By John Pickard
The war in Gaza has now entered its seventh month, having brought about an unprecedented scale of death and destruction in a narrow strip of land. We cannot know for certain how the war will proceed, but it is creating a new political reality in the region, the most profound and long-lasting effects of which are only beginning to take shape.
More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, the overwhelming majority of them non-combatants: men, women and children. According the the website of the +972 magazine, the complete disregard for human life shown by the IDF can be seen by their use of AI to target and assassinate those it deems to be Hamas supporters.
An investigation by that magazine revealed that an AI-based program played “a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war”. According to the magazine’s sources, its influence on military operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.” It is further proof that it is part of the rationale of IDF thinking that they are prepared to destroy scores of innocent lives, just to target one ‘Hamas’ militant.
What the IDF cannot destroy, they steal
There has been more than just AI in the IDF campaign in Gaza, however. The IDF has also been reponsible for the deliberate destruction of infrastructure, hospitals, clinics, roads, schools and university buildings, as if aiming to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable. The intensity of the bombing is paralleled in modern times only by the carpet-bombing of cities in the Second World War. The IDF has been able to destroy buildings, civilians’ cars, equipment and facilities, and what it cannot destroy its soldiers have often looted and taken back to Israel.
And as if the death and destruction from bombs, shells, rockets and bullets hasn’t been enough, Israel has manufactured a humanitarian catastrophe by blocking food, water and medical supplies from Gaza, with the result that scores are now dying from malnutrition or dehydration, particularly children and the sick.
There is more than a suspicion that the IDF are following the dictates of the Israeli far right in trying – although they have failed up to now – to drive the more than two million Palestinians into Egypt, by making Gaza too dangerous a place to stay, or in any case uninhabitable in the long run.
Meanwhile, using the Hamas attack of October 7 as a pretext, Israeli settlers on the West Bank have increased their pogroms on Arab villagers and their ethnic cleansing of rural areas in the West Bank. Even before October, 2024 had seen a significant increase over previous years in assaults on Palestinians by the IDF and settlers, but since then Israelis have acted with impunity. Well over four hundred Palestinians have been killed and thousands of ‘hostages’ taken, without any due legal process, to Israel’s Guantanamo, where they are abused, mistreated and occasionally killed.
Death toll and deliberate starvation have increased world outrage
While War Rages in Gaza”, wrote columnist Gideon Levy in Haaretz, “the West Bank has undergone a metamorphosis…Israel has seized the opportunity to intensify the occupation, with mass arrests of Palestinians, hundreds killed, a host of new illegal settler outposts and roads. Shepherds expelled from their homes, violent settlers rampaging in uniform. All under the aegis of the war” (Haaretz, March 30).
The monstrous death toll in Gaza and the use of starvation as a weapon of war, not to mention the increased repression in the West Bank, have created a huge and unstoppable global movement against Israel and in sympathy for Palestine. This profound world shift of opinion cannot be underestimated, because it will have significant consequences for and in Israel, which is increasingly seen as a pariah state.
In the years after the Second World War, there was a fund of sympathy for those Jewish refugees who had survived the Nazi Holocaust and the newly-founded state of Israel capitalised on it for political, financial and military support. Notwithstanding the fact that the new Zionist state was always going to be a colonial-settler project, and that in 1948, half a million Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from areas that became part of Israel, support for the new state held up, because of what Jews had suffered under the Nazis in Europe.
Today, that has been turned on its head; we are now looking at the mirror image of 1948. There has been an enormous shift of public opinion, especially among workers and youth, over the savage collective punishment meted out to Gaza by Israel. World sympathy, with the notable exception of handfuls of European and North American political leaders, has swung dramatically against Jerusalem.
As the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz reports, Israel’s hasbara “is no longer working”. According to Wikipedia, hasbara is a Hebrew word with no direct English translation, but roughly it means “explaining“. It is a communicative strategy that “seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified“.
It is a reference, in other words, the huge international propaganda and lobbying machine that the Israeli government has set up to garner support around the world. It is a branch of the Israeli government that reaches to the heart of all political processes and parties in the West – including the Labour Party – and it has up to now been very effectively in defending Israel, ‘justifying’ its policies and in stifling criticism.
No-one believes the spokespersons of the Israeli government any more
But that is all changing. No-one believes the Israeli government any more apart from a handful of right-wing politicians. The families of aid workers killed – their vehicles deliberately targeted by the IDF – do not believe there was ever a proper inquiry into their murder. No-one believes the IDF when they provide excuses for shooting unarmed civilians, whose only crime was to crowd around a food convoy in Northern Gaza. The world believes that Israel is using starvation as a weapon.
The opposition to Israel is most widespread in the global South, where Latin American and African countries have almost entirely condemned Israel and have demanded a ceasefire. It was no accident that it was South Africa that sponsored the referral of Israel to the International Court of Justice over its genocide in Gaza. This week, it is Nicaragua taking Germany to the International Court of Justice for facilitating genocide in Gaza because of its arms exports to Israel.
The contrast between Western leaders’ condemnation of Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, and their silence over the much bloodier intervention of Israel in Gaza, has been laid bare for all the world to see.
Although they really only constitute moral and political pressure, the votes in the UN, the outrage expressed by the UN humanitarian organisations and the proceedings of the bodies like the International Court of Justice are important. They are all indications that the moral stature and ‘democratic credentials’ of the USA and the UK, not to mention Israel itself, have been considerably diminished in the eyes of the world.
Such has been the groundswell of anger over Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza, that it is in now even beginning to make Western leaders shift and squirm uncomfortably. The most senior Democratic on Capitol Hill, Chuck Schumer, called for a cease-fire. Some member of staff in the US State Department resigned and publicly condemned the Biden administration for supporting for ‘war crimes’. There are now calls, even among Establishment politicians in the West, for an arms embargo on Israel.
Even as he continues to arm Israel, Biden is threatening (albeit weakly) to withhold arms and has called for a ceasefire. Biden and his advisers understand what perhaps Netanyahu has not yet realised – that Israeli policy viz-a-viz the Palestinian population is a ticking time-bomb that has so far only partially gone off. There is still a lot more combustible material in the Arab world as a whole, and not least in the occupied West Bank.
War will accelerate US retreat from the Middle East
Across the Arab Middle East, the stability of rotten dictatorships and kingdoms are on a knife-edge, as their populations see on Al Jazeera what the IDF are doing to the people of Gaza and they take note of the weakness of their own governments – always long on words, but short on actions. In the long run, the war launched by Netanyahu on Gaza will likely undermine political support for the USA in the region and accelerate its military retreat from its bases, to begin with, in Iraq and Syria.
The entire policy of the Israeli right wing, based on the so-called ‘security’ of Israel, has driven forward a policy of apartheid. But the current events are proof, if such proof were needed, that apartheid is catapulting Israel into a blind alley. As a result of this war and the upheaval in world opinion, we will see the most profound shifts of opinion in Israel, changes that are only beginning. In the future, Israel could tear itself apart, as all of its inbuilt contradictions are intensified and sharpened.
Large numbers of Israelis may still support some kind of continued war to ‘defeat Hamas’, or they are at least hanging on the the idea of ‘security through strength’. That reflects, above all, their wish to see Israeli hostages returned, as well as a yearning for ‘security’ and ‘peace’, especially, in the absence of other alternatives. But other than within the Israeli right, there will be a growing realisation that there has to be a settlement of some kind with the Palestinian population. When you have been driven up a dead end, the only way to move is to turn around.
There are now regular demonstrations of Israelis calling for an immediate election, which Netanyahu would almost certainly lose. These demonstrations are being handled with increasing levels of violence by the Israeli police, with water cannon and truncheons used, even against the families of hostages still held by Hamas. Even the family of the hostage whose body was recovered last week have blamed the government for his death, claiming that he could have been released before his death by a new ceasefire.
There are also violent clashes between police and some of the Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish population, who are resented by secular Jews for their draft-dodging and their life of permanent Torah ‘study’ – thanks to government subsidies. That particular crisis – the Haredi exemption from military service having been declared illegal by the Supreme Court – is still unfolding.
Apartheid is not a sustainable future for Israel
Israel presents almost a finished recipe for social conflict and upheaval. Part of the population, on the extreme right, some of them unreconstructed racists will fight – literally fight – to keep the apartheid project alive, to drive Palestinians out of what they call Eretz Israel, from the Jordan River to the Sea. According to Haaretz, Israeli government ministries are today actively working on new Jewish settlments in Gaza “There is intensive work behind the scenes”, a member of the Knesset (from the Party of Religious Zionism) said in a TV interview, “to advance settlement in the Gaza Strip.”
But a part of the population will also come to fight against this, realising that apartheid means more wars, insecurity, military service and unending economic sacrifices to pay for it all. More and more, this war is being seen as a politicial strategy to prolong the life of the government. Netanyahu’s statement yesterday, that “a date has been set” for an IDF incursion into Rafah, reflects the pressure from right-wing coalition partners threatening to bring down the government if it doesn’t happen.
Little more than a tenth of the population of Israel live in the Jewish-only settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land, but the rest of the population are having to face endless sacrifices and hardships to protect them. That is not a sustainable future for the majority of the Israeli population.
Netanyahu wants war only to remain in power
If there is no reconciliation between these opposing elements of Israeli politics – and it looks highly unlikely – then the perspective for Israel will be one of Jews fighting Jews for the heart and soul of the country. The editorials of Haaretz – a news outlet the far right openly talked about banning, just as Al Jazeera is now banned – is today calling for ceasefire. “No one in Israel has any idea how to end the worst war in its history,” wrote Gideon Levy in yesterday’s Haaretz, “whose costs are piling up at an alarming rate and whose benefits are negligible, nonexistent in fact”.
Despite the wishes of Netanyahu and his cabinet, the logic of events now, and the political pressure from outside, point to the possibility of a cease-fire. That will be a great relief to the suffering population of Gaza, but even if it happens, as a political process it is only a beginning. Whether a ceasefire happens now depends on the balance of opposing pressures on Netanyahu: from his coalition partners who want war only to stay in power, or Israel’s international allies who want a ceasefire to preserve what ‘stability’ still remains in the Middle East.
The unravelling of the established parties and the political consensus in Israel will play a decisive role in what happens in the future. But it will also depend on political currents within the Palestinian movement itself. A movement of Palestinian workers that reaches out to Israeli workers has a chance of finding an echo. But political forces that seek to destroy the state of Israel – leaving aside the question of where its borders would lie and equal rights for its citizens, both key issues – in the sense of driving out Israelis, will only drive Israelis back to the right and prolong the agony of the Palestinian people.
It can only be hoped that out of this fierce maelström of debate, argument and struggle, will there emerge a movement capable of unifying Palestinian and Israeli workers with a common programme that offers full equality, hope and economic development for all. Workers’ unity and socialism offer a way forward. Nationalism and Zionism offer only internecine conflicts, and potentially on an even greater scale than we have witnessed in the last six terrible months.
