On the very first day of Hamas’ sadistic rampage, the Israeli authorities took to the microphones to declare to the world that this was Israel’s 9/11. And indeed, there are some striking similarities. Between the tactics and goals of Al Qaeda and Hamas, as well as between the imperialist opportunities their actions created for the US and Israel.
Both Al Qaeda and Hamas attacked civilians indiscriminately. Both are guided by an Islamist ideology1, based on myths of a glorious past and an even better future in heaven, feeding on the anger and resentment that poverty, repression, and discrimination amply produce. What do they want? A real state, a vast territory under their control, ruled not by “the people” but by themselves, a state that imprisons and tortures anyone who dares to disagree (as Hamas does in Gaza), claiming their authority cannot be challenged because it is sanctified by religious dogma. They have utter contempt for human life, including sometimes their own. They are a clear expression of the death culture that capitalism in this epoch produces. They are racist, not in the strict sense of classifying people on the basis of skin color, but in the broader meaning of dehumanizing people on the basis of their “otherness”, the conditions under which they are born, like their ethnicity or culture. But they are not only contemptuous for the life of Jews and other non-believers in their jealous god, the life of “their own people” has no value for them either. Both Al Qaeda and Hamas knew that their attacks would provoke ferocious reactions but that’s precisely what they wanted. They calculated that they would politically benefit from the immense suffering that these responses would bring to Muslims. And in the case of Hamas, for Gazans in particular. The cruelties Hamas committed during its onslaught were probably not just sadism but a calculated tactic to elicit a maximally brutal Israeli invasion. This was entirely predictable, as Israel has always followed a doctrine of disproportionality for deterrence. Even before the state was founded, Jewish militias embraced it when dealing with the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. Ever since, when Jewish civilians were killed, many more Palestinian civilians have always died in retaliation. So Hamas knew very well that their attack would cause the death of many thousands of civilians in Gaza. Its hope is that this will help it to win in its struggle against its direct competitor, Fatah, for control over the Palestinian proto-state.
Hell
The other similarity between 9/11 and the Hamas-massacre is that they both provided golden opportunities for the attacked nations. No doubt there will be speculations again that the victimized state allowed this to happen for its political benefit: the sadness and rage, the thirst for revenge, the patriotic unity, and the frenzy stoked by the media create a blank check for military actions for which it could not get enough support otherwise. Gone are the internal divisions, the opposition to the government, and the concerns about Netanyanu’s corruption and power grab; crushing the enemy is now all that counts.
The US state used the opportunity to invade two countries and to vastly expand its means of control over society. It spent over 8 trillion dollars on these wars. Was it worth it? Many bourgeois politicians and pundits, including the president, who supported these wars then, changed their minds (but now support new wars). We can’t ask the more than 900.000 people who died in these wars what they think of it.2
Israel’s goal is no different from what it was before: to expand. The current government was focused on absorbing more territory on the West Bank, step by step. It is exploiting the current war to accelerate that process. But it had less interest in taking Gaza. There’s nothing there for it, only superfluous people. It’s a holding pen. A ghetto full of children and grandchildren of people chased out of Palestine. Full of traumatized young people with no perspective, no freedom to leave this open-air prison, constantly bombarded with nationalist propaganda, seduced by the macho violent culture of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, like kids in the inner cities are recruited by gangs. A thorn in Israel’s side.
In the first week since this crisis began, Israel threw 6000 bombs on Gaza (an area about the size of Newark, New Jersey), as much as the US dumped on Afghanistan in an entire year. And the invasion hasn’t started yet. Netanyahu has vowed a retaliation that will “reverberate for generations” among Israel’s enemies. The Israeli general Ghassan Aliyan warned, “You wanted hell—you will get hell.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” None of them made any effort to distinguish between Hamas militants and the 2 million plus Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The “human animals” comment is telling. For decades, and especially in recent years, the people of Gaza have indeed been treated like animals. Perhaps not surprisingly, the gangsters ruling this prison indeed acted like animals when they broke out and attacked southern Israel. So now Israel will triple down on the dehumanization and collective punishment of all of these “human animals.” It is clear that civilians are not just risking to be collateral damage in this onslaught, they are targeted as well. Israel ordered the civilians in the northern half of the strip to evacuate to the south and then bombed people who did so. It bombed ambulances, schools, mosques, apartment buildings, and the US made sure it had all the military hardware to do so. It deprived the civilian population of water, food, medicine, and electricity. And all the leaders of the West who screamed “war crime!” when Russia did similar things in Ukraine now have nothing to say on the subject. This shouldn’t surprise us: “human rights” is just a pawn in their power game.
By dehumanizing all Palestinians and inflicting collective punishment on them, the Israeli state shows that it is as racist as Hamas. If it could, perhaps it would follow the advise of US Senator Lindsey Graham who recommended to “level the place”. But it can’t kill all Gazans and it can’t push them into Egypt either. So there still will be a Gaza when this round is over. It seems that the main objective of the Israeli offensive is to make those who survive it so fearful that it might happen again that Hamas and similar gangs will lose all support. Whether that would work is doubtful. Fear holds people back when they have something to live for, but when they feel they have nothing to lose, rage can overpower it.
Why now?
The current violence is nothing new but it’s an escalation the world did not expect. Like how the tension between Russia and the West was nothing new, but the war over Ukraine was an escalation that was a surprise to most. The tension in the Caucasus was old but the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh is new. In Africa too, there is an escalation of wars and military coups. Tensions are mounting around the globe. Armament spending is rising everywhere3. Why now?
The global context of this trend is a capitalist world economy in crisis and this crisis heightens the antagonisms that are intrinsic to the system. Not only the antagonism between rich and poor, and between capitalist and working class, but also the antagonisms between competing capitalist entities, between hegemonic and contender states. If the working class does not recognize itself as a class with common interests against capital, it is the latter antagonisms that will dominate the world scene, and the antagonism between rich and poor will just be fodder for the ideological discourse of war.
The more the crisis deepens, and is fanned by the effects of the climate-change which is accelerating, the more contender states have an incentive to challenge the dominant power, in our times, the US. The US response is to defeat contenders by isolating them, by building strong US-allied coalitions around them. Thus it has isolated Russia by integrating former republics of the USSR into its sphere, culminating in the fight over Ukraine; it has joined with Japan, South Korea and Vietnam in a military alliance that has been dubbed the Asian NATO; and in the Middle East, it has brokered agreements between Israel and several Arab states (the ‘Abraham accords’). The crowning achievement was supposed to be the diplomatic normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. For Iran, Hamas’ main backer, this agreement would be a major strategic setback. Should Israel, the most potent U.S. military partner in the region, and Saudi Arabia, Washington’s most financially powerful and religiously influential one, normalize and build cooperation, Tehran would face an integrated pro-American camp. American partners, including the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan, would effectively ring the Arabian Peninsula, securing control of the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf through their three maritime choke points: the Suez Canal, the Bab el-Mandab Strait, and the Straits of Hormuz. This would largely block Iran’s imperialist regional aspirations for now. Well at least they got that much: the agreement is off since for the foreseeable future it would be too “awkward” for an Arab state to strike a deal with Israel.
There is no ‘national liberation’
Wars in our epoch are about different capitalist entities claiming ownership of the same piece of real estate. The choice presented to the inhabitants of Palestine/Israel is either a Zionist Apartheid-state or an Islamist Apartheid-state. The thought that people there could live without either is inconceivable for those who define the choice. It is inconceivable as well for most people demonstrating against Israel or against Hamas, waving their respective national flags. While revulsion of injustice may be what originally motivated them, they are propagandists of war. War for Israel, war for Palestine, in which rivers of blood of ordinary Palestinians and Israelis are shed for the power games of states and proto-states. They ignore the atrocities committed by their own side and act as apologists for the murder of innocents. For the SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) which has a sizable presence on American campuses, there are no innocent Israelis, they’re all occupiers, and nobody can criticize Hamas because it has “the right to resist the occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary”, as a recent SJP-resolution declared. Means that include killing babies, raping women, burning corpses, torturing prisoners, kidnapping children, etc.
Let us be clear: there is no such thing as national liberation in our epoch. Humankind is facing Capital as a totality, a global machine, of which nations can only be a part. At most, ‘national liberation’ can achieve the right for a local bourgeoisie to choose out of which larger powers it wants to be a vassal. But always, with no exception, national liberation means that the exploited must support exploiters of their national origin against the foreign enemy. There is no liberation for the working class through national liberation movements. Quite the contrary: these movements are major obstacles to a movement that could lead to real liberation. A movement that fights for the real interests of the proletarians living in Israel/Palestine and overcomes the divisions imposed on them to attack the real source of their misery: capitalism and its states, which have nothing to offer them but exploitation, pauperization, and war. A fight not to decide who possesses what but to abolish possession, to ground society on meeting human needs instead of on the accumulation of possessions and profit.
The global working class, which is the only social force that can generate such a movement, is not defeated, as the increase of big strikes in the last two years shows. But it’s not fully awake either, drugged as it is by relentless nationalist indoctrination which rarely explicitly but always implicitly instructs us that “the other people”, who are not part of “our” tribe, are less important, less human. Especially so in Israel and Palestine.
In the whole Middle East poverty has sharply increased in recent years. It is full of people who have been made superfluous by capital. Millions of them have been killed in wars. How many more will have to die for the nation before the madness stops? The worsening of living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza has been obvious but the proletariat in Israel has not escaped this reality either. There’s not only the constant threat of violence but also pauperization. One-third of Israeli children now live in poverty while the concentration of wealth is the second highest of all developed countries. Objective reasons are enough for workers in both places to stand up against their rulers and join forces. Even though this perspective may seem impossible at this point in time, it is the only way out of this deadly spiral of ever more catastrophes.
INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE
10/20/2023
Read also: https://barbaria.net/2023/10/10/against-israeli-and-palestinian-nationalism/
1 As MacIntosh wrote in “Islamism: Political ideology and movement” in International Perspective 39 (2001): While Islamism appears to be an ideology and political movement that is adamantly opposed to modernity, and which seeks to reinvigorate traditional Islamic beliefs and institutions, it is very much the product of the destruction of the pre-capitalist Arab-Islamic world, and both as ideology and political project is irretrievably stamped with the imprint of modernity and capitalism. (In this respect, Islamism has much in common with Nazism, with its ideological recourse to a pre-capitalist Gemeinschaft, and Aryan religion, even while it instantiated the most brutal realities of capitalism and imperialism in its social relations and political project.)
2 See the Brown University report: Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths . This figure does not include the many deaths that were an indirect result of these wars, such as disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.
3 $ 2.2 trillion in 2022. In his television speech on Gaza (10/20), Biden shamelessly boasted how all these wars create “many good jobs” in the American military industry.
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