By John Pickard
The next phase of the Gaza war has begun in earnest and it will consist largely of Israel using its overwhelming military superiority to bombard a defenceless population. But the more savage the Israeli retribution, the greater will be the impact on governments and the labour movement internationally.
The overriding sentiments in Israel are grief and anger over the indiscriminate murder by Hamas of so many people on Saturday, most of them civilians, and according to reports, including babies and children. Reports put the death toll now at over 1,200. More than 2,000 were injured and around a hundred taken as hostages to Gaza.
The national outpouring of rage is reflected in the speech and language of politicians and generals, demanding an unprecedented destructive campaign against Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to conduct the war “with neither limitations nor respite”.
The Financial Times (October 9) quoted a right wing newspaper columnist on Sunday saying, “We need to break the enemy’s bones…We need to bring it to its knees until it begs us to stop, to strike at it mercilessly and to pummel it viciously.” It is not clear if this last remark was directed at Hamas or not, but in practice it will apply to Gaza as a whole.
Short term unity among politians in Israel
More than 360,000 Israeli reservists have been mobilised, more than in any war in recent times, and preparations are being made for a full-scale ground offensive. For the moment, the political opponents of Netanyahu will be silent, and those reservists who previously refused to report for duty, in protest against the government’s judicial reforms, will go along with everyone else. A special war cabinet of all the main parties has be formed.
In the short term, therefore, there will be general political unity among all political parties and among Jewish Israelis behind the military. Israeli Arabs, around a tenth of the population, seem to keeping a low profile, for their own safety, if nothing else. There is an over-riding sentiment in Israeli society, notwithstanding that it is a regional superpower, that Israeli Jews are fighting for their existence and it is a perception that will be milked by the government and the military to the full.
It is unlikely in the short term that there will be any shift in public opinion in Israel. The outrage at the killings of Israelis by Hamas – many of them young people at a music festival – puts people solidly behind the military. The history of the Jewish people, and especially the Nazi Holocaust, runs like a dark thread through the Israeli psyche, through all of politics and this is seen as yet another ‘existential’ threat to Jewish people.
In the longer term, however, it is impossible to overstate the deeply traumatic effect on the political situation in Israel from the attack on Saturday and the potential to change Israel utterly. Nothing will ever be the same. Six months after the 1973 Yom Kippur War – and that surprise attack by Egypt and Syria was also considered a military and intelligence failure – the Prime Minister, Golda Meir, was gone. One way or another, this war may mean the end of Netanyahu, and that is only for starters.
Hamas did not fall from the skies
Biden and nearly all Western politicians have declared their full support for Israel and he is sending new caches of sophisticated arms. The USA is stationing a battle fleet near the conflict, not that it will engage with Hamas, but as a warning to other Arab governments to stay clear.
One speaker at Labour conference this week, suggested that “our only reaction” must be to support Israel. That little word “only” is an important caveat that socialists will note, because, while we abhor the massacre of Israeli civilians on Saturday, we must strive to show the bigger picture and understand the background to this conflict.
Hamas did not fall from the skies. We only need to look at why Gaza is so densely populated in the first place. During the 1948 civil war, tens of thousands of Palestinian villagers fled or were forced to flee from the smaller villages and communities in the area, towards the safety of bigger cities on the coast. They no doubt expected to be able to return home after the fighting died down, but the land from which they had fled became ‘Israel’ and they have never been allowed to return.
Three generations of Palestinians crammed into Gaza, mark the day they fled – the Naqba – ever year, as do other refugees in the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon. None of these refugees have ever been allowed to return, while Jews from any part of the world can move freely in and out of Israel, with full rights. Many of those killed in Israel this weekend are American or European citizens, with greater rights to move in and out of Israel than its original indigenous population. Small wonder there is bitter anger and resentment among Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, cut off from the outside world by Israeli fences and military.
The historic crime of the Naqba has only been made worse by the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, under direct military occupation, and in Gaza by a decades-long siege making it – in the words of the UN – the biggest open prison in the world.
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”
The main political organisation of Palestinians in Gaza, as elsewhere, was the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, its largest component being Fatah, which to this day is still dominant in the Palestine Authority on the West Bank. But in Gaza, with a much higher proportion of Muslims, Islamic fundamentalism was able put down roots, with the support, incredibly of the Israelis. It was seen as a counter-weight to the PLO.
In an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, [still there, archived] Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades wrote, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”. Back in the mid-1980s, he even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists [ie the PLO]. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face.”
Hamas was elected in 2006, largely as a reaction to the corruption of Fatah and the PLO. Since then, Hamas has allowed no elections in Gaza and in fact, in their daily lives, Gazan Palestinians are tightly controlled by this increasingly vicious and reactionary organisation.
Since Hamas took control of Gaza, there has been continuous, if intermittent, conflict with Israel. The population has suffered one bombing campaign after another, as well as large scale wars in 2008-9, 2012, 2014 and 2021. In these wars, consisting largely of Israel bombing the Gaza strip, over four thousand Palestinians have been killed, 245,000 home damaged or destroyed and nearly $6bn-worth of damage caused.
In addition to suffering, these four – now five – bombing campaigns, Gazans have been under siege for years and have been drip-fed all the necessities of life, like water, electricity and food, by Egypt and Israel, chiefly the latter. Even the sea off the coast of Gaza has offered very only limited access for Palestinian fishermen, the waters being constantly patrolled by the Israeli navy.
Yet all of this suffering, which is the real wellspring of the savagery of Hamas and the war, has been largely ignored by the Western press. The mainstream media, reporting in graphic detail on the indiscriminate murders by Hamas of hundreds of Israeli civilians has put Israel on the moral high ground. But that high ground may begin to disappear when – as looks likely – Israel begins stacking up its own crimes through the brutal collective punishment of Palestinians living in Gaza, irrespective of their relationship to Hamas.
Israeli government declared ‘total siege’ on Gaza
This war of Israel’s will be nominally against Hamas, the perpetrators of the atrociity on Saturday, but like past bombardments, it will impact more than anyone else on the ordinary population of Gaza, most of whom are not supporters or members, much less active militants of Hamas.
The excuse that will be used by Israel, over and over, for the likely deaths of thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, will be that Hamas is ‘immersed’ in the population. But how could it be otherwise, in such a narrow and densely populated strip of land?
The Israeli government has declared a ‘total siege’ on Gaza. All food, water and other necessities that usually go into Gaza are now embargoed. They are intent on starving the whole population: men, women and children, as retribution for the crimes of Hamas. As Natan Sachs of the US Brookings institute wrote in the Atlantic – and this is a right wing US magazine – “As bad as things have been in Gaza in the past two decades—and they have been terrible—the coming weeks could prove even worse”.
According to the Guardian (October 9), Netanyahu has warned the people of Gaza to “get out of there now” – but he is telling people to leave, when he knows they have nowhere to go. “For your own safety, immediately evacuate the areas where you live,” Lt Col Avichay Adraee, of the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force, instructed civilians in Gaza on Twitter (now ‘X’). But as the Guardian explained, “Many across Gaza feared there was nowhere to hide, in a 140sq mile area that has long been considered one of the most densely populated areas on Earth”.
As if to emphasise the entrapment of the Gaza population, the Israelis bombed the Rafah crossing that goes between Gaza and Egypt, in direct conflict with the ‘advice’ of Israeli generals to flee to Egypt. Those Palestinians queing to leave usually include a high proportion of those in need of medical treatment in Egypt. It may be that the bombing is a means of reinforcing ‘total siege’, because it reportedly stopped lorries of humanitarian aid that were about to be sent into Gaza.
Israel threatened to bomb any aid trucks from Egypt
Israeli generals broadcast mixed messages to Gaza about whether to flee or not to flee to Egypt. But in any case, the Egyptian government of General Sisi will not allow a mass ethnic cleansing, and will at best offer humanitarian aid, assuming it is allowed through. According to the correspondent of the Financial Times (October 10), “Cairo is making preparations to receive the wounded and send humanitarian aid to Gaza when possible. At the same time, Israeli television reported that Israel had warned Egypt it would bomb any aid trucks sent to relieve the pressure on Gaza, which on Tuesday endured another day of Israeli shelling”.
The capture by Hamas of around a hundred Israeli civilians will enormously complicate the task of the Israeli army in a ground operation. Hamas has threatened to kill a hostage for every bombing mission that kills civilians without warning. They have also pledged not to negotiate with Israel over the hostages until the fighting ends – although such negotiation looks highly unlikely.
So in the coming days and weeks there will be bloody and grinding ground war launched against Gaza. “The price the Gaza Strip will pay will be a very heavy one,” Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, told the Financial Times. It will be Gaza as a whole, not Hamas, that pays this “heavy price”.
In many places, Gaza is already rubble. Because of previous wars and bombings, infrastructure hangs by a thread. Cement and building materials are never allowed in – the Israeli excuse being that Hamas will use them to build tunnels – so bombed-out buildings have stayed unrepaired for years.
The Guardian reported some comments from Mohammed Ghalayini, a Palestinian living in Manchester, but who happened to be in Gaza visiting family. “People are very fearful of what’s to come,” he said. “But Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have suffered so much over the past 15 years of blockade and attack after attack from Israel, so they feel they have nothing left to lose.” He also noted that “The lack of electricity as well as years of attacks by Israel have left Gaza’s medical infrastructure on its knees”.
An Israeli-engineered humanitarian disaster
What will unfold will be an Israeli-engineered humanitarian disaster that will eclipse all of the wars with Gaza in the past. in terms of casualties – including, again, women, children, babies and other non-combatants – it will dwarf even the atrocity committed in Israel on Saturday, and by a wide margin.
Such an outcome is even anticipated by some Israelis. An Israeli human rights lawyer, told the Financial Times (October 10) that in their attack, “Hamas used the same type of barbaric tactics that we saw in the recent years by Isis…Now Israel will be able to commit terrible and extensive crimes and collective punishment while receiving total global immunity, even more than before.”
“This is important to focus on one mission, which is winning,” Aviv Bushinsky, a political analyst and former chief of staff to Netanyahu, told the same newspaper. “It’s a tough task, and we are going to lose many soldiers.” But he also noted that “international support for Israel might wane during a protracted war”.
If not in Israel at this stage, an ongoing campaign of destruction and state terror waged against the Gaza population will increase support for Palestine In the labour movement internationally. Israel will not receive “total global immunity” and that will be reflected in diplomatic and economic shifts in coming months.
What that means is that around the rest of the world and particularly in the labour movement, there will be growing support for Palestine. It will be a dangerous time for the most reactionary Arab leaders, whose own populations will express their sympathies with Gaza. There is a considerable Palestinian diaspora around the Middle East and the greater the horrors inflicted on Gaza in the coming weeks, the greater will be the urgency of their protests in other Arab states.
Until recently, Saudi Arabia was discussing a recognition agreement with Israel, such as the United Arab Emirates have done, and Egypt has had for many years. But the sheiks and Arab dictators will feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. When the Hamas assault first broke into the news, it was significant that the government in Riyhad, while calling for restraint, referred to “the deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate right.” It is only lip-service as usual, but the Saudi ‘risk calculations’ have changed.
Even before Saturday, Israel was on an unsustainable path
Although rocket and artillery exchanges between the Israeli army and Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon have been relatively brief, it is still not ruled out that this area may also become an arena for major conflict. Israel has fought several wars here, too, and Hezbollah, although no match for the Israeli army, are a sizeable force – enough to enormously complicate the task of a ground war in Gaza.
Last but not least, if the war in Gaza turns into a monstrous humanitarian crime, it is not ruled out that there may be uprisings and a political explosion of Palestinians on the West Bank, and support expressed among Arabs in Israel. Twenty five Palestinians have been killed by Israelis on the West Bank even since Saturday, some of them by armed Jewish settlers in a drive-by shooting. Here too, there is an explosion waiting to happen.
Every Arab king, sheikh and dictator is worried at the present time, about what a war in Gaza might bring. The positioning of large-scale naval forces in the Eastern Mediterranean by the USA is not aimed to make any difference to the Gaza war. It is a gesture to dictators and kings to say, “we’ve got your back…so don’t go doing anything you might regret.”
Seven years ago, in a full page advert in the New York Times, sixteen well-known Israeli public figures argued that the path Israel was taking was not sustainable. The sixteen – six former army chiefs of staff, five former Shin Beth directors, five former directors of Mossad – were largely ignored, and now we have the most right wing government in Israeli history, elected by an appeal to ‘security’ and unable to offer that very thing to its population.
But the view of those sixteen are reflected in similar opinions now increasingly being aired in thank-tanks and foreign policy discussions in the USA and elsewhere – and all this before last Saturday. At some point in the coming war or after wards there is going to be a step change in the relationship between Israel and its biggest military and political backer. But in the meantime, tens of thousands of Palestinians may be killed.
Socialists support the right of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to fight for their freedoms and rights. But the left makes a serious mistaken if it fails – as it sometimes does – to distance itself from groups like Hamas who have nothing in common with the workers’ movement.
We should strongly oppose Suella Braverman’s suggestion that any expression of support for Palestine should be banned on the grounds that it signifyies ‘support for terrorism’, but Left Horizons did not and would not join in celebrations, largely on the fringes of the labour movement, about the Hamas attack on Saturday.
The central issue remains the absence of any rights for half of the population controlled by Israel. Nor should we forget that the collective deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis over the last few decades far overshadow the deaths in Israel on Saturday. This is something the mainstream press and Labour’s right wing do not want to discuss or even reference, but it is the chilling background the events over the weekend.
There can be no military solution to the Palestine issue
It is important that socialists see this war, not from a national, but from from a class standpoint. Socialists need to explain is that there is no military solution to the Palestine/Israeli conflict. Israel has a powerful military; it is a super-power by Middle East standards, and will not be defeated militarily.
But neither will Hamas be defeated by force of arms. As previous wars have demonstrated, it will not be possible for Israeli generals to defeat Hamas ‘once and for all’, or to ‘change reality reality for a generation’ no matter how much they pound the area with high explosives. No matter how heavily Hamas will be defeated militarily – and they will be – the despair, hopelessness and lack of any future that are daily life in Gaza will create new organisations like Hamas, or perhaps worse, imbued with even more bitterness and rage.
We are internationalists, not nationalists but it is important to understand what drives nationalist movements. What ‘nationalism’ means depends on the class through which it is expressed and in whose class interests it is fought.
For Israeli workers, Zionism means little more than the right to live a life in peace and security, to have a reasonable life and a future. For workers, as Marxists have argued since the formation of the state in 1948, a capitalist Israel is not a ‘safe haven’, but a trap. For Israeli capitalism, on the other hand, Zionism for the ruling class has always meant the exploitation of Jewish and Arab workers.
Even twelve years ago, it was estimated that as few as eighteen families controlled 60% of the equity value of all Israeli companies. It is one of the most unequal countries in the ‘Western’ world. Zionism for the ruling class also means an assertion of geo-political and military dominance in the entire region – paid for by the USA – and in their exploitation of Jewish workers, they always use ‘security’ as a screen to cover themselves.
Workers are the cannon-fodder of national wars
For ordinary Arab workers too, Arab nationalism – including the Palestinian variety – means little more than the right to live a life in peace and security and to have a health system and an education for their children, and a future. All things denied to Palestinian workers. But for the leaders of Arab regimes, their nationalism – and the Palestinian ‘struggle’ to which they pay lip-service – is a means of exploiting their own workers and it helps them tremendously in maintaining their positions to point the finger at Israeli (or ‘Jewish’) crimes.
It is the working class of Israel and Palestine who are supplying the cannon-fodder and the casualties for this war. Unfortunately, that will remain the case, unless and until the labour movement, regionally and internationally, somehow intervenes and welds together the struggles of Jews and Arab workers in a struggle for both their interests.
But this is to put forward a socialist view. What we will probably see as the war progresses is even greater devastation in Gaza. It remains to be seen whether or not international opinion will force Israel into allowing humanitarian relief and relief corridors into Gaza. As things stand that looks unlikely.
There will be growing calls for humanitarian aid and support and those are calls that the labour movement must support. But socialists must raise the political explanations and explain the political background to the storm of death and destruction in that part of the world. We should demand a socialist perspective, a socialist policy and socialist answers.
Socialists and the labour movement must demand:
- No support for Israeli bombing of Gaza
- No support for Hamas or the ‘Palestinian Authority’
- An end to the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza.
- For a workers’ movement based on the needs and interests of Jewish and Arab workers.
- For a socialist Israel/Palestine, with no exclusive civic, political or economic rights based on religion or ethnicity.
- For the economy and wealth of Israel/Palestine to belong to the population and used for the benefit of all.
No-one can accuse Left Horizons of inconsistency. Nearly a year ago, we wrote, “In the absence of an intervention by the international labour movement, a spontaneous and chaotic uprising could bring in its wake great suffering and distress to the lives of all, Palestinians and Israelis alike”. Six months after that, we wrote, “The state of Israel is facing the greatest peace-time crisis in its 75-year history”. It is impossible in the midst of war to predict outcomes and results. But we can say that after this weekend, nothing will be the same again.
