements along the border with Israel, indiscriminately killing many civilians, and taking dozens of hostages, including men, women and children, back to Gaza. Israeli settlements near the Gaza border have had to be evacuated.
Israeli political leaders, taken completely by surprise, have responded in a fashion typical for them, with biblical language and promises of ‘vengeance’ and ‘retribution’. Apart from clearing out the last remaining Hamas incursions, they have already started bombarding Gaza, by land, sea and air. Israeli claims that they “do not deliberately target civilians” are just for the record. In fact, they have always been prepared to bomb a building full of civilians to get one ‘militant’.
Israel has had Gaza on ‘rations’ for years
Israel has already demolished an entire office block and the homes of Hamas members. Palestinian dead also already number well over three hundred, with over a thousand injured. Israel has cut off electricity to Gaza, affecting hospitals as well as everyone else.
The fact that Israel can ration, and in the case of energy completely cut off, supplies to Gaza, is an indication of the underlying source of the conflict. With a population of two and a half million and 50% unemployment, Gaza has been under seige by Israel for years, rationed in terms of food, water, energy and even dollars bills (donated by the UAE) for ATM machines.
Israel has restricted movement in and out of Gaza, including the movement of journalists, humanitarian organisations and Palestinians in need of urgent medical treatment. Gaza has been kept as virtually as an open prison for years, and while the scale of the Hamas assault on Israel has taken everyone by surprise, the fact that it has happened at all is not surprising in the least.
Israel is a regional super-power. It is only a matter of time before they clear out the Hamas insurgents still at large within Israel, and then the next phase of the war is likely to be a brutal and pitiless assault on Gaza. There have already been casualties among civilians in Gaza, but that number will increase ten or fifty-fold in the coming weeks. It will not be Hamas militants alone who bear the burden of Israeli vengeance, it will overwhelmingly be women, children and non-combatants.
That is particularly true if, as has been suggested, Israel begins a full-scale ground assault and moves to fully occupy Gaza, as it did in the past.
It is not clear at the moment what the impact of the Hamas assault will have on the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank. Their lives are a daily struggle against Israeli army check-points, Jewish settler violence and economic strangulation. The casual humiliation, harassment and brutality meted out by Israeli soldiers on Palestinians are part of daily life on the West Bank.
In fact, most observers in Israel, aware of the boiling anger seething below the surface, expected an explosion of discontent here; they had their eyes on the West Bank and not further South, on Gaza. Socialists can in no way condone the murder of Israeli civilians this weekend by Hamas militants, but we should also note that according to the UN, over four hundred Palestinian civilians have been killed by the Israeli Army in the West Bank since the beginning of 2021.
Widespread demonstrations in the Muslim world in support of Gaza
It is hardly surpising that in Palestinian cities on the West Bank, like Hebron, Nablus and Ramalla, there have been demonstrations in support of the Hamas assault, with the waving of Palestiian flags. This has been repeated in other Arab capitals, as well as Istanbul and Tehran. Whatever its longer-term consequences, it is perceived as a blow against Israel and on behalf of Palestine.
For all their military superiority, Israelis will be looking somewhat nervously to the North. In Southern Lebanon, the Shiite Hezbollah militia has already sent over some rockets into Israel, ‘in solidarity’ with Palestine and if there were the possibility of a war here, too, it would consume a large part of the Israeli military machine, as it has in previous wars in Lebanon.
It is not ruled out that under the impact of the Hamas attack and the likely Israeli retribution on Gaza that there could be an uprising on the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, a corrupt organisation beholden to the Israeli government, will not wish to see any solidarity movements among its population. But they may not be able to control events and even its militia units – armed by the USA for use against civilians – may be affected by what will happen in Gaza.
The war in Gaza will almost certainly lead to a military defeat for Hamas, but, one way or another, it will inject life and energy into the political struggle of the Palestinian people for their rights and freedom.
Most right wing and corrupt government in Israeli history
In Israel itself, there are likely to momentous long-term consequences. Like the Yom Kippur War, this will go down in Israeli history as a monumental failure on the part of the Israeli military and intelligence services. The most right-wing government in the whole of Israeli history – including openly anti-Arab racists and pogromists – was elected on the slogan of ‘security’ and their failure to even provide that will cost them dear.
The Israeli government is not only the most right wing in history, it is the most corrupt, with a Prime Minister in Benjamin Netanyahu manoeuvring laws and policies just to avoid the corruption charges he is faced with personally. The religious parties in the coalition use their ministerial positions to milk the government of cash for their own settlements and causes they favour.
In the short term, there will be a popular rallying around the government and the Israeli military. Most israelis – even those who previously opposed doing military reserve duty because of the policies of Netanyahu – will rally around the military and will want to see Hamas crushed. Netanyahu has warned of a “long and difficult war” with Hamas and however long it will be, it will be bloody and Israel will see it through to the end, even if that means occupying Gaza again, further Israeli military losses and, on a far greater scale, civilian deaths in Gaza.
Occupying Gaza will be another nightmare for Israel
The taking of dozens of Israeli hostages back to Gaza – civilians, mostly – will greatly complicate Israeli military tactics. In similar circumstances in the past, albeit on a smaller scale, the Israelis were unable to rescue hostages alive. But even assuming that Israel were able to completely re-occupy Gaza, they will simply have replaced on nightmare with another, because holding onto Gaza will lead to a protraced ‘urban war’ against the population.
But in the longer term, this war may mean the end of Netanyahu. His one slogan in his entire political life has been ‘security’ and he will be seen to have failed in that. Although Israel has faced an unprecedented internal political crisis over the governement’s attempts to control the judiciary – leading to the biggest series of anti-government demonstrations in the history of the state – the most important overriding issue facing Israel is not the judiciary, it is Palestine. The changes in the legal system are about giving free rein to confiscations and annexationist policies on the West Bank.
Speaking in the Israeli Knesset, to justify the new law limiting the power of judges, Justice Minister Yariv Levin asked, “Do you really want these judges to have the power to determine what is reasonable and what is the right thing to do?”
“A change in the legal system is essential”, the same politician told a conference in 2014, “because it will allow us, and will make it much easier for us, to take tangible steps on the ground that strengthen the process of advancing sovereignty [in the West Bank].”
But as much as the extreme right in Jerusalem would blithely go ahead and annex the whole of the West Bank, the more serious political commentators – in Israel and even in the USA, Israel’s biggest backer – have serious forebodings about the Palestinian population. An Israeli state with a population of nine or ten million is not viable as long as half the population – the Arabs – have restricted or no rights at all.
Politicians have said nothing while Palestinian bodies piled up
It is Israeli politicians, not just the left, who talk about Israeli apartheid. For years Israel has been on a trajectory to apartheid – a trajectory enabled by American, British and European politicians who have nodded at every act of repression conducted against the Palestinian people. Those in the British Labour Party who are now wringing their hands and denouncing Hamas ‘terrorism’ are the same people who have said nothing for years, while Palestinian bodies have piled up.
The war will have serious implications for the Middle East as a whole. This week, Joe Biden had been planning on discussing with Israeli and Saudi Arabian politicians to put the final touches to an Israeli-Saudi treaty of some sort. That may have to be postponed for a time.
The corrupt Saudi regime, ‘guardians’ of the two holiest sites in Islam, were on the brink of an agreement with Israel, with the condition of only a nod in the direction of Palestinian rights. They have said they would have an ‘embassador’ to the PLA, who would not even have resided in Ramallah. But the hypocrits of Saudi Arabia – and this goes for all of the other Arab states who pay lip-service to Palestinian rights – will be under pressure from their own populations to adopt a more antagonistic stance towards Israel.
The third most holy site of Islam is the Al-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem, and one of the reasons given by Hamas for its assault (although spurious, the attack having clearly been planned for months) were the ‘desecrations’ of the Mosque compound by right-wing Jewish worshippers. These issues, and the expected savagery of the Israeli rataliatory invasion of Gaza, will have a profound effect on Arab peoples throughout the Middle East, not to mention in other Moslem countries, like Iran and Turkey.
It is always difficult to predict the outcome of war, at least in detail. It will almost certainly lead to a military victory for Israel. The ‘rock solid and unwavering’ support offered by Biden and European leaders is hardly necessary from a military point of view. The USA already sends $3.3bn every single year to Israel.
But politically and diplomatically, the war will represent a severe setback for Israel. It will increase significantly the pressure on Netanyahu – and may well lead to the fall of his government – and on Israeli politicians to come to some agreement about what to do with that half of the population that it ‘controls’ by repression, but it cannot govern.
How should socialists see the Hamas assault on Israel? Given the appalling conditions in Gaza, the assault is entirely understandable. The population of Gaza have no rights, no future and will almost certainly feel that they have nothing to lose. Hamas is no friend of Palestinian workers; it is a repressive organisation of Islamic fundamentalists, against democratic rights for its population. Its stated policies – for the ‘destruction’ of Israel are profoundly anti-semitic. It is an aborrent organisation.
There is no military solution to the Palestinian issue
But our refusal to support the policies of Hamas should not mean that we deny the Palestinian people a right to struggle for their existence. We will not join in the chorus of the Western media in condemning ‘terrorism’, when Israeli terrorism has gone on without comment for years.
What we should make clear is that socialists are opposed to and appalled by the senseless and arbitrary killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas. We are opposed to taking hostages. We have to argue – and it might be that the Hamas leaders know this but don’t say it – that as regards the issue of Palestinian rights there can be no military solution. Palestinian rights will not be won over the dead bodies of Israeli soldiers or civilians. Israel is a military super-power and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
We can hope that one outcome of the war may be that it leads to increased support within the workers’ movement internationally for Palestinian rights, perhaps for support for the BDS movement (boycott, disinvestment and sanctions against Israel). But above all, we can hope that it leads to serious discussion about exactly how and under what circumstances Palestine will become ‘free’.
It will come as a movement of workers across the Middle East, as part of a struggle for a socialist society worldwide, or it will not come at all. It will not come from a war between Jews and Arabs.
[Photos from Al Jazeera TV]
