Where there was growing harmony between the interests of the ruling elite in Saudi Arabia and the capitalist class of Israel, the war in Gaza has laid bare all the underlying contradictions in that cosy rapprochement. The Saudi Foreign Ministry reiterated today, on the social media platform ‘X’, that there will be no recognition of the Israeli state without a full agreement for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
It is not a new-found backbone in the Saudi leadership, or their feelings of sympathy towards the Palestinians that caused them to issue what amounts to an ultimatum to the US, its strongest ally. It is a fear that the horrors of the Gaza war will affect the Arab populations across the Middle East, to such a degree as to threaten Arab governments, including theirs.
Night after night, Arabs in the region will be watching Al Jazeera and seeing the scale of the death, destruction and the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel has visited upon the population of Gaza. For the Hamas raid on October 7, there has been a brutal collective punishment of millions of Palestinians.
There are no safe places anywhere in Gaza. Today, Israel continues to bomb the South of the Gaza strip, around the city of Rafah, where more than 1.9m people have been forced to gather after fleeing the bombing in the North.
The death toll, as of today, is officially 27,585, around a third of them children, and the overwhelming majority non-combatants. There are thousands still missing, many believed to be buried under tonnes of rubble and demolished buildings, as Israeli high explosives have rendered most areas of Gaza uninhabitable.
All hospitals and clinics now bombed and out of use
The first bombing of a hospital – the Al Ahli in Gaza City – was met by such outrage internationally, that Israel was obliged to blame a stray ‘Hamas missile’ – a propaganda lie repeated by all the Western media. But since then, Israel has destroyed all the other hospitals and clinics still left in the Gaza strip, a fact ignored by the Western media, so the IDF have not even bothered with a rationale, much less with lies about rogue ‘Hamas missiles’.
For those Palestinians hanging onto life, and able to shelter from the bombing and artillery, there is now a daily struggle for water and food. An Al Jazeera camera team caught a small boy drinking from a puddle in the street, for the lack of a clean alternative. Humanitarian aid is available in the form of hundreds of trucks, standing ready in Egypt, but the only reason that Palestinians in Gaza face famine and disease, is that Israeli will not allow more than a trickle of this aid to cross into Gaza.
This is what workers across the world can see on their TV screens every day, and not least in the Arab and Muslim world. The hypocrisy of the Western powers and Israel is blatant. Several Western states have cut off aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, on the grounds that a handful of its employees participated in the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. Given that the UNRWA was the largest single employer in Gaza, with 14,000 employees, in schools, hospitals, clinics welfare agencies, and so on, it would be more surprising if a few of them were not Hamas sympathisers.
The withdrawal of aid from UNRWA will be seen to have done on a pretext
The undue haste with which some governments withdrew what is vital humanitarian support will look to Arab workers’ eyes as if October 7 is a pretext and had there not been one excuse, then another would have been be found. It will be noted that there has been no Western reaction to the determination by the International Court of Justice that there is a plausible case that genocide was being perpetrated by Israel and condoned by Israeli politicians.
There was no Western reaction, much less cutting off funds to Israel, when an ITV camera crew caught on camera an incident in which the IDF fired on a group of men holding aloft a white flag. The reaction of the IDF commander on the ground to this episode, in which one man died, was basically, “this is war. Shit happens“.
It is as a result of the savage and – in terms of the bombing tonnage in such a small area – unprecedented slaughter in Gaza that there has been a huge reaction among workers across across the world, and not least in the Middle East. Tens of millions have condemned their own governments for supporting Israel, for demonstrating bare-faced hypocrisy and double standards, and in the case of the Arab states for their impotency and inaction, in contrast to the Houthis in Yemen.
More than anything else, the representatives of Western capitalism and the Arab elites fear the political fall-out of this global reaction against Israel. That is the reason why they are hastily trying to cobble together together some kind of cease-fire agreement, even one involving Hamas, to bring the war to an end.
They have several serious problems in this endeavour, however, and the greatest of them is the bloody-minded indifference of the most reactionary Israeli government in its seventy-five year history. Israeli Ministers are still openly calling for Gazan to be expelled into Egypt – a policy that government dare not accept.
IDF creating a km-wide cordon-sanitaire by demolishing buildings
Moves are being made to create a kilometre-wide cordon-sanitaire on the Gazan side of the border, by demolishing all buildings within that range of the Israeli border fence. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the war will continue until Hamas is “destroyed”, all the while increasing sympathy for Hamas among Palestinians. He has said that Israel will remain in military control of Gaza after the war, and with the additional no-man’s land around the Strip, it would mean the 2.3m inhabitants (assuming they are allowed to stay) would be hemmed in even more than ever. Last, but by no means least, Netanyahu has categorically ruled out a Palestinian state next to Israel.
His stand on the whole matter of the war, on an inquiry into security lapses on October 7, and on a whole number of other issues, have produced deep divisions in Israel. Senior military and political leaders now openly argue that it is ‘impossible’ to totally destroy Hamas. Calls for an early election – one which Netanyahu will almost certainly lose – are growing louder week by week. The rows taking place in the Israeli Cabinet and the political splits that are out in the open are an indication of changes that will affect Israeli society as a result of this war.
Change is still at an early stage – most Israelis support the military and see it at the moment as the best hope of having Israeli hostages released. But longer term, when the war is over, there will be a profound and permanent settling of accounts, a re-jigging of established patterns of political organisation and thought. As much as anything, it will begin to sink in with a part of the population that having Israel as a permanent military camp, a ‘Spartan state’, is not a guarantee of ‘security’ and even less of international sympathy and support.
International support for Israel is collapsing
Part of the change in Israel will be engendered by the knowledge that international support for Israel is collapsing within the populations and especially among youth, if not yet among political leaders. There will also be a perception of a split between the US State Department and the Israel government. The latter is seen by the former as part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has shuttled backwards and forwards around the Middle East, touting this agreement and that agreement, but in the knowledge that none of what he has said has had any effect on the Israeli government. At some stage, something will have to give. There will either be an open split between Blinken and Netanyahu, something which has been avoided up to now, or an election in Israel, or both.
Much as Western politicians and the corrupt sheiks, kings and dictators of the Arab world will want to return to some kind of ‘normality’ in the Middle East, that is not going to happen any time soon, or even in the foreseeable future.
The bottom line will be either a two-state solution, with a fully independent Palestine, with agreed borders, alongside Israel, or a ‘unitary’ state ‘From the River to the Sea’, in which all citizens, Arabs and Jews, have full and equal rights and shared opportunites. Whichever is the direction of travel, either will ultimately depend on a mass movement of ordinary workers in the region, one encompassing Jews, Arabs, Christian, Muslims, Druze and all others.
[Pictures from Al Jazeera newsfeed. Film showing boy drinking from puddle, link here]
