By John Pickard
The latest news out of Gaza, that the Al Ahli hospital was bombed, has produced a wave of revulsion in the labour movement around the world. Around the same time, a school run by the United National Relief and Works Agency (UNRAW) was also been bombed.
Both the school and hospital had been used as a shelter by scores of Palestinians, hoping these places were ‘safe’. But is is the bombing of the hospital in particular, the biggest death toll from a single bombing in Gaza, that has caused the greatest anger, with patients and medical staff among those killed.
US President Biden, visiting Israel hours after the bombing, repeated the story released by the Israeli propaganda machine, that the ‘other team’ were responsible. But as the former director of the UNRAW told Al Jazeera, Israel have ‘form’ in this regard. When a UNRWA school was bombed in 2014, Israel released videos to the US media, purporting to show Hamas fighters firing rockets from the school roof. A subsequent investigation by the UN showed the allegation to be false and the videos fake.
Few people besides the governments in the West believe the Israeli government on this or other issues. It is stretching credulity to breaking point, to imagine that a home-made missile from the Islamic Jihad group could produce so much damage as to kill nearly 500 people. Not one of the missiles fired at Israel from Gaza in twenty years has produced a hundredth of that damage. The attack will further increase the tide of world and labour movement opinion going against the Israeli occupation and treatment of Palestinians.
As a result of this attack, there have been demonstrations in Lebanon, Jordan and on the West Bank, in protest against the savage collective punishment Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian people.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, deprived of food, water and electricity, have now become pawns in a stand-off between Israel on the one side, supported by the USA, and the Egyptian government on the other. Before the expected invasion of Gaza by the third of a million Israeli troops standing ready, along with 300 tanks and other armoured vehicles, the Israeli ‘Defence Force’ urged all of the population of Northern Gaza to move south.
Call for evacuation is a thin moral fig-leaf
The warning was a transparent moral fig-leaf, so the Israeli government can attempt to evade its responsibility for large-scale civilian casualties when the invasions finally comes. It was a call for an evacuation that could not possibly be carried out, according to all of the organisations on the ground, including the UNRWA, and hospital authorities.
Moreover, the IDF also knows that a full evacuation of the northern Gaza strip is impossible. Hospitals with hundreds of patients in critical conditions, with more being treated every hour, without transport or the means of finding it, simply could not be moved. Up until the time it was bombed, doctors and nurses at the Al Ahli hospital had bravely decided to carry on, ignoring the threat to their lives and their patients’ lives.
It is as if the decision has already been made in the top echelons of the Israeli military that there will be a collective punishment of the Gaza population, for the deeds of Hamas.
There is also a suspicion – well-founded, given the history of Palestine – that once removed to the South, Gazans will never be allowed to go back to their homes, that it will become a second Naqba. What the Israelis are after, it is suggested, and not without good reason, is an ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
This is not as far-fetched as some might suggest, because there are members of the Israeli Cabinet, on its extreme right wing, who have openly said that those Palestinians residing in the area of Eretz Israel – the territory they claim from the River Jordan to the Sea – are there by ‘accident’ after 1948. Some Israeli politicians have openly called for the Arab populations of both Gaza and the West Bank to be forcibly removed to other Arab countries.
Israel threatened to bomb aid lorries going into Gaza
According to Al Jazeera, In an interview aired last Friday, Israel’s former Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, said that people in Gaza should simply relocate to the Sinai Desert. “There is a huge expanse, almost endless space” he said. The problem is, when he promises that they will be “allowed back” after the fighting, no-one believes him. Not Gazans, not Egypt and not other Arab states.
This is the reason for the stand-off over the crossing point at Rafah between Egypt and Gaza. Israel and the USA want this opened – but only to allow American and European citizens (those with dual nationality) to get out. Behind them will come the hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians looking for the safety of Egypt.
Israel will let people move South through the Rafah crossing, but they have refused to allow Egypt to send food, supplies and medical aid North into Gaza. Lines of lorries are waiting on the Egyptian side, but the Israelis have threatened to bomb those lorries should they move into Gaza.
The Egyptian government is not prepared to allow two and a half million Gazans into that part of Egypt – Sinai – where there are no infrastructures or facilities that can accommodate and provide for them. They have urged the Israelis – if they were really concerned about the Gaza population – to evacuate them to the East, to the Negev Desert in Israel. Other Arab governments, too, have made it clear that they are not prepared to accept the forcible transfer of the Gaza population, or even a large part of it, to other Arab states.
Egypt unable to send aid into Gaza
The Rafah crossing point between Gaza and Egypt has always been controlled nominally by Egypt, since it borders on that country, but always on Israel’s terms. Egypt is not a free agent to let people or materials come and go. Like all of the Arab regimes, successive Egyptian governments have paid lip service to the Palestinian cause, but in practice their prime concern in the stability and security of their own ruling classes and regimes.
After the war that founded the state of Israel, in 1948, Gaza was actually controlled by Egypt for nearly twenty years – up to its conquest by Israel in 1967. In those twenty years, Egyptian governments made no attempt to integrate or develop their fellow Arabs into Egyptian society.
The rationale – that the residents of Gaza should have had the right to return to their homes in what became Israel, rather than settle in Egypt – may appear to have some logic to it. But the real reason was that Egyptian presidents, Nasser and Sadat, preferred to keep Gaza as an open festering sore and as an irritant for Israel. Egypt signed a treaty with Israel in 1979, so that when Israel retreated from direct control of Gaza in 2005, Egypt took over the Rafah checkpoint, on Israel’s terms.
Despite the implied threat to those Palestinians who remain in the North of the Gaza strip, despite the bombing of one of the supposed ‘safe passage’ routes South, despite Hamas exhorting the population to stay put, despite the suspicion that they will never be allowed to return – despite all of this, two thirds of the population of Gaza City has moved South.
The Southern part of the Gaza Strip is now crammed with twice its already crowded population, unable to get out and unable to be allowed access to food and aid coming to them. There are now reports that some of them are moving back up North, prepared to die with dignity in what is left of their homes, rather than die of starvation in the South.
Labour movement organisations passing protest resolutions
The international labour movement must support all the efforts of governments, NGOs and appropriate charities and agencies to get humanitarian relief into Gaza, and for electricity, fuel and food supplies to be restored. The leadership of the Labour Party is displaying scandalous role in this conflict – Starmer even ‘justifying’ Israel cutting off food and water. Labour has tried to forbid Labour MPs and councillors from attending demonstrations in support of Palestine. Some trade unions leaders are playing a no less disgraceful role, in trying to limit discussion or protests on Gaza, But labour movement organisations are passing resolutions calling for an end to the bombing and the siege.
Attempts to intimidate activists will fall flat. There will be protest resolutions, like this one, going through many organisations as we write. Whatever the leaders say, activists will protest. It is likely that the demonstration called for London this weekend is likely to be very big.
Socialists and activists are outraged and angry at the ongoing bombardment of Gaza. But it is also important that we understand these events and put them in context. World capitalism is facing unprecedented crisis of which the special crisis of Israel/Palestine is only one facet. It is an issue that will not be solved on the basis of capitalism.
The Arab governments in the Middle East, particularly those nearest to Palestine – Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan – are concerned above all else for the stability of their corrupt governments and the interests of their ruling classes. But that stability is now in question as never before. The Hamas outrage on October 7 threw a flaming torch onto the dry tinder that is Israel/Palestine, but the Israeli government are pouring petrol on the flames, and the flames threaten to become a regional conflagration.
By appearing next to Netanyahu hours after the bombing of the Al Ahli hospital, Joe Biden will also ‘own’ this outrage. It might be a serious miscalculation on his part, because, for all the deployment of naval battle fleets, US influence and prestige in the the Middle East may be shattered. Today US embassies are facing demonstrations in Beirut, Amman, and across the Middle East. Tomorrow they may be burning.
[All pictures from Al Jazeera TV feed]
