By Dave Putson
Over the course of the last few days we have seen the Israel government continue with its genocidal atrocities in Gaza, with the bombing of a school on Saturday. It did not just result in a hundred deaths, but the weapons used caused the victims’ bodies to be obliterated into a mass of body parts.
Israel has already assassinated the Hamas Leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital. In the same week they assassinated the second in command of Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many other non-combatants as so much ‘collateral’.
There is a lot of speculation in the press that the ongoing low-level war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the assassination of the Hamas leader in a foreign capital – hours after having attended the inauguration of the new Iranian president – will lead to a wider regional war.
Iran’s previous response to the Israeli attack on part of its embassy in Damascus was relatively restrained, enough to make a statement, but not enough to cause an all-out regional war. On that occasion, the Israeli “Iron Dome” defence system required the assistance of Saudi, Jordanian, US and UK aircraft to resist a missile and drone attack that was forewarned and pre-acknowledged by Iran. But any new response to a murder by Israel of an ally and a guest in their capital city may not be flagged in advance and may be much more substantive.
Western politicians notionally support a ceasefire
In what can only be judged as the height of hyprocrisy, the political class of the USA, the UK, Germany and France, have warned Iran not to attack Israel. There were not such public warnings to Israel about their missile assassinations in other states. Although these western politicians notionally support a ceasefire, they have done nothing in the past ten months except support Israel diplomatically and militarily. and with various types of weaponry pieces towards the Israeli armoury.
Two questions are posed: Firstly, just how worried Israel is by the potential response from Iran, given how stretched their forces are with their genocidal incursion into Gaza, given also increased troop deployments in the occupied West Bank and facing north towards Lebanon? Israel alone may not be able to resist a substantial Iranian missile attack or for that matter from Hezbollah. It is no accident that the USA is now sending another aircraft carrier fleet to the region.
Poltical leaders in the UK , France , Germany and Italy have “called upon Iran to stand down its ongoing threats of military attack against Israel and discuss the serious consequences for regional security should such an attack take place”. This looks, for the first time, like a substantive response by European states to Israeli attackes on other Middle Eastern states, although these governments have had nothing to say in the previous ten months to the genocidal murderous policy of the Israeli regime in Gaza.
But secondly, we now see just how far the influence of zionism and Israeli state politics have infiltrated UK and EU political leaders. Starmer, a self-declared “avowed zionist” is making threats to Iran not to attack Israel, and making tokenistic calls for a ceasefire. Yet he has no such criticism of Israel, which has just assassinated the leading negotiator of Hamas. That killing shows, although the Labour leader is blind to what is glaringly obvious, that Netanyahu and his ministers are simply not serious about any political solution to the Gaza issue.
Many deaths on October 7 were caused by the IDF
There is nothing that socialists can say to justify the nature of the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel. The leaders of Hamas must have been blind and deaf to reality, if they ever thought there was a possible ‘military’ solution to the despair of life in Gaza, if they thought that there wouldn’t be a massive and disproportionate response from Israel – and moreover, one that would come down mainly on the heads of women and children.
It appears to have been a ‘last throw of the dice’ to stop Israel being able to sign up to “normalisation” agreements with Middle Eastern countries, leaving behind the Palestinian issue. So Hamas attacked Israel on motorbikes, armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades and they paraglided across the “most secure border in the world”.
It is now common knowledge that many of the Israeli deaths on that day were as a result of the actions and policies of the Israel Defence Force. Implementing their “Hannibal Directive” – meaning that they are prepared to kill their own, rather than allow the possibility of them being taken hostage taking – meant their helicopter gunships killed Hamas operatives and hostages with them. Israeli tanks shelled houses where they knew there were Israelis held hostage, killing most of those inside.
As early as last October, Mondoweiss was challenging the precise figures for casualties and particularly those killed by the IDF. The IDF response on that day will no doubt come out in public inquiries long after this war.
Gaza before October 7 – the ‘largest open prison in the world’
The Israeli public relations response to October 7 was a huge amount of victimhood statements, and in this they were supported by the western media. Few commentators noted the abject despair that Israel had created in Gaza, the ‘largest open prison in the world’, a despair that ultimately was the root cause of the Hamas attack.
Since that initial PR barrage, the truth has become clearer and the Israeli propaganda campaign has got lost in the overwhelming truth of thousands of social media posts and news reports from inside Gaza. Not surprisingly, international journalists are barred as much as possible from Gaza, and the IDF have targeted journalists and Al Jazeera employees for assassination where they can.
Real death toll in Gaza could exceed 180,000 – The Lancet
The chief political support for Israel, and its main supplier of finance and weaponry has for decades been the USA. In the week Kamala Harris quietly complained that there were “too many” civilian deaths in Gaza, the US sanctioned another $20bn in arms aid. Over the years, there has been an obscene amount of money and weaponry have been given to Israel. It is by far the greatest recipient of US foreign aid.
Both of these nations politicians have spent much time highlighting the loss of 1100 Israelis on October 7, but there has been barely a shred of empathy or recognition of the genocidal have visited on the Palestinian people. Comparing ‘official’ death rates in this war (currently around 40,000) to similar conflicts in the past, a July article in the UK medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that the real casualty rate is a lot higher. “It is not implausible”, the article says, “to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”.
Taking together the deaths in Israel on October 7, and adding the number of deaths in the 9/11 attacks of 2001 – the latter being still an important feature in the US political narrative – they amount to less than 3% of the total deaths in Gaza, using the figure from The Lancet. Yet there is still a huge amount of ‘victimhood’ spouted by the political class in these countries.
There are no ‘safe zones’ in Gaza
Is anyone surprised, therefore, that Iran has rejected calls to stand down its threat of retaliation? Can anyone say why they should listen to lectures or instructions from western politicians?
In recent weeks, the Palestinians in Gaza have been following Israeli instructions to move to so-called ‘safe zones’…and still been bombed. Why should anyone believe anything coming out of the Israeli government, or their main supplier and supporter the USA?
If the Middle East does erupt into a regional war, Netanyahu and his band of minister-thugs will reap what they have sown. Netanyahu has stayed free, temporarily, from the gaols he looked destined for, but in the longer term, that may not be the case. Meanwhile, how many more lives of ordinary working class people will have to be squandered?
It is for the youth and the labour movement to apply pressure to our governments, because it is only that pressure that will move them at all. But for many years they failed to budge on the Assange issue and then eventually the pressure became too much and the institutions and governments resolve imploded.
No state has an unchallenged right to exist in the borders it currently holds, or on the basis of the legal system it maintains. That applies particularly to an Israeli state that operates a modern form of apartheid, with half of the population under its sway having little or no national, economic or political rights. The more Israel continues along this path, the bleaker its future prospects look. On this road, there can only be war, social upheaval, uprisings and more war – and worst of all for Israel – it is an international pariah state.
Netanyahu won the last election with the illusion of ‘security’
In the last elections in Israel, nearly two years ago, as many as two thirds of voters supported parties that found their way into Netanyahu’s coalition. This election, producing the most right government in Israel’s history, was largely won on the basis that Netanyahu had offered the prospect of ‘security’, and we now know how that turned out. He would be unlikely to win an election today, but, unfortunately, for the moment, the idea of ‘security through strength’ still has a powerful hold on a large part of the population.
That will change, however. What will have a big impact inside is Israel is that the world outside now has a different view of that state. The war in Gaza is a military victory but a massive and unprecedented political and diplomatic defeat for Israel, the biggest in its 76-year history.
That is reflected above all in the states of the so-called global south, who have been the main instigators of the actions in the International Court of Justice, the deliberations of which have further undermined Israeli support. Western politicians who supposedly offered the world a “rules-based order” have been shown to be selling a dud – the only ‘rules’ they support, are those than benefit their friends and clients.
Graphic top: from Al Jazeera report, here.
