Apenas tres semanas después de iniciar el conflicto de Gaza, el presidente brasileño Lula declaró: “No es una guerra, es un genocidio.” “Acaben con el genocidio. No es una guerra”, dijo Francesca Albanese a un comité de la ONU en noviembre de 2024. “No hay guerra. Es un error llamarlo guerra”, dijo el historiador del genocidio Omer Bartov en abril de 2025. Más de dos años después de la devastación de Gaza, el estribillo se ha convertido en una fórmula. Es repetido por generales y presidentes, por juristas e historiadores, por trabajadores humanitarios que están sobre los cuerpos de sus colegas, por columnistas y manifestantes callejeros. Este estribillo pretende registrar la magnitud de la matanza y la asimetría de la fuerza, y rechazar el lenguaje desinfectante de la autodefensa y la necesidad militar. Pero el estribillo es incorrecto. Gaza es una guerra. Ver eso claramente forma parte de ver el mundo que lo produce, y solo desde ahí puede comenzar una lucha real contra ese mundo.
La fórmula de “no es guerra” es un recurso ante los tribunales, sanciones, intervención humanitaria — al orden internacional, como si en algún lugar de este hubieran Estados dispuestos y capaces de detener esto. Pero los Estados con poder de actuar son los que facilitan la guerra: sus diplomáticos piden públicamente moderación en Gaza mientras sus ministerios de defensa renuevan los contratos de armas de Israel. El orden no fue diseñado para prevenir la violencia, sino para regular qué Estados pueden ejercerla. Dos años y medio después y más de cien mil muertos[1], el orden ha generado algunas restricciones simbólicas, algunas condenas ministeriales y ninguna voluntad de enfrentar a Washington. El orden al que apela la fórmula nunca iba a detener esta guerra.
Lo que impidió que las grandes potencias lucharan entre sí tras 1945 no fue el orden internacional, sino la disuasión nuclear: la certeza de que una guerra directa entre ellas sería aniquilación. Las instituciones construidas a la sombra de esa amenaza se atribuyeron el mérito de una paz que no lograron. Las guerras continuaron igualmente, desplazadas a proxies y Estados clientes en tres continentes, pero las grandes potencias no lucharon. El colapso de la URSS puso fin al estancamiento. Durante unas décadas, Estados Unidos dirigió el sistema en solitario, librando sus guerras bajo el viejo vocabulario humanitario. Esa era unipolar ya ha terminado. Estados Unidos ya no se molesta en vestir su dominio en el lenguaje del derecho internacional; compite abiertamente por la hegemonía, y sus rivales también. Lo que antes eran rivalidades reprimidas ahora son contiendas abiertas, y Gaza es una de ellas.
Cuando se abandona la apariencia de un orden internacional basado en reglas, lo que queda es la guerra. La fórmula de “no es una guerra” no escapa a esta guerra, sino que toma un partido en ella. Despoja al conflicto de su contenido político de una manera particular: Israel se reduce a una máquina de matar, Gaza a sus víctimas. Hamás se disuelve en la masa de sufrimiento gazatí. Facciones armadas, divisiones de clase, patronos extranjeros desaparecen, y lo que queda son bebés, madres, familias, el Pueblo como tal. Esta imagen depende de una mistificación: que los gobernados y sus gobernantes están unidos en un único interés nacional y voluntad política. Pero Hamás es el gobierno y el ejército que gobierna Gaza, con sus propios objetivos de guerra, sus propios partidarios y su propia disposición a sacrificar a quienes están bajo su control.
La forma militante de esta mistificación eleva a Hamás en lugar de disolverlo; su violencia se convierte en la auténtica autoafirmación de un pueblo subyugado. La imagen reflejada de la doctrina israelí de autodefensa es la línea ya establecida de que una nación oprimida tiene derecho a lograr la condición de Estado por cualquier medio, y que la muerte de mil israelíes[2] fue, por tanto, un acto revolucionario. “Esto no es una guerra”, dijo el general de las FDI Itai Veruv pocos días después del ataque del 7 de octubre. “No es un campo de batalla. Es una masacre.” Ambos bandos identifican a Hamás con Gaza en su conjunto: uno para justificar la resistencia armada, el otro para justificar el castigo colectivo. Es la misma ideología nacionalista vistiendo un uniforme diferente. Un bando lucha por la seguridad nacional, el otro por la liberación nacional. Ambos requieren que los explotados mueran por los fines de sus gobernantes y deseen la aniquilación del enemigo como el objetivo mismo de la victoria. La clase trabajadora — de Gaza, de Israel, de Líbano, de Irán — no tiene nada que ganar de ninguna de las partes de esta guerra.
Geoff Butler, Happy Days Are Here Again, 1983
Una guerra, entonces. No porque su violencia sea legítima, simétrica o sujeta a las normas que el derecho internacional humanitario afirma hacer cumplir. La guerra no es un duelo entre caballeros. La asimetría abrumadora no la convierte en otra cosa que una guerra, ni tampoco el hecho de que la mayoría de los muertos nunca hayan sostenido un fusil. La guerra es un conflicto armado organizado con fines políticos por los Estados y las organizaciones armadas que les sirven o los desafían. Gaza cumple con esa descripción en todos los aspectos. Llamarla guerra no ayuda a Israel. Es una negativa a la pretensión de que este asesinato masivo sistemático pertenezca a algún otro desastre incomprensible, alguna ruptura catastrófica con el funcionamiento normal de este mundo.
Y este es el funcionamiento normal del mundo. Llamar a Gaza “no una guerra” es tratarla como algo excepcional, como si las matanzas allí fueran fundamentalmente diferentes de las que este mundo trata como normales. Las sanciones económicas condenan al hambre a cientos de miles de niños en Irak y Siria bajo la etiqueta de diplomacia.[3] Los ataques con drones de la “guerra contra el terrorismo” — reclasificados legalmente como antiterroristas para facilitar la administración de la muerte sin fricciones — mataron a muchas personas en Pakistán, Yemen, Somalia y Afganistán durante dos décadas. La política fronteriza mata a miles de migrantes cada año, convirtiendo desiertos y mares en cementerios por diseño. La gente es aplastada en almacenes y asesinada en los campos que recoge, envenenada por el aire que respiran y el agua que beben, y condenada a morir por las enfermedades rutinarias de la privación — y nada de eso cuenta como violencia porque nadie disparó un arma. Nada de esto es una aberración. Es la paz del capitalismo.
Tampoco Gaza es una guerra aislada. Es un frente entre muchos. Israel está simultáneamente arrasando Gaza, reforzando su control sobre Cisjordania, invadiendo Líbano y bombardeando Irán. El ataque del 7 de octubre ayudó a hundir los acuerdos de normalización entre Israel y los Estados del Golfo. El control férreo de Irán sobre el Estrecho de Ormuz amenaza la economía mundial; el impulso estadounidense por mantener la hegemonía en Oriente Medio se pone a prueba en Ucrania al mismo tiempo; Rusia y China investigan cada grieta en el mismo campo inestable. Esta guerra es impulsada desde otros lugares: en capitales, mercados y salas de tratados mucho más allá de la Franja. Eso en otros lugares no es el trasfondo. Es donde se decide el asesinato. Esto es lo que significa decir que la guerra moderna es interimperialista. Los Estados que compiten dentro del sistema del capital global asumen su peso a cada conflicto local y lo convierten en un nodo, en una lucha planetaria por el control. Se desplazan a través de contratos de armas, acuerdos de base, flujos de divisa y los cálculos de oficiales de estado mayor en capitales lejanas, y terminan en un bloque de departamentos concreto en Khan Younis.
Chris Shaw Hughes, Gaza/Syria Collage, 2016
Nada de esto requiere negar que lo que está ocurriendo en Gaza es genocida. Pero la maquinaria legal que distingue el genocidio de la guerra no existe para proteger a las personas que están siendo asesinadas. Esa definición existe para clasificar atrocidades — para determinar qué matanzas masivas serán procesadas y cuáles serán toleradas como el coste rutinario de hacer negocios. Los objetivos políticos que impulsan la destrucción de Gaza, los Estados y bloques que la respaldan, la economía de guerra que la sostiene — nada de esto cambia dependiendo de si un tribunal clasifica la muerte como guerra o genocidio. Es el mismo conflicto, impulsado de la misma manera, produciendo los mismos muertos. Las razones no son legales, sino históricas.
En el siglo XX, la guerra y el genocidio se entrelazaron a través del desarrollo de la acelerada capacidad destructiva del capitalismo. La infraestructura de la guerra industrial había ido creciendo desde la década de 1860.[4] Lo que añadió la Primera Guerra Mundial no fue la tecnología, sino la escala. Por primera vez, la capacidad productiva de toda una economía determinó si un país podía seguir luchando. El frente consumía munición más rápido de lo que la industria en tiempos de paz podía producirla5 y todos los países en guerra se vieron obligados a convertir su economía civil en una operación de municiones, reclutando mano de obra y dirigiendo la producción a una escala sin precedentes.[6] La conclusión militar se siguió directamente: si el esfuerzo bélico comienza en la fábrica y la panadería, entonces tanto el maquinista como el panadero son objetivos.
La Segunda Guerra Mundial puso en práctica esta conclusión. Las ciudades y sus poblaciones fueron destruidas deliberadamente como medio para romper la base productiva que sostenía al enemigo — una línea que va desde Guernica pasando por Hamburgo y Tokio hasta Hiroshima. Para 1945, la distinción entre combatientes y no combatientes ya no limitaba la forma en que se libraban las guerras. La doctrina estratégica podía designar a toda una sociedad como objetivo, pero producir la voluntad social para llevar a cabo esa destrucción requería algo más. Aquí la lógica del nacionalismo alcanzó su extremo: sociedades enteras fueron presentadas a través de categorías raciales como enemigos existenciales cuya destrucción no solo se convirtió en una necesidad estratégica sino moral. El mismo proceso une a la población atacante: el odio compartido al enemigo racial es uno de los mecanismos más efectivos para producir la unidad nacional que exige la guerra total. El racismo genocida y la exterminación no son desviaciones del funcionamiento normal del capitalismo. Los campos de concentración son el infierno de un mundo cuyo paraíso es el supermercado.[7]
Ese infierno no se ha cerrado. Gaza no está sola. Los campos se multiplican. En Sudán, facciones militares rivales han convertido una guerra por el control del Estado en exterminio étnico en Darfur, con el hambre empleada como arma y comunidades enteras arrasadas. En Tigray, el gobierno etíope sitió toda una región y libró una guerra de aniquilación contra los tigrainianos. En Myanmar, el ejército lleva años desplazando y liquidando a los rohinyás. Ninguna de estas guerras ha sido detenida por las instituciones que reclaman jurisdicción sobre genocidio y crímenes de guerra. Todos ellos llevan mucho tiempo llamados por lo que son: guerra, genocidio, atrocidades masivas. El nombramiento no ha provocado intervención, enjuiciamiento ni el fin de los asesinatos. Junto con Gaza, muestran que la convergencia del siglo XX entre guerra y violencia exterminadora solo se ha profundizado. Las potencias mundiales compiten con más dureza, por márgenes cada vez más reducidos, con más armas, y las guerras que producen se vuelven cada vez más destructivas.
La guerra con Irán hace que esto sea inconfundible. La excusa de la densidad de Gaza se desploma en Irán, un país de ochenta millones de habitantes con ciudades distribuidas y un ejército permanente, donde los mismos métodos están produciendo la misma carnicería. En Minab, una bomba estadounidense impactó una escuela primaria el primer día de la guerra y mató al menos a 175 personas, la mayoría niños.[8]Rusia ha convertido la infraestructura civil ucraniana en un objetivo militar principal. Israel arrasó los hospitales y escuelas de Gaza durante dos años. Ahora Estados Unidos está haciendo lo mismo en Irán, y su secretario de Defensa está desmantelando las restricciones institucionales que se suponía debían impedir esto: destituyendo a los principales asesores legales militares, cerrando las oficinas diseñadas para responder a daños civiles, presumiendo de eliminar las “estúpidas reglas de enfrentamiento”. Estas restricciones se están desmontando deliberadamente, porque son obstáculos para el tipo de guerras que estos Estados pretenden librar.
Las grandes potencias se están armando a gran escala. La guerra en Ucrania se ha convertido en una contienda de desgaste industrial decidida por la producción de proyectiles, y Rusia ha construido una economía bélica que no puede desmovilizar sin desencadenar su propia crisis económica y política. China lleva años preparándose, expandiendo masivamente su marina, duplicando su arsenal nuclear y diseñando su industria civil para que sea una economía de guerra bajo demanda. Las guerras actuales han agotado los arsenales de municiones estadounidenses, y el Pentágono se apresura por reconstruir la capacidad de producción en masa vaciada por décadas de preferencia por sistemas de alta tecnología y bajo volumen. El déficit es tan grande que Estados Unidos está recortando los compromisos de seguridad y presionando a sus aliados para que se rearmen a un ritmo no visto desde la Guerra Fría.[9] Las grandes potencias aún no están en guerra entre sí, pero se están armando y preparando como si lo esperaran, y las guerras que ya están luchando muestran para qué es esa preparación. El mundo está produciendo más Gazas, más rápido, con menos restricciones y con guerras mayores en el horizonte.
Paul Nash, We Are Making a New Earth, 1918
Decimos que es una guerra. Lo decimos no para domesticar el horror ni archivarlo como un conflicto más entre otros. Lo hacemos para rechazar toda postura que trata esta guerra como separable del sistema que la produce. La identificación campista con la resistencia defiende la cara local de un bloque imperialista. La apelación institucional solicita a una autoridad colectiva que no tiene medios de aplicación independientes de los Estados que arman la guerra. Las llamadas a la intervención, sanciones o reconocimiento legal correcto se dirigen a la ONU; las grandes potencias simplemente los ignoran.
Cada campo representa su campaña de destrucción como necesidad, defensa, venganza, civilización o incluso paz. Oponerse a la guerra eligiendo un bando en ella no es oposición. Es reclutamiento. La posición internacionalista es rechazar todos estos campos. Ningún bando en esta guerra, ni en ninguna de las guerras que ahora se multiplican, representa los intereses de las personas que luchan y mueren en ella. Ningún ejército libera a la población en cuyo nombre mata. La ideología nacionalista — ya sea que se llame patriotismo, resistencia, solidaridad o seguridad — es la forma en que los gobernantes logran que sus súbditos luchen y mueran voluntariamente por ellos.
Las fuerzas que producen estas guerras son enormes, y la capacidad actual para interrumpirlas es casi inexistente. En un periodo de baja actividad de la clase trabajadora, hay poco uso para las propuestas estratégicas. Somos pro-revolucionarios; No podemos decir cómo comenzaría la lucha final desde donde estamos, pero sí podemos decir qué es un callejón sin salida. Una lucha que realmente amenazara estas guerras no podría ser una campaña por un mejor orden internacional, una coalición de Estados “progresistas” contra el bloque imperial dominante, ni siquiera un “semi-Estado obrero” que agrupe al proletariado[10] bajo una bandera roja. Cada uno de estos mantiene intactas las condiciones que producen estas guerras. Solo la clase trabajadora puede acabar con lo que las produce: el Estado, el capital y la relación de clase que sostiene ambos.
Mientras el capitalismo persista, aún queda más de esto. Habrá más Gazas, más guerras disfrazadas de acciones policiales, operaciones de seguridad o intervenciones humanitarias, más destrucción de vidas civiles como método rutinario de conflicto entre Estados cuyas rivalidades se intensifican y cuyas limitaciones se están eliminando. El enemigo no es este o aquel Estado, ni este o aquel ejército, sino el propio capitalismo, que destruye la vida tanto en la guerra como en la paz. Cada guerra depende de la disposición de los explotados a librarla. Cada negativa colectiva — cada motín, cada huelga contra la guerra, cada grieta en la ideología nacionalista que une a la clase trabajadora a las guerras de sus gobernantes — es una grieta en la propia maquinaria de la guerra. La lucha contra estas guerras requiere la claridad para insistir, contra cada bando y cada bandera, en que lo que debe luchar no es esta o aquella guerra, sino el sistema que las produce: el capitalismo.
HK
NOTAS
Los registros oficiales de fallecimientos solo identificaban o registraban fallecimientos y excluyen necesariamente muchos cuerpos aún sepultados bajo escombros, muertes no notificadas a las autoridades sanitarias y muertes indirectas por hambre, enfermedades, falta de agua potable, exposición y destrucción de infraestructuras médicas. En octubre de 2025, el Ministerio de Sanidad de Gaza informó de más de 67.000 muertos y 169.000 heridos. Investigadores de salud pública han argumentado repetidamente que esto subestima sustancialmente tanto las muertes violentas como las indirectas. Un estudio de 2026 de Lancet Global Health estimó más de 75.000 muertes violentas sólo en los primeros dieciséis meses, con muertes indirectas adicionales por desnutrición y enfermedades no tratadas. En cualquier recinto que incluya la mortalidad relacionada con el asedio, el número de víctimas es plausiblemente muy superior a 100.000. ↑
Aproximadamente 1.200 personas murieron en los ataques liderados por Hamás contra Israel el 7 de octubre de 2023, principalmente civiles y extranjeros. Aunque la gran mayoría fue asesinada por los atacantes, las FDI en varios lugares invocaron la Directiva Hannibal, un protocolo para prevenir secuestros (y la consiguiente influencia de negociación) “a toda costa”. El uso de armamento pesado contra objetivos donde militantes y rehenes estaban mezclados resultó en la muerte por “fuego amigo” de al menos catorce civiles israelíes. ↑
UNICEF estimó en 1999 que las sanciones de la ONU a Irak (1990–2003) habían causado aproximadamente 500.000 muertes excesivas de niños menores de cinco años. Los regímenes de sanciones sobre Siria y otros lugares han estado creíblemente vinculados a una crisis humanitaria masiva y a una mortalidad excesiva considerable, aunque la atribución causal se complica por los efectos simultáneos de la guerra, la política gubernamental y el colapso de infraestructuras. ↑
La logística industrial de la guerra moderna era visible décadas antes de 1914. La Guerra de Crimea (1853–56) combinó artillería rayada, ferrocarril y telégrafo, permitiendo que suministros e información se movieran a velocidades que transformaron las operaciones. La Guerra Civil estadounidense (1861–65) se libró entre dos economías industrializadoras de desarrollo desigual (la mayor capacidad industrial del Norte fue decisiva en su victoria) y terminó con la Marcha hacia el Mar de Sherman, una campaña diseñada para destruir la base productiva del Sur y la disposición de la población a sostener la guerra. La Guerra Franco-Prusiana (1870–71) mostró la movilización ferroviaria prusiana a una escala y velocidad sin precedentes. Lo que añadió la Primera Guerra Mundial no fueron estas capacidades, sino su integración sistemática bajo la dirección estatal. ↑
La “crisis de proyectiles” británica de 1915 es una abreviatura útil para el momento en que la capacidad industrial se volvió visiblemente inseparable del éxito militar. La crisis siguió a grave escasez de proyectiles de artillería en el Frente Occidental y ayudó a derribar al gobierno liberal, dió paso a un gobierno de coalición y a crear el Ministerio de Municiones bajo Lloyd George. La lección que sacó el Estado fue que la guerra moderna no podía ser abastecida mediante la coordinación ordinaria del mercado ni la adquisición en tiempos de paz: la mano de obra, las materias primas, la producción de fábricas y el consumo civil debían subordinarse a las necesidades del frente. El debate parlamentario contemporáneo ya presentaba las municiones como un problema nacional de producción, no simplemente como un problema de suministro militar. ↑
El control de producción del Estado durante la guerra no desapareció con el armisticio. El Ministerio de Municiones en Gran Bretaña, la Junta de Industrias de Guerra en Estados Unidos, el Kriegsrohstoffabteilung alemán y aparatos similares en todos los principales beligerantes pioneros en técnicas de dirección laboral, control de precios y planificación industrial que se convirtieron en características permanentes de la diplomacia del siglo XX. Después de 1918, estos aparatos fueron parcialmente desmantelados pero nunca completamente disueltos; fueron reactivados durante la depresión de entreguerras y completamente removilizados para la Segunda Guerra Mundial, tras la cual la asignación de capital dirigida por el Estado se convirtió en la condición permanente de las economías capitalistas — ya fuera bajo la planificación central soviética, la dirección corporativista fascista, la gestión liberal-demócrata del New Deal o el desarrollo socialdemócrata de posguerra. Las tendencias hacia la concentración, el monopolio y la intervención estatal en la producción precedieron a 1914, pero la Primera Guerra Mundial obligó su consolidación en las formas institucionales que han estructurado el capitalismo desde entonces. ↑
“Ataques de EE. UU. e Israel han dañado cientos de escuelas e instalaciones sanitarias en Irán”, The New York Times, 22 de abril de 2026. ↑
Los estándares de la OTAN exigen que los arsenales miembros cumplan con especificaciones que en la práctica implican comprar armas americanas, por lo que cuanto más se rearme Europa, mayor será el mercado para el complejo militar-industrial estadounidense. Las diversas amenazas de Trump contra la OTAN han sido fundamentales para lograr un compromiso europeo de aumentar el gasto militar del 150% en la próxima década, a costa del salario social. Véase Sanderr, “¿Está simplemente loco o hay una estrategia?”, Internationalist Perspective, febrero de 2026 https://internationalistperspective.org/staging/3363/venezuela-greenland-minneapolis/ . ↑
La clase que puede ser reclutada para la fábrica puede ser reclutada para el frente. Cualquier revolución que preserve el trabajo como condición de acceso al producto social preserva la desposesión que hace posible ambas formas de conscripción. ↑
Barely three weeks into the Gaza conflict, Brazil’s president Lula declared “It’s not a war, it’s a genocide.” “End the genocide. It’s not a war,” Francesca Albanese told a UN committee in November 2024. “There is no war. It’s a misnomer to call it a war,” said the genocide historian Omer Bartov in April 2025. More than two years into the devastation of Gaza, the refrain has become a formula. It is repeated by generals and presidents, by jurists and historians, by aid workers standing over the bodies of their colleagues, by columnists and street marchers. This refrain is meant to register the scale of the slaughter and the asymmetry of force, and to refuse the sanitizing language of self-defense and military necessity. But the refrain is wrong. Gaza is a war. Seeing that clearly is part of seeing the world that produces it, and only from there can any real struggle against that world begin.
The “not a war” formula is an appeal to courts, sanctions, humanitarian intervention — to the international order, as if somewhere in it there were states willing and able to stop this. But the states with the power to act are the states facilitating the war: their diplomats publicly urge restraint in Gaza while their defense ministries renew Israel’s weapons contracts. The order was designed not to prevent violence but to regulate which states may exercise it. Two and a half years in and more than a hundred thousand dead[1], the order has produced a few symbolic restrictions, a few ministerial condemnations, and no willingness to cross Washington. The order to which the formula appeals was never going to stop this war.
What kept the major powers from fighting each other after 1945 was not the international order but nuclear deterrence: the certainty that direct war between them would be annihilation. The institutions built in the shadow of that threat took credit for a peace they did not produce. The wars continued anyway, displaced onto proxies and client states across three continents, but the great powers themselves did not fight. The USSR’s collapse ended the deadlock. For a few decades the United States ran the system alone, waging its wars under the old humanitarian vocabulary. That unipolar era is now over. The US no longer bothers to dress its dominance in the language of international law; it competes openly for hegemony, and so do its rivals. What were once suppressed rivalries are now open contests, and Gaza is one of them.
When the pretense of a rules-based international order is dropped, what remains is war. The “not a war” formula does not escape this war but takes one side in it. It strips the conflict of its political content in a particular way: Israel is reduced to a killing machine, Gaza to its victims. Hamas dissolves into the mass of Gazan suffering. Armed factions, class divisions, foreign patrons all vanish, and what remains is babies, mothers, families, the People as such. This image depends on a mystification: that the ruled and their rulers are united in a single national interest and political will. But Hamas is the government and army that rules Gaza, with its own war aims, its own backers, and its own willingness to sacrifice those under its rule.
The militant form of this mystification elevates Hamas rather than dissolving it; its violence becomes the authentic self-assertion of a subjugated people. The mirror image of Israel’s doctrine of self-defense is the ready-made line that an oppressed nation has the right to achieve statehood by any means, and that the killing of a thousand Israelis[2] was therefore a revolutionary act. “It’s not a war,” said IDF general Itai Veruv within days of the October 7th attack. “It’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.” Both sides identify Hamas with Gaza as a whole: one to justify armed resistance, the other to justify collective punishment. It is the same nationalist ideology wearing a different uniform. One side fights for national security, the other for national liberation; both require the exploited to die for their rulers’ aims and to desire the enemy’s obliteration as the very object of victory. The working class — of Gaza, of Israel, of Lebanon, of Iran — has nothing to gain from any side of this war.
Geoff Butler, Happy Days Are Here Again, 1983
A war, then. Not because its violence is legitimate, symmetrical, or bound by the rules international humanitarian law claims to enforce. War is no duel between gentlemen. Overwhelming asymmetry does not make it something other than war, nor does the fact that most of the dead never held a rifle. War is organized armed conflict pursued for political ends by states and the armed organizations that serve or challenge them. Gaza meets that description on every count. Naming it a war does Israel no favors. It is a refusal of the pretense that this systematic mass murder belongs to some other, incomprehensible disaster, some catastrophic break with the normal functioning of this world.
And this is the normal functioning of the world. To call Gaza “not a war” is to treat it as exceptional, as if the killing there were fundamentally different from the killing this world treats as normal. Sanctions starve hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq and Syria under the label of diplomacy.[3] The drone strikes of the “war on terror” — legally reclassified as counterterrorism to facilitate the frictionless administration of death — killed people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan for two decades. Border policy kills migrants by the thousands every year, turning deserts and seas into graveyards by design. People are crushed in warehouses and killed in the fields they pick, poisoned by the air they breathe and the water they drink, and consigned to die from the routine diseases of deprivation — and none of it counts as violence because no one fired a gun. None of this is an aberration. It is capitalism’s peace.
Nor is Gaza an isolated war. It is one front among many. Israel is simultaneously razing Gaza, tightening its hold on the West Bank, invading Lebanon, and bombing Iran. The October 7th attack helped scuttle the normalization deals between Israel and the Gulf states; Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz threatens the world economy; the US drive to maintain hegemony in the Middle East is tested in Ukraine at the same time; Russia and China probe every crack in the same unstable field. This war is driven from elsewhere: in capitals, markets, and treaty rooms far beyond the strip. That elsewhere is not the backdrop; it is where the killing is decided. This is what it means to say modern war is interimperialist. The states competing within the system of global capital throw their weight onto every local conflict and convert it into a node in a planetary struggle for control. They move through arms contracts, basing agreements, currency flows, and the calculations of staff officers in distant capitals, and end in a particular apartment block in Khan Younis.
Chris Shaw Hughes, Gaza/Syria Collage, 2016
None of this requires denying that what is happening in Gaza is genocidal. But the legal machinery that distinguishes genocide from war does not exist to protect the people being killed. That definition exists to sort atrocity — to determine which mass killings will be prosecuted and which will be tolerated as the routine cost of doing business. The political aims driving the destruction of Gaza, the states and blocs backing it, the war economy sustaining it — none of these change depending on whether a court classifies the killing as war or genocide. It is the same conflict, driven the same way, producing the same dead. The reasons are not legal but historical.
In the twentieth century, war and genocide became intertwined through the development of capitalism’s accelerating capacity for destruction. The infrastructure of industrial war had been growing since the 1860s.[4] What the First World War added was not the technology but the scale. For the first time, the productive capacity of an entire economy determined whether a country could keep fighting. The front consumed ammunition faster than peacetime industry could produce it[5], and every warring country was forced to turn its civilian economy into a munitions operation, conscripting labor and directing production at unprecedented scale.[6] The military conclusion followed directly: if the war effort begins in the factory and the bakery, then the machinist and the baker are both targets.
The Second World War put this conclusion into practice. Cities and their populations were deliberately destroyed as a means of breaking the productive base that sustained the enemy — a line that runs from Guernica through Hamburg and Tokyo to Hiroshima. By 1945 the distinction between combatant and noncombatant no longer constrained how wars were fought. Strategic doctrine could designate a whole society as a target, but producing the social will to carry out that destruction required something more. Here the logic of nationalism reached its extreme: entire societies were cast through racial categories as existential enemies whose destruction became not just a strategic but a moral necessity. The same process binds the attacking population together: shared hatred of the racial enemy is one of the most effective mechanisms for producing the national unity that total war demands. Genocidal racism and extermination are not deviations from capitalism’s normal functioning. The concentration camps are the hell of a world whose heaven is the supermarket.[7]
That hell has not closed. Gaza is not alone. The camps multiply. In Sudan, rival military factions have turned a war for control of the state into ethnic extermination in Darfur, with starvation deployed as a weapon and entire communities burned out. In Tigray, the Ethiopian government besieged an entire region and waged a war of annihilation against Tigrayans. In Myanmar, the military has been displacing and liquidating the Rohingya for years. None of these wars has been stopped by the institutions that claim jurisdiction over genocide and war crimes. All of them have long been called what they are: war, genocide, mass atrocity. The naming has not produced intervention, prosecution, or an end to the killing. Taken together with Gaza, they show that the twentieth century’s convergence of war and exterminatory violence has only deepened. The world’s powers are competing harder, over shrinking margins, with more weapons, and the wars they produce are growing more destructive.
The war with Iran makes this unmistakable. The excuse of Gaza’s density collapses in Iran, a country of eighty million with distributed cities and a standing army, where the same methods are producing the same carnage. In Minab, an American bomb hit an elementary school on the first day of the war and killed at least 175 people, most of them children.[8] Russia has made Ukrainian civilian infrastructure a primary military target. Israel leveled Gaza’s hospitals and schools over two years. Now the United States is doing the same in Iran, and its defense secretary is dismantling the institutional restraints that were supposed to prevent this: firing the military’s top legal advisors, closing the offices designed to respond to civilian harm, boasting about eliminating “stupid rules of engagement.” These restraints are being taken apart deliberately, because they are obstacles to the kind of wars these states intend to fight.
The great powers are arming themselves at scale. The war in Ukraine has ground into an industrial attrition contest decided by shell production, and Russia has built a war economy it cannot demobilize without triggering an economic and political crisis of its own. China has been preparing for years, massively expanding its navy, doubling its nuclear arsenal, and engineering its civilian industry to be a war economy on demand. Current wars have drained US munitions stockpiles, and the Pentagon is scrambling to rebuild mass-production capacity hollowed out by decades of preference for high-tech, low-volume systems. The shortfall is so great that the US is cutting back security commitments and pressuring its allies to rearm at a pace unseen since the Cold War.[9] The great powers are not yet at war with each other, but they are arming and preparing as if they expect to be, and the wars they are already fighting show what that preparation is for. The world is producing more Gazas, faster, with fewer restraints, and with larger wars on the horizon.
Paul Nash, We Are Making a New Earth, 1918
We say it is a war. We say so not to domesticate the horror or file it away as one more conflict among others. We do it to reject every position that treats this war as separable from the system that produces it. The campist identification with the resistance champions the local face of an imperialist bloc. The institutional appeal petitions a collective authority that has no means of enforcement independent of the states that arm the war. Calls for intervention, sanctions, or correct legal recognition are addressed to the UN; the great powers simply ignore them.
Every camp represents its campaign of destruction as necessity, defense, revenge, civilization, or even peace. Opposing the war by choosing a side in it is not opposition. It is recruitment. The internationalist position is a refusal of all these camps. No camp in this war, or in any of the wars now multiplying, represents the interests of the people fighting and dying in it. No army liberates the population in whose name it kills. Nationalist ideology — whether it calls itself patriotism, resistance, solidarity, or security — is how rulers get their subjects to willingly fight and die for them.
The forces producing these wars are enormous, and the present capacity to interrupt them is almost nonexistent. In a period of low working-class activity there is little use for strategic proposals. We are pro-revolutionaries; we cannot say how the final struggle would begin from where we stand, but we can say what is a dead end. A struggle that would actually threaten these wars could not be a campaign for a better international order, a coalition of “progressive” states against the dominant imperial bloc, or even a “workers’ semi-state” that marshals the proletariat[10] under a red flag. Each of these leaves intact the conditions that produce these wars. Only the working class can end what produces them: the state, capital, and the class relation that sustains both.
So long as capitalism persists, there is more of this to come. There will be more Gazas, more wars dressed as police actions or security operations or humanitarian interventions, more destruction of civilian life as the routine method of conflict between states whose rivalries intensify and whose restraints are being stripped away. The enemy is not this or that state, not this or that army, but capitalism itself, which destroys life in both war and peace. Every war depends on the willingness of the exploited to fight it. Every collective refusal — every mutiny, every strike against the war, every crack in the nationalist ideology that binds the working class to its rulers’ wars — is a crack in the machinery of war itself. The struggle against these wars requires the clarity to insist, against every camp and every flag, that what must be fought is not this or that war but the system that produces them: capitalism.
HK
The official death toll records only identified or otherwise registered deaths and necessarily excludes many bodies still buried under rubble, deaths not reported to health authorities, and indirect deaths from hunger, disease, lack of clean water, exposure, and the destruction of medical infrastructure. By October 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported more than 67,000 killed and 169,000 injured; public-health researchers have repeatedly argued that this substantially undercounts both violent deaths and indirect deaths. A 2026 Lancet Global Health study estimated more than 75,000 violent deaths in the first sixteen months alone, with additional indirect deaths from malnutrition and untreated illness. On any accounting that includes siege-related mortality, the toll is plausibly well above 100,000. ↑
Approximately 1,200 people were killed in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, primarily civilians and foreign nationals. While the vast majority were killed by the attackers, the IDF in several locations invoked the Hannibal Directive, a protocol to prevent abductions (and the resulting negotiation leverage) “at all costs.” The use of heavy weaponry against targets where militants and hostages were intermingled resulted in the “friendly fire” deaths of at least fourteen Israeli civilians. ↑
UNICEF estimated in 1999 that the UN sanctions on Iraq (1990–2003) had caused roughly 500,000 excess deaths of children under five. Sanctions regimes on Syria and elsewhere have been credibly linked to mass humanitarian crisis and substantial excess mortality, though causal attribution is complicated by the simultaneous effects of war, government policy, and infrastructural collapse. ↑
The industrial logistics of modern war were visible decades before 1914. The Crimean War (1853–56) combined rifled artillery, the railway, and the telegraph, allowing supplies and information to move at speeds that reshaped operations. The US Civil War (1861–65) was fought between two industrializing economies of unequal development (the North’s greater industrial capacity was decisive in its victory) and ended with Sherman’s March to the Sea, a campaign designed to destroy the South’s productive base and the population’s willingness to sustain the war. The Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) showcased Prussian railway mobilization at unprecedented scale and speed. What the First World War added was not these capacities but their systematic integration under state direction. ↑
Britain’s 1915 “shell crisis” is a useful shorthand for the moment when industrial capacity became visibly inseparable from military success. The crisis followed severe shortages of artillery shells on the Western Front and helped bring down the Liberal government, produce a coalition government, and create the Ministry of Munitions under Lloyd George. The lesson drawn by the state was that modern war could not be supplied by ordinary market coordination or peacetime procurement: labor, raw materials, factory output, and civilian consumption had to be subordinated to the needs of the front. Contemporary parliamentary debate already framed munitions as a national production problem, not merely a military supply problem. ↑
The state’s wartime command of production did not disappear with the armistice. The Ministry of Munitions in Britain, the War Industries Board in the United States, Germany’s Kriegsrohstoffabteilung, and similar apparatuses in every major belligerent pioneered techniques of labor direction, price control, and industrial planning that became permanent features of twentieth-century statecraft. After 1918 these apparatuses were partially dismantled but never fully dissolved; they were reactivated during the interwar depression and fully remobilized for the Second World War, after which state-directed capital allocation became the permanent condition of capitalist economies — whether under Soviet central planning, fascist corporatist direction, New Deal liberal-democratic management, or postwar social-democratic developmentalism. Tendencies toward concentration, monopoly, and state involvement in production predated 1914, but the First World War forced their consolidation into the institutional forms that have structured capitalism ever since. ↑
“U.S. and Israeli Strikes Have Damaged Hundreds of Schools and Health Facilities in Iran,” The New York Times, April 22, 2026. ↑
NATO standards require member arsenals to conform to specifications that in practice mean buying American weapons, so the more Europe rearms, the larger the market for the US military-industrial complex. Trump’s various threats against NATO have been instrumental in extracting a European commitment to a 150% increase in military spending over the next decade, at the expense of the social wage. See Sanderr, “Is He Just Mad or is There a Strategy?”, Internationalist Perspective, February 2026 https://internationalistperspective.org/staging/3363/venezuela-greenland-minneapolis/ . ↑
The class that can be conscripted to the factory can be conscripted to the front. Any revolution that preserves labor as the condition of access to the social product preserves the dispossession that makes both forms of conscription possible. ↑
As we write this, the guns are silent in Gaza. The rain of bombs, continuing until almost the last minute before the cease-fire came into effect, has finally stopped. But rather than an end of the war, this is most likely a pause. How long will it last ? Only 42 days, if no agreement is reached between Israel and Hamas about a second exchange of prisoners/hostages. And even if the IDF doesn’t resume its mass slaughter then, the chances that the region will remain a hotbed of small scale and large scale inter-imperialist conflict are very high. And even if against all odds a lasting “peace’ would come to Gaza, it would remain hell on earth. The death and destruction accomplished in the last 15 months guarantee that. It will be a place of pain and hunger, of disease and despair. And, even more than before, it will be a prison. With prison guards to manage it and to maintain “order”.
The prison guards are back. Who else is going to impose “order” but Hamas? They were the ruling proto-state apparatus before in the strip and there’s no other. And for Israel the come back of Hamas may be the perfect excuse to resume its genocidal campaign. Unless they shift their focus now to the West Bank.
One thing is crystal clear: the working class is the victim in all this. Not only the proletarians in Gaza and the West Bank but also the working families in Israel whose living standard will fall sharply because of the war cost. Only autonomous class struggle bears a solution to the problems of the region, the permanence of war and the growing misery. As Raoul Victor writes, in the essay below:
“Capitalism carries war in its DNA. Preventing the suicidal approach that it imposes on humanity cannot be done without directly attacking its very existence, all the pillars on which this system rests and first and foremost the submission of populations to state apparatuses, to the political forces that manage them”.
Victor sets out to unmask the lies that accompany the mass murder and shows the real motivations of the different parties to the conflict. He highlights both the specific aims of Israel (“the evacuation of the Palestinian population by means of genocide”) and those of the American empire (“ reestablishing US authority over its allies and preparing for a confrontation with its main global rivals, Russia and China”).
There is one aspect of his analysis that we in IP don’t endorse. He writes about Hamas’s October 7 attack: “Everything confirms that the Israeli authorities knew what was going on and had decided to let the planned attack go ahead.” Likewise he believes the US authorities knew the 9/11 attacks were coming and decided to let them happen. He also sees a global conspiracy behind the Covid pandemic. Our objection to this is not that conspiracies do not happen. Specifically in regard to the October 7 attack, it is not at all a far fetched hypothesis. But it‘s still a hypothesis, a speculation that can not be proven or unproven at present. There are other explanations and the debates about which one is correct tend to be long and unproductive. And it’s not an essential debate. In the end, it doesn’t make any difference whether the Israeli authorities knew: whether they did or didn’t, they were going to use the opportunity like the US did after 9/11, for the imperialist interests of the capitalist state. We must show the perverse “logic” of their actions and not get sidetracked by endless conspiracy-debates.
IP
1/20/2025
GAZA – The horror and its lies
“In war, truth is the first loss”, wrote Aeschylus more than 2,500 years ago. The Gaza War, a military event that will remain one of the most ignoble in history, has not denied this merciless sentence. Three gross lies, three enormous ‘losses of truth’ mark its course. The first, the Hamas attack presented as a ‘surprise’. The second lie concerns nothing less than the goal proclaimed by the most powerful fighter: the extermination of Hamas. The third, but not the least, the motivation of the main supplier of the material means of the massacre, the first economic and military power on the planet, the United States.
I – The October 7 attack was not a ‘surprise’
Contrary to the ‘official’ version and taken up by the world’s media, the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 was not a ‘surprise’ for senior officials of the Israeli army and government.
The incursion was carried out by nearly 2,000 men from Hamas, but also from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Omar al Qassim Forces, and the Mujahideen Brigades. All these scoundrels, under the command of Hamas, had prepared for a long time to coordinate this action.1 Armed to the teeth, perched on trucks and pick-ups, followed by disparate groups ready for anything, they smashed at many points the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, the very costly ‘iron wall’ (more than a billion dollars), one of the most impenetrable, monitored and militarized borders on the planet. Such an operation was neither simple nor improvised. As the Wall Street Journal reported the day after October 7, this operation began to be put in place, at least, from the month of August and was the subject of meetings at the international level, in particular between representatives of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and Syria.2
Who can believe that the Israeli secret services, the Mossad and the Shin Bet, known worldwide for their formidable and ruthless efficiency, who have agents infiltrated in most of the organizations they fight, that these cynical masters of espionage were completely unaware of the preparations for such an operation? Who can believe that the American secret services were also deaf and blind?
Who can believe that it was because of Jewish religious festivities on October 7 that a large part of the soldiers charged with defending this border had been exceptionally withdrawn, as the official version says?
A testimony alone is enough to remove all doubt as to the reality of the lie concerning a supposed ‘surprise’. It is that of young female soldiers permanently posted on the border to monitor what is happening on the Gaza side. It is widely exposed in a BBC article: “They are known as the eyes of the Gaza border – but their warnings about Hamas were ignored”. 3 The soldiers recount how during the months leading up to October 7 they regularly transmitted reports that indicated significant changes in the behavior of Hamas soldiers and the population near the border, changes that could mean preparations for an upcoming attack. The article describes how some even gambled on the date of such an attack. They claim in this article that their reports were systematically ignored and this at the highest levels of the hierarchy. The article describes how they reassured themselves by telling themselves that if this happened the Israeli army would react very quickly and that Tsahal (the IDF) would immediately settle its account with the attackers.
Now, precisely, one of the astonishing facts of the events of October 7 is the strange slowness of the reaction of the Israeli army. It took more than four hours for the first serious interventions to take place. While the Hamas and Islamic Jihad incursions began at 6:30 in the morning, some kibbutzim would have to wait more than 13 hours to see the first IDF soldiers come to their aid. The attackers had plenty of time to carry out the bloody massacres and kidnappings of hostages. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz tried to reconstruct the events minute by minute on its website, gathering information and testimonies. 4 There, we can hear telephone recordings reporting dramatic situations where calls for help go unanswered by the authorities.
Everything confirms that the Israeli authorities and the army general staff knew what was going on and had decided to let the planned attack go ahead. They wanted to make the event, as they immediately proclaimed in all the media at the time of the attack, “their September 11”. For the record: the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11, 2001, the official versions of which have been questioned many times, had served to justify on the national level the establishment of ultra-draconian measures of the ‘Patriot Act’, signed by George Bush at the end of October. On the international level, at the same time, the invasion of Afghanistan by the American army was launched, and a year and a half later, of Iraq.
When the Israeli authorities proclaimed and repeated that October 7 was “their September 11”, they were preparing to follow the example of their American masters 22 years earlier: they made the October 7 attack the justification, on the domestic level, for granting the war cabinet exceptional powers with virtually no limits and, on the international level, for launching the military operation on the Gaza Strip.
One can be surprised at the little consideration by ‘observers’ of this Machiavellian aspect of the Israeli government for what was the worst pogrom suffered by Jews since the Shoah. Even among internationalists who nevertheless denounce this war, this face of reality seems “secondary” to them. Perhaps for fear of appearing ‘conspiracy theorists’… but who still believes that political leaders do not conspire?
The action of Hamas and Islamic Jihad was an act of barbarity of rare savagery. Nearly 800 civilians were massacred, often in front of their loved ones, their homes were set on fire, women and men were sexually brutalized, nearly 300 members of the police or army forces were killed during attacks on military bases, 253 people were taken hostage, dozens of whom were subsequently murdered.
Netanyahu’s government could perfectly foresee the bloodbath that its ‘negligence’ would cause. Just as the Hamas leadership could perfectly foresee the massacre of the Palestinian population that the Israeli response to its intrusion on October 7 would cause.
The Palestinian population, in the Gaza Strip as in the West Bank, is not only a victim of the action of the Israeli armed forces. It is also the victim of the armed gangs that are fighting for power in these territories, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad or Fatah. I will come back to this.
II. The main goal of the Netanyahu government is not the eradication of Hamas but the evacuation of the Palestinian population by means of genocide
Let’s start by getting rid of the ridiculous discussion about the definition of the term ‘genocide’. The Israeli authorities, as well as all those who would like to attenuate the criminality of their intentions, reject the use of this term. The most widely used argument is that the Israeli army does not seek to kill “absolutely all” Palestinians. However, the ‘official’ definition, as formulated by The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, this treaty of international law, unanimously approved on December 9, 1948 by the the General Assembly of the United Nations, following the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War, leaves no doubt as to the genocidal nature of the massacres carried out by the Israeli army.
Article II of this convention leaves no room for doubt on this subject: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: – Killing of members of the group; – Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; – Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; – Measures intended to prevent births within the group; – Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The definition is clear: “in whole or in part”. As for children, “the other group”, the one to which thousands of children have been ‘transferred’ is the group… of corpses. “The number of children presumed killed in just four months in Gaza is higher than the number of children killed in four years in all conflicts around the world”, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on March 12, 2024.
Netanyahu recently cynically repeated on French television the supreme argument to explain the tens of thousands of dead civilians, 70% of whom were women and children: “Every civilian death is a tragedy for us… For Hamas, it is a strategy. They knowingly use civilians as human shields.” It is difficult to do worse in cynicism. Since Hamas soldiers hide behind children, one should expect the use of snipers or at least a minimum of caution. Instead, the IDF uses bombs weighing nearly a ton, kindly provided with the most modern aircrafts by the American godfather, capable of destroying a residential building in a single strike. As a precaution, more than 220,000 homes have been bombed in nearly 6 months.
The electricity, water and sewage networks have been destroyed. The health system has been systematically destroyed: according to UNICEF in April 2024, 83% of the 36 hospitals have been bombed, more than 400 health workers have been killed. By March 2024, an estimated 40% of Gaza’s land previously used for food production had been destroyed. The population has been gradually expelled and successively moved to temporary camps where the threat of famine has become the primary concern, with the Israeli army methodically working to prevent or reduce to ridiculous minimums the arrival of food aid trucks. Moreover, this aid, when it does arrive, is increasingly marketed by criminal gangs who seize it, loot it and resell it. They monetized humanitarian aid… the horror is crowned by the action of ultra-Orthodox fanatics who destroy, ‘with God on their side’, without the army stopping them, the contents of food trucks that have been allowed to pass.
As of mid-June 2024, in the West Bank, where Hamas is not present, at least 500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers since the start of the war, according to a senior United Nations official. As of the same date, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, there have been at least 37,396 Palestinians killed since the start of the war and according to an estimate published in The Lancet, this could indirectly lead to 186,000 deaths. 5
One of the ministers in Netanyahu’s government, Amichai Eliyahu, illustrated the state of mind of this terrible clique in power by declaring several times, despite some reframing, that the use of nuclear weapons remains… “an option”. 6 This same character often says: “There are no non-combatants in Gaza”. In other words: civilian population and Hamas, same fight. Normal that they are massacred. Since October 9, 2023, the Gaza Strip has been subject to a total blockade. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant justifies it thus: “We are putting a complete siege on Gaza …. No electricity, no food, no water, no gas – it’s all closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”7
How can one claim that this reality does not correspond to the definition of genocide: “Deliberately subjecting the group to conditions of existence calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”?
Netanyahu’s government is only continuing the ‘Zionist’ work in the sense of the consolidation and expansion of a ‘Jewish State’. In the past, there were two particularly important moments in the work of expelling the Palestinian civilian population: the war of 1947-1949, around the proclamation of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the Six Day War in 1967. The first resulted in the expulsion of nearly 800,000 Palestinians, the Nakba, the catastrophe in Arabic; the second condemned more than 300,000 Palestinians to exile, the Naksa. These were wars against the states bordering Israel. Today it is the State of Israel against proto-state organizations financed largely by interested states. The Israeli governments of the time were ‘Labor’, that is, secular. Among the specificities of Israel’s current action there is the addition of a religious, ‘ultra-orthodox’ dimension: Netanyahu does not hesitate to justify the genocide by speaking of the fulfillment of the writings of the prophet Isaiah and the fight of the people of light against the people of darkness. It is a question of continuing to recover the “biblical heritage”.
Is the goal really to eradicate Hamas, as the official discourse constantly hammers home?
Hamas is present mainly in the Gaza Strip. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Fatah exercises power. The acceleration of colonization by violence in these last two areas since October 7 would be enough to demonstrate that the real objective of the Israeli counter-offensive is not the destruction of Hamas but the construction of the new Israel ‘rid’ of Palestinians. At the end of June 2024, a count by the Israeli organization ‘Peace Now’ established that since October 7 the largest area of occupied land in the West Bank had been achieved.
It is necessary here to recall, if only briefly, the specificity of the attitude of Netanyahu and some of Israel’s leaders towards Hamas. Netanyahu, who has been part of the leadership of the Likud party for more than three decades, has always been, like his colleagues, a furious opponent of the Oslo Accords (1993). These agreements opened a peace process between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s party sees in these agreements a renunciation of the occupied territories. These agreements were signed on the one hand by Yitzhak Rabin, then Labor Prime Minister of Israel, who paid the price by his assassination in 1995 under the bullets of a young radical Zionist, and on the other hand by Mahmoud Abbas in the name of the PLO and Fatah of which Arafat was the eminent figure. Unlike Fatah, Hamas does not recognize the State of Israel which it promises to destroy and it is not secular but religious Islamist. As a result, it has long been considered by Netanyahu and those who share his orientations as a powerful instrument to weaken Fatah and the idea of sharing the ‘biblical heritage’ with a Palestinian state.
In March 2019, Netanyahu declared at a Likud meeting: “Anyone who wants to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state must support the strengthening of Hamas and transfer money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”8
In February 2024, the BBC published an article with the testimony of a Mr. Levy, a former head of the Mossad secret service. He recounts how he had repeatedly demonstrated to Netanyahu that it was possible to crush Hamas by resorting to financial means, but that he had never received a response from the head of government. Levy does not hesitate to make a link between this refusal and the events of October 7. 9
In addition to the advantages found in the existence of Hamas already described by Netanyahu, it should be added that this organization allows the latter to prolong a crisis situation. Netanyahu has every interest in prolonging a war situation, even in the event of negotiations. As long as the war continues, he has a major, if not prohibitive, argument for staying in power – it is difficult to change captains when the ship is in the middle of a battle. His popularity has continued to fall since October 7, partly because of doubts about his responsibility for the ‘negligence’ that allowed October 7. In the event of elections, it will be very difficult for him to be reappointed, he would then lose his ‘inviolability’ and would have to face justice since he is being prosecuted for “corruption, fraud and breach of trust”. He is the first Israeli head of government to be indicted while in office.
Netanyahu’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, declared on the radio at the end of May that “The fighting in Gaza will continue for at least another 7 months”.
Hamas, even if very weakened, is very useful in maintaining this war. The disappearance of Hamas, which also receives funding from Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and ‘voluntary contributions’, among others, is probably not about to disappear and its eradication, as we have seen, has never been the main objective of the Israeli government’s action.
But it would be absurd to believe that the enormous military deployment carried out in the Middle East since the pogrom of October 7, would find its reasons only in the poisonous logic of radical Israeli Zionism. Behind this war tragedy are the strategic needs of the American empire, of which Israel is only a ‘proxy’, important certainly, but a ‘proxy’.
III. The real motivations of the American empire
Since the beginning of this war, the propaganda of the United States, like that of all those who approve of this genocide, has been a tissue of lies.
The American authorities claim, like the Israeli authorities, to have been surprised by the attack of October 7. They also claim to have played a moderating role with regard to the violence exercised by the Israeli army on the civilian population. They developed a spectacle around so-called red lines imposed on Israel, only to finally let it happen, saying that they had not been crossed, in particular for the massacres carried out in the south of the Gaza Strip. 10
It was barely a few hours after the start of the Israeli army’s intervention in Gaza that the most modern of the 11 American aircraft carriers, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest warship in the world, already in the Mediterranean near Marseille, received the order to head for the Israeli coast, with its entire carrier battle group (surface combat ships, supply ship, one or two nuclear-powered submarines, an air escort, 74 fighter planes, drones or helicopters, with a total of about 6,000 sailors).
The American authorities, whose secret services work in close collaboration with those of Israel, were no more surprised than the Israelis by the attack of October 7. Their participation in the Israeli response was certainly planned. It was not improvised and the scale of their contribution in military supplies before and since the start of the war in bombs, munitions, intelligence, etc. testifies to this. 11
The military intervention of the United States in the Middle East alongside and through its Israeli proxy, but also directly in Yemen, against the pro-Iranian Houthis in the strait controlling the entrance to the Red Sea, this warlike deployment finds its fundamental motivation in the response developed for years to attempts to destabilize the American predominant place on the planet. It is part of the continuation of the war in Ukraine.
After the collapse of the Soviet empire in the 1990s, the United States had become the only ‘superpower’ on the planet. They were already the first, they were now practically the only one. In a few years they had seized and integrated into NATO almost all the countries that the USSR had had to make independent.
But, a third of a century later, things have changed. Economically and militarily, the United States still remain in first place. Their gross domestic product is still the first. The US dollar is still the world’s main currency: 60% of foreign currencies, 40% of global payments and 50% of international debt. Militarily, they maintain an indisputable superiority: their annual military expenditure is greater than the sum of expenditures of all the other countries in the world, they have 800 military bases that crisscross the planet.
But over time, this predominance has been increasingly called into question in a few decades. Economically, China has experienced extraordinary development, becoming the world’s second largest economic power and extending its influence to the four corners of the planet, developing its ‘new silk roads’, becoming, for example, the leading foreign investor in the African continent. Militarily, it is making a gigantic effort and has managed to have a navy that now has more ships than that of the United States. At the United Nations, China is playing an increasingly important role. In March 2023, it managed to co-sign an agreement that, to everyone’s surprise, brought about a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Since 2020, it has begun to establish contracts with oil-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia, which allow oil to no longer be paid in dollars but in yuan.
In Europe, reunified Germany had, since the end of the 1990s, despite opposition from the United States, forged increasingly powerful economic ties with Russia, making it its main energy supplier. Two major gas pipelines are built between the two countries, financed mainly by Germany. European allies, feeling less threatened by Russia, tended to distance themselves from the American ‘protector’. In November 2019, French President Macron declared: “What we are experiencing is the brain death of NATO”, and proposed to “reopen a strategic dialogue, without any naivety and which will take time, with Russia.” 12
Finally, since 2009 a new institution has been developing explicitly intended to challenge US predominance, in particular dependence on the dollar – the BRICS, for the initials of four large ’emerging’ countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China. With the accession of South Africa in 2011 they became the BRICS, then in January 2024 the BRICS Plus with the integration of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Ethiopia. This represents almost half of the world’s population.
According to the American financial group Bloomberg, thirty other countries are now candidates to join the BRICS Plus. Since the beginning of 2024, African countries, rightly inspired by distrust of the evolution of the American economy (difficulty in controlling inflation, uncontrolled growth of debt, threat of a new major recession), have been repatriating the gold reserves they had deposited in the United States. This is the case for Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In July 2024, Niger forced the United States to leave the military base it had just installed in this country.
Within this rapidly expanding ‘revolt’, China and Russia play a particularly important role, as shown, among other things, by their growing presence on the African continent.
The United States has not watched this challenge to its power without reacting and has shown that it is ready to do anything to try to pulverize it. They have of course resorted to classic political and economic means such as sanctions of all kinds, such as international isolation, confiscation of investments and reserve deposits in the United States, increases in customs duties, trade blockades, etc. But they have had and will increasingly have resort to the most dangerous and most powerful of their weapons: military force and the ‘diplomatic’ consequences that accompany its use.
As I tried to demonstrate in the text Capitalism and War – The Case of Ukraine13, this war was the result of an American provocation against Russia. Accepted by the West during the Minsk agreements, the non-integration of Ukraine into NATO had been demanded by Russia as a red line. The move towards crossing it could only lead to a significant response from Russia. The latter chose a military intervention in Ukraine. It thus provided the United States with the opportunity to destroy in a few weeks the economic ties patiently woven between Russia and Germany and to bring into line the French and European boasting of military autonomy vis-à-vis the American godfather. Biden gave himself the luxury of publicly announcing in a joint press conference with Scholz, the German Chancellor, that the Nord Stream pipelines were going to be destroyed. NATO ‘allies’ were forced to stop supplying themselves with Russian gas or oil and to buy fuel supplied by the USA at exorbitant prices. The European member countries of NATO were brought into line and two that were not yet members, Sweden and Finland, were integrated into it. All of them will be used to provide the finances and weapons necessary for a possible major confrontation with Russia.
The intervention in the Gaza war is part of the same process of reestablishing US authority over its allies and preparing for a confrontation with its main global rivals, Russia and China. The European Union was the main provider of funds to the Palestinians. After October 7, the main European powers were forced to affirm without reservations their “unconditional support” for Israel and the American sponsor in their genocidal intervention against the Palestinians.
At the same time as the operation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Israel and the USA are developing their latent war against Iran, Russia’s ally. Since 2020 and the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, ‘architect of Iran’s regional power’, icon of the Islamic Republic, an operation explicitly authorized at the time by Trump, the United States and Israeli authorities have continued to multiply provocations against Iran, one of the latest being the bombing by Israel of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, 2024. At the same time, they are developing clashes in southern Lebanon with Hezbollah, Iran’s armed wing in the region. And, 2,000 kilometers away, in Yemen, they are fighting the Houthis, directly supported and armed by Iran but at war for almost 10 years with Saudi Arabia, undermining the alleged rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia within the BRICS Plus.
What needs to be highlighted is that, contrary to what some claim, the American authorities are not seeking to put the Middle East hornet’s nest in order, but on the contrary, they are increasing harassing Iran with their Israeli proxy. The latest, the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in the Iranian capital, the day after the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president Massoud Pezeshkian, is of unprecedented gravity. And behind Iran, is its ally, Russia, which is being provoked, as in Ukraine.
Not to mention that behind all these warlike maneuvers and those to come is the omnipresent hand of the enormous American military-industrial sector whose influence on the ‘deep state’ and its political appendage is decisive. Faced with the threat of an upcoming recession, the warning signs of which are being felt, a new ‘arms race’ would constitute a powerful stimulant to ‘growth’.
Two elements must be added here that are very important from both an economic and military point of view.
The first is the discovery over the past two decades of significant reserves of natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean, some of which are in Israeli and Palestinian territorial waters (off the Gaza Strip). 14The control and exploitation of these reserves constitutes an important issue from an economic but also a military point of view, since energy sources are a crucial element in the event of conflict. The exploitation of the reserves of Gaza, moreover, has already been the subject of conflicts between the Israeli government and the Palestinian authorities. The erasure of the ‘Palestinian problem’ would facilitate their total takeover.
The second concerns the importance of the American dollar. 15 We know that the power of a currency, that is to say its capacity to be accepted as an instrument of trade and as a means of storing value, depends on the trust placed in the person issuing this currency. However, this trust does not rest only on the state of its economy. To a large extent, it also relies on its military power. The assertion of American military capacity in Ukraine and the Middle East, in the face of the two main military powers in the BRICS Plus, Russia and China, is a real backfire to this desire for independence, and thereby an important element in trying to strengthen ‘confidence’ in the US dollar.
IV. Movements against genocide
Any criticism of the Israeli authorities is systematically accused of antisemitism by these authorities, but also by the governments of countries that ‘unconditionally’ support the ‘homeland of the victims of the Shoah’. This is a ridiculous, if not ignoble, defense in the sense that one uses the memory of the monstrous genocide of the Second World War to justify the carrying out of another genocide. It is ridiculous when one notes that among the first to denounce the barbarity unleashed by the Netanyahu government in the aftermath of October 7 were Jews, first in Israel, then in New York, the second Jewish city in the world after Jerusalem (the first if one takes into account the fact that more than a third of the population of Jerusalem is not Jewish).16 Trump, who never ceases to proclaim himself “the best friend of the Jewish state”, who, when he was president, had the United States embassy moved to Jerusalem, says he is scandalized to see American Jews protesting energetically from the end of October against the genocide in Gaza, shouting “Not in our name!”17 Were these ‘antisemitic’ acts? Since at least June 2024, every week in Tel Aviv there have been two demonstrations on Saturday evenings, after the end of Shabbat. One to demand an end to the war and the return of the hostages, the other to demand the resignation of the Netanyahu government and the immediate use of elections. 18 More ‘antisemitic’ acts?
Anti-war demonstration in Israel
According to a count by Agence France-Presse, in the first 8 months of the war after the attacks of October 7, there were 1,195 Israeli deaths. The Israeli government’s security cabinet approved a project to extend compulsory military service for men to 36 months, compared to 32 currently. In Tel Aviv, graffiti appears: “It is time to oppose military service”, “We refuse to serve as occupiers”. Were they written by ‘antisemites’?
Recently 41 Israeli reservists published a manifesto in which they declared: “After the decision to enter Rafah rather than reach an agreement on the hostages, we, reservists men and women, declare that our conscience does not allow us to lend a hand to the loss of the lives of the hostages and torpedo another agreement.” 19 Are they also ‘antisemites’?
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which brings together 31 states, including Israel and the United States, adopted in 2016 a “working definition of antisemitism”: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” 20
The accusation of antisemitism for any criticism of the policies of the State of Israel is simply stupid when one considers the thousands of Jews in the world who vomit the ignominy of the Israeli far-right government and who would therefore only be people who manifest ‘hatred’ towards themselves.
That said, obviously it is not only Jews who have expressed a rejection of the massacre carried out by the Israeli State. There have been and there are many demonstrations, social movements expressing to varying degrees on all continents a condemnation of the horrors underway in Gaza.
First of all, we can distinguish in these movements, on the one hand, those that took place in countries whose governments are hostile to Israel and, on the other hand, those that took place in countries supporting Israeli policy, generally ‘Western’ countries. In the former, they were encouraged by local authorities and expressed support for Palestinian organizations such as Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, etc. In the latter, they were often repressed, sometimes banned by governments, and the participants appeared more cautious, even distrustful, of Palestinian military-political organizations. In the United States, they gave rise to mass marches in major cities such as San Francisco, Chicago or Washington… They contributed to delaying the departure of an American military supply ship from the port of Oakland. In the spring of 2024, starting in New York, a movement of students camping out at universities spreads to 40 of them across the country and then internationally to Canada, Mexico, Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland… “These protesters belong in jail. Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period,” tweeted Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbot. Trump keeps repeating that if elected president he will “crush” all these movements.
Generally these movements in the West have shown more solidarity with the Palestinian population than with the organizations supposedly representing them. But they generally remain prisoners of the prospect of a Palestinian state that they rarely question. But who would be at the head of this state? Hamas, which knew perfectly well that the attack of October 7 would trigger a gigantic bloodbath of its population, some of whose leaders watched the events from their residences in Doha, Qatar, sitting on their personal fortunes, including that of the supreme leader, Ismail Haniyeh (recently assassinated in Tehran) estimated by some at 2.5 billion dollars. As bloodthirsty as the Israeli generals, they negotiate with them, to top it all off, the exchange of corpses, those of the Israeli hostages they murdered for those of Palestinian victims, killed by the Israelis. The armed gangs that claim to represent the Palestinian civilian population and fight to assume state functions there also exert daily oppression on the population. They collect taxes, exercise control through terror over the people. In the Gaza Strip, Hamas, in the name of Islamism, even exercises ‘moral’ control over the private lives of individuals and does not hesitate to arrest offenders or execute people it condemns. On a more general level, Hamas did not hesitate in 2019 or 2023 to very violently repress demonstrations protesting against these controls and against the deterioration of living conditions such as increasingly frequent power cuts or the rise in the cost of living. Added to this are the consequences of the clashes between these gangs: for example, more than 600 Palestinians were killed in the fighting between Hamas and Fatah in 2006-2007. 21
End of the parenthesis, let’s return to the reality of the movements against the horrors currently underway in Gaza. It must be noted that despite the scale they have sometimes taken on, they have remained insufficient. They have generally remained isolated within the population.
V. Conclusions
One may be surprised by the weakness of the response encountered. Perhaps it is still temporary. Sometimes we have the feeling that people have been anesthetized, desensitized?
The Covid operation of 2020-2021, which constituted a gigantic manipulation allowing governments around the world to subject their populations to a strict and merciless totalitarian domination by state authorities, vertiginously accelerating the digitalization of social life, has certainly contributed to this kind of anesthesia. (See my article Who organized and directed the management of the Sars-Cov 2 crisis?22
This insidious development of totalitarian control by states was subsequently consolidated with a rapid rise in wars and military tensions in all four corners of the planet. Burkina Faso, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burma… 23 Tensions and military exercises are increasing, particularly near China. Practically all major countries are rearming, all arms factories are developing their capacities to the limit and increasing their production as never before in decades. The share prices of companies in the global military-industrial complex are exploding, while financial uncertainties in other areas are growing (see the recent and spectacular plunge of the Tokyo stock exchange which shook all the stock markets in the world). At the heart of this global dynamic is the questioning of the order based on the ‘Pax Americana’. The threat of a global conflagration, of a march towards a third world war is is becoming more concrete day by day.
But wars are not fought only with weapons and material means. Human beings are needed to produce these weapons, transport them, and handle them. Cannon fodder is needed, ready to die for those who dominate this society that has become self-destructive. It is there, in the human factor, that the murderous logic can find its limits.
The Russo-Ukrainian war, at the time of writing, has already caused more than half a million deaths.24 In Ukraine, according to the British newspaper Financial Times, which cites Ukrainian government sources, 800,000 men subject to mobilization escaped conscription. 25 The recruitment of soldiers is increasingly done through the violence of the military police, by taking men by force in the streets, in their homes. In regions such as Kovel and Volyansk, calls for rebellion have spread on social networks. Conscripts captured by military committees have been freed by spontaneous demonstrations. There are countless cases of young people arrested almost daily for setting fire to vehicles of mobilization officers. Signs of revolt against the war in Israel also exist, as we have seen, even if they are much more of a minority. These signs still need to develop and transform into a social revolt capable of tackling the problem at its roots.
Capitalism carries war in its DNA. Preventing the suicidal approach that it imposes on humanity cannot be done without directly attacking its very existence, all the pillars on which this system rests and first and foremost the submission of populations to state apparatuses, to the political forces that manage them for the benefit of the one percent that dominates the planet.
2 The Wall Street Journal claims that the operations (by Hamas and its ilk) have been underway since August. According to the newspaper, “several meetings have taken place in Lebanon and Syria between the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah.”
The article provides a lot of interesting information.
4 “What-happened-on-oct-7”. It is a kind of text illustrated with images and recordings that are scrolled chronologically by means of a mouse. The document does not claim to describe everything because, it says, not everything is yet very clear. The readers’ comments at the end of the document are also interesting, especially when they affirm the need to look for the reasons for the strange delay in the reaction of the military forces.
11 “Since October 7, 2023, the United States has approved tens of millions of dollars in arms sales, including two ‘emergency’ sales.
In the United States, only major arms sales must be made public. The exact amount of weapons sent to Israel is therefore unknown. According to The Washington Post, “… more than 100 non-public military sales have been approved by the administration of President Joe Biden since the October 7 attack, including many artillery munitions. In addition to these two emergency sales, Washington has been providing regular and free aid to Israel for many years. It is estimated at more than $3.5 billion per year, according to official figures. In addition, it is also the United States that finances and partly supplies the equipment for the ‘Iron Dome’, Israel’s effective and very expensive shield against rockets fired from Gaza or Lebanon.”
15 The US dollar is not only the currency of the United States. It is used as the main currency in 8 other countries, including Ecuador, Panama and Zimbabwe. It is a parallel currency in more than twenty countries, including Canada, Mexico, Burma, Lebanon, Vietnam and increasingly Argentina, which is talking about ‘dollarizing’ its economy, and even, recently, Venezuela.
16 The population of Jerusalem is estimated at 970,000, and the number of Jewish residents in New York is estimated at 944,000. Estimates vary depending on the source. But as of 2022, 59.4% of Jerusalem’s residents were Jewish, 37.7% Muslim, and 1.3% Christian.
21True, on July 23, 2024, under the aegis of China, always seeking to expand its international influence, these two organizations signed a “national unity” agreement to possibly jointly assume power in a Palestinian state at the end of the war. But who can believe it? And it will not change their corrupt and dictatorial methods of government. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/23/china/hamas-fatah-palestinian-factions-beijing-intl-hnk/index.html
24 “Casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian War include six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the War in Donbas, and up to 500,000 estimated casualties during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
Le monde regarde avec horreur l’une des armées les plus avancées de la planète détruire une zone urbaine enclavée, pour l’essentiel sans défense, comme on tire sur des poissons dans un tonneau1. Il n’est pas étonnant que l’indignation soit générale et que le monde entier réclame l’arrêt de cette folie. Mais plutôt que d’arrêter la guerre, de nombreux gauchistes veulent la poursuivre, au côté du Hamas. Et ils veulent que nous ignorions les violences commises par leur camp contre des innocents parce qu’elles ont été commises pour une bonne cause. Etait-ce le cas ?
Les apologistes du Hamas affirment que son armée est composée de combattants de la liberté autochtones, s’élevant contre une puissance coloniale, et que l’histoire des guerres coloniales montre que ces conflits sont inévitablement brutaux, faisant de nombreuses victimes innocentes des deux côtés. Il appartient aux “combattants de la liberté” de décider de la manière dont ils mènent leur lutte, affirment-ils, et ceux qui soutiennent la libération du “peuple palestinien” ne devraient pas remettre en question leurs méthodes. Surtout pas s’ils sont blancs et vivent dans des pays qui eurent eux-mêmes des colonies. La honte du comportement passé ou présent de “leurs” pays doit faire taire toute pensée critique sur les tactiques et les objectifs de la lutte “anticoloniale”. Ils ne sont pas bien placés pour “donner des leçons de morale à la résistance”.
Les apologistes de l’autre camp, les sionistes, utilisent exactement le même argument. La honte de la persécution antisémite passée des Juifs en Europe doit faire taire toute critique de l’État sioniste. Parce qu’il y a eu l’Holocauste, parce qu’il y a eu la Naqba : chaque camp prétend que la brutalité qui lui a été infligée justifie la brutalité qu’il utilise.
Mais ce n’est pas la couleur de votre peau ou votre pays de naissance qui détermine si votre point de vue est correct ou erroné.
Je me souviens d’une discussion que j’ai eue en 1976 avec des amis gauchistes qui disaient que nous ne devions pas critiquer les Khmers rouges de Pol Pot ; parce que nous étions des Européens blancs, nous n’avions pas le droit de le faire. Selon eux, les Khmers rouges étaient des combattants de la liberté ; les dénoncer revenait à soutenir l’impérialisme américain. Aujourd’hui, bien sûr, plus personne ne cherche d’excuses aux exterminations de Pol Pot. Oui, mais c’était différent, pourraient-ils objecter, les Khmers rouges ont surtout assassiné leur propre peuple. C’est vrai. Mais c’est aussi le cas du Hamas.
Comme nous l’expliquons dans Capitalism’s Death World, il est indéniable que le Hamas savait que son action du 7 octobre provoquerait des morts et des destructions massives à Gaza et qu’il a froidement décidé que le jeu en valait la chandelle. Sommes-nous encore assez humains pour nous indigner du sacrifice de plusieurs milliers d’êtres humains pour la soif de pouvoir du Hamas ?
Pourquoi le Hamas se bat-il ?
Les “combattants de la liberté” comme le Hamas et le Djihad islamique luttent-ils pour la libération ? Libération de qui et de quoi ? Les habitants de Gaza et de Cisjordanie seraient-ils libres s’ils vivaient dans un État islamique du Hamas ? Qu’est-ce que cela signifie, “une Palestine libre” ?
Le but et les moyens sont étroitement liés. Tout ce que fait le Hamas – réprimer violemment les grèves, emprisonner et torturer les opposants, tuer des civils, prendre en otage des enfants et des personnes âgées, etc. – montre quel est son objectif : établir un État fort qui bafoue impitoyablement les libertés de ses citoyens. L’été dernier, de nombreuses manifestations sociales ont eu lieu à Gaza. Des manifestations pour réclamer de l’eau, de l’électricité, de meilleurs salaires. Le Hamas les a réprimées, mais moins violemment que les années précédentes (en particulier en mars 2019), comme s’il craignait de jeter de l’huile sur le feu. La spectaculaire offensive du Hamas du 7 octobre a suivi cet été chaud. Un lien entre les deux événements n’est pas impossible. Le Hamas cherchait à restaurer son prestige, tant à Gaza qu’en Cisjordanie. On pouvait raisonnablement s’attendre à ce que cette action ait cette conséquence. L’impuissance des Palestiniens, dit le spécialiste de la Palestine Emilio Minassian, « produit une logique de ressentiment double : recherche de reconnaissance d’un côté, de vengeance de l’autre ».
Le Hamas n’est ni pire ni plus cruel que l’État israélien. Ils agissent tous deux selon une logique similaire conduisant à l’effusion du sang d’innocents. Mais si leurs moyens diffèrent, il en va de même de leurs tactiques et de leurs stratégies. Il s’agit d’un conflit asymétrique. Par conséquent, leur brutalité s’exprime de différentes manières. L’un coupe des têtes, l’autre pose des tapis de bombes. Tous deux sont des terroristes, car semer la terreur est leur principal objectif. La peur comme arme politique devient de plus en plus la norme à notre époque.
Nulle part dans le monde, il n’existe de pays qui appartienne au “peuple”. Partout, la terre et tout ce qu’elle contient appartient aux propriétaires. Il n’existe pas un seul exemple de lutte de “libération” nationale qui ait libéré la majeure partie de la population de la faim et de l’impuissance. Chacune d’entre elles a été une lutte entre des entités capitalistes et les gauchistes ont toujours eu un camp à soutenir.
Les mêmes groupes de gauche, qui pensent aujourd’hui que s’opposer à la punition collective de Gaza implique de soutenir le Hamas, pensaient que s’opposer à la guerre au Viêt Nam impliquait de soutenir l’État stalinien nord-vietnamien. Deux millions de personnes sont mortes dans cette guerre. Le Viêt Nam a “gagné”. Aujourd’hui, c’est un État policier qui est devenu un partenaire commercial et militaire subalterne du pays dont il s’est “libéré”. Les Vietnamiens travaillent désormais dans des usines pour le marché américain à des salaires inférieurs à ceux de la Chine, avec des langes pour réduire les pauses toilettes. Ils peuvent désormais boire du Coca-Cola à Hanoï. Ou du Pepsi, c’est la liberté de choix.
Nous pourrions énumérer la liste des “libérations” nationales, mais cela nous mènerait trop loin. Évidemment, cela ne signifie pas que les régimes coloniaux étaient meilleurs. Si, dans la plupart des pays libérés du joug colonial, la majeure partie de la population vit dans une grande misère, ce n’est pas à cause, mais en dépit de leur “libération” nationale. Mais cela montre clairement que la lutte nationale est par définition une lutte bourgeoise qui ne mène pas à une véritable libération. Au contraire, surtout à notre époque, c’est un obstacle. L’abolition des régimes coloniaux et de leur racisme inhérent est une bonne chose. Mais même dans le cas d’un progrès indéniable comme l’abolition de l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud, nous devons en voir les limites. Il s’agit d’un pays où le fossé entre les riches et les pauvres est l’un des plus importants au monde, où le chômage est plus élevé que jamais, où les grévistes sont abattus à la mitrailleuse, où les travailleurs sans papiers sont jetés en prison… la lutte pour une véritable liberté n’a pas encore commencé dans ce pays.
Turner et Bacon
Un autre exemple utilisé par les apologistes du Hamas est la rébellion de Turner. Nat Turner était un esclave qui a mené une rébellion sanglante en Virginie en 1831. Son objectif était de tuer autant de Blancs que possible. Des familles entières ont été massacrées. Pour eux, ce massacre, comme celui du Hamas du 7 octobre, n’est pas la faute de ceux qui l’ont commis. C’est, comme l’a dit Franz Fanon, “la violence du colonisateur qui se retourne contre l’oppresseur”.
Cela réduit Turner et le Hamas à des acteurs sans volonté propre, sans capacité de décision, juste des automates qui renvoient la violence reçue comme un mur renvoie une balle de tennis. Comme s’ils n’avaient pas d’autre choix. Cependant, il existe également des exemples de soulèvements contre l’oppression qui ne se sont pas transformés en guerres raciales ou ethniques. La première grande rébellion en Amérique a été la révolte de Bacon en 1676-1677. Lors de celle-ci, des Blancs pauvres et des esclaves noirs se sont battus ensemble contre le gouvernement colonial de Virginie. Ils se sont emparés de la capitale de l’époque, Jamestown. Ce n’est qu’avec l’arrivée d’une armée expéditionnaire venue d’Angleterre que la rébellion a pu être réprimée.
Les esclaves noirs et les prolétaires blancs avaient les mêmes intérêts. Même en laissant de côté l’aspect moral (et je ne veux certainement pas idéaliser la rébellion de Bacon sur ce point), il devrait être clair que les esclaves qui ont combattu avec Bacon ont choisi une méthode de lutte beaucoup plus efficace et intelligente que ceux qui ont suivi Turner : une alliance basée sur des classes sociales ayant des intérêts communs plutôt que sur la couleur de la peau ou la religion. Les puissances coloniales l’ont également compris. La rébellion de Bacon a semé la panique dans leurs milieux. La crainte était grande de voir des Blancs et des Noirs exploités se battre à nouveau ensemble. Peu après, des lois concernant les domestiques et les esclaves, les « Virginia Slave Codes », ont été introduites, induisant un système d’apartheid qui renforçait la nature raciale de l’esclavage et limitait strictement les contacts entre Blancs et Noirs.
La réalité incontournable est que les esclaves noirs n’ont pas pu s’émanciper sans l’aide de la classe ouvrière blanche et que le prolétariat noir des États-Unis a aujourd’hui aussi désespérément besoin de cette solidarité au-delà des races. Il en va de même pour les Palestiniens. Ils ne peuvent pas se libérer sans le soutien de la classe ouvrière israélienne. Et ils ne peuvent pas l’obtenir en assassinant autant de Juifs que possible, à la manière de Turner. De même que le pouvoir après la rébellion de Bacon a tout fait pour séparer les Blancs des Noirs, le pouvoir en Israël-Palestine, les sionistes et les islamistes, font tout pour dresser les Juifs et les Arabes les uns contre les autres. Tout faire pour empêcher les prolétaires palestiniens et israéliens de découvrir qu’ils ont des intérêts communs.
Une guerre anticoloniale ?
Israël, comme les États-Unis, a été créé par l’installation d’Européens majoritairement blancs sur des terres dont la plupart des habitants avaient été expulsés. Si l’on met côte à côte des cartes datant de différentes années, on peut suivre de près la croissance des deux pays et le rétrécissement du territoire des “autochtones”. Et cette expulsion des autochtones se poursuit. Elle s’est accélérée en Cisjordanie sous le dernier gouvernement de droite dure de Netanyahou et, depuis le début de la guerre actuelle, elle est passée à la vitesse supérieure, les colons jouant le rôle de troupes de choc fanatiques. Comme les États-Unis l’ont fait avec les Indiens, l’État sioniste veut enfermer les Palestiniens dans des réserves.
Cependant, Israël n’est pas une puissance coloniale qui étend son territoire, il contrôle déjà le territoire. Ce qu’il fait, c’est gérer ses habitants, les reléguant dans différentes zones qui assureront leur division et donc la domination de l’État.
Ainsi, bien que les tactiques soient similaires, il ne s’agit pas d’une guerre coloniale. Mais comme le souligne Minassian, il existe également une similitude idéologique avec le colonialisme européen :
« Israël hérite de cette logique européenne qui consiste à « animaliser » la force de travail sur la base de critères raciaux, à tracer une barrière entre monde civilisé et monde pré-civilisé. Ce paradigme agit à plein régime en Israël, et de manière assumée. Présentement, on massacre les Gazaouis selon cette logique : on les noie sous les bombes sans autre objectif politique que de les « calmer », de rappeler la hiérarchie qui sépare les groupes humains dans cette région du monde. Un chien mord, on abat la meute ».
Il ajoute : « Il faut rappeler que ces frontières entre le civilisé et l’animal sont mouvantes. Elles ont été, et demeurent, agissantes au sein même de la citoyenneté israélienne juive. Les juifs arabes (mizrahis) ou éthiopiens (fallashas) étaient longtemps du mauvais côté de la barrière, et constituaient des sortes de supplétifs indigènes utilisés pour calmer d’autres indigènes ».
Mais les guerres coloniales opposent une population autochtone, dirigée par des cadres issus de la classe sociale supérieure autochtone, à une puissance étrangère qui contrôle l’État et récolte l’essentiel des bénéfices de l’économie nationale. Une lutte entre deux pays. Ce n’est pas le cas en Israël-Palestine, dit Minassian, et en ce sens, dit-il, le conflit n’est pas colonial. Il s’agit, de fait, d’un seul pays, d’une seule économie, centrée sur Tel-Aviv, dont les villes de Cisjordanie et de Gaza sont les banlieues marginalisées et appauvries. Les habitants de Gaza utilisent également de l’argent israélien, des produits israéliens et des cartes d’identité israéliennes. Les prolétaires palestiniens et israéliens sont des segments d’un même ensemble. De nombreux Palestiniens de Cisjordanie travaillent, légalement ou illégalement, en Israël et dans les colonies. Ils parlent souvent l’hébreu. Minassian raconte :
« J’ai passé des soirées à écouter des travailleurs journaliers d’un de ces camps raconter comment l’ethnicisation de la force de travail se déployait sur les chantiers de la capitale israélienne : les promoteurs juifs ashkénazes, les prestataires Palestiniens de 1948 pour le passage de la main-d’œuvre des Territoires occupés, les contremaîtres juifs séfarades eux aussi arabophones, etc. Et puis tous les autres prolétaires importés : les Thaïlandais, les Chinois, les Africains, qui, sans-papiers, sont en réalité ceux dont la situation est la pire. Tout ça ne peut pas se mélanger, car chaque groupe a un statut et une place distincte dans les rapports de production ».
Depuis sa création, Israël s’est développé à une vitesse fulgurante, principalement avec l’aide des États-Unis. En grande partie grâce à l’utilisation massive de la main-d’œuvre palestinienne, cet État est devenu une économie forte, un pays hautement développé. Mais cette forte croissance s’est arrêtée dans les années 1980 : krach boursier en 1983, inflation de 445 % en 1984, déficit record de la balance des paiements. Cette période a été suivie par la dissolution du bloc de l’Est, qui a entraîné une immigration massive, en particulier de Juifs russes. L’industrie israélienne avait donc beaucoup moins besoin de la main-d’œuvre palestinienne. Le chômage palestinien est monté en flèche. Israël est devenu un leader de l’industrie de haute technologie mais, comme aucun autre pays parmi les leaders, il a à sa charge une énorme quantité de prolétaires “inutilisables”. En ce sens, Minassian voit dans l’économie israélo-palestinienne une métaphore de l’économie mondiale.
La réponse de l’État israélien à cette situation a été une politique de séparation consistant à enfermer les Palestiniens dans des enclaves, et à en confier la gestion à des sous-traitants locaux.
« Ce grand enfermement, cette opération de séparation entre prolétaires utiles et prolétaires surnuméraires sur une base ethnico-religieuse, débute en même temps que s’amorce le processus de paix, qui est en réalité un processus d’externalisation du contrôle social des surnuméraires », explique Minassian. Ainsi, contrairement à un conflit colonial :
« On est dans une situation où ce qui est en jeu, c’est moins l’exploitation d’une force de travail indigène que la gestion d’une population prolétarienne excédentaire, dans des proportions uniques au sein des centres d’accumulation capitalistes. Pour chaque travailleur avec un contrat de travail en Israël, il y en a un autre maintenu dans une des grandes banlieues fermées que constituent les centres de peuplement sous juridiction palestinienne : la bande de Gaza et les villes de Cisjordanie. Ça fait près de cinq millions de prolétaires parqués à quelques kilomètres de Tel-Aviv, invisibles, vivant de la vente de leur force de travail au jour le jour, gardés par des soldats pour qu’ils ne sortent pas de leurs cages ».
Gaza, plus encore que les villes et les camps de réfugiés de Cisjordanie, est une poubelle de l’économie israélienne. Le taux de chômage des jeunes y dépasse les 70 % (avant l’invasion actuelle). Tous ces travailleurs excédentaires survivent dans l’économie informelle grâce à l’aide financière de diverses sources, dont Israël. Cet argent est distribué par les sous-traitants, le Hamas et la soi-disant Autorité palestinienne, qui remplissent également d’autres fonctions étatiques, principalement le maintien de “l’ordre”, mais aussi l’augmentation des impôts, l’enrôlement forcé de jeunes hommes dans leur armée, la soumission d’autres bandes para-militaires, etc. Les sous-traitants sont en concurrence les uns avec les autres, essayant de regagner leur emprise sur le public palestinien désillusionné. Dans le même temps, ils cherchent à renforcer leur position face à leur client, l’État israélien. Selon Minassian, c’est là qu’il faut chercher l’explication de la stratégie du Hamas. Celui-ci veut se rendre “incontournable”. Cela n’a rien à voir avec une lutte de libération.
Pas un conflit local
Mais la dynamique interne en Israël-Palestine n’est qu’une partie de l’histoire. Il s’agit également d’un conflit géopolitique entre l’Amérique et ses adversaires.
La création d’Israël s’est accompagnée d’une vague de décolonisation, la pression américaine ayant mis fin à la plupart des régimes coloniaux européens après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans les deux cas, il s’agissait du résultat d’un déplacement du pouvoir mondial de l’Europe vers les États-Unis. Une colonie blanche militarisée, dotée d’une armée puissante et équipée par les Américains, s’inscrivait parfaitement dans les plans géopolitiques des États-Unis pour le Moyen-Orient. L’importance d’Israël pour Washington s’est accrue au fur et à mesure que les ressources pétrolières prenaient de l’importance. Depuis le début, et encore aujourd’hui, le cadre géopolitique détermine ce qui se passe en Israël-Palestine. En ce sens aussi, il ne s’agit pas d’une guerre coloniale, mais d’un conflit inter-impérialiste. Nous avons développé ce sujet dans l’article précédent : Capitalism’s Death World. La politique américaine consistant à former une alliance pro-américaine forte autour d’Israël et de l’Arabie saoudite contre l’Iran a été un facteur important. L’Iran est le mécène de l’aile militaire du Hamas (l’aile politique “plus modérée” est financée par le Qatar), tout comme les États-Unis sont le mécène de l’armée israélienne. L’essentiel de l’argent et des armes utilisés dans la guerre proviennent d’autres pays. Seules les victimes sont locales.
Dans cet article, nous soulignions l’absence de perspective de l’ordre mondial capitaliste, la certitude que sa crise s’aggravera. La crise systémique déstabilise le monde, ébranle les équilibres existants. L’augmentation des dépenses d’armement et des conflits militaires est une tendance globale. Les fronts gelés fondent, redeviennent actifs : en Ukraine, en Afrique, au Karabagh et maintenant à Gaza. Il ne s’agit pas de nouveaux conflits, mais de conflits existants qui s’enflamment soudainement. Il faut s’attendre à ce que d’autres poudrières explosent dans les années à venir.
La manière de gérer et de contrôler les fractions inutilisables de la main-d’œuvre devient un problème de plus en plus central dans l’ordre mondial capitaliste. Israël pourrait être un précurseur à cet égard. Ce qui se passe actuellement à Gaza, selon Minassian, « n’est pas une guerre, mais c’est une gestion du prolétariat surnuméraire avec des moyens militaires qui sont ceux de la guerre totale, de la part d’un État démocratique, civilisé, appartenant au bloc central de l’accumulation ». Les milliers de morts à Gaza, poursuit-il, « dessinent une image terrifiante de l’avenir – des crises du capitalisme à venir ».
Le capitalisme semble être entré dans une nouvelle période où la guerre joue un rôle croissant. Une période au cours de laquelle nous apprenons à admirer les soldats et les “combattants de la liberté”, à applaudir ou à fermer les yeux sur les massacres, à considérer que la mort et la destruction pour la patrie sont normales et à prendre parti dans des conflits où les gens ordinaires sont toujours les perdants.
La libération ne passera pas par la guerre et les attentats, mais par la solidarité et la conscience des intérêts communs du travailleur collectif, sans distinction de couleur ou de croyance. Lorsque nous les aurons atteints, nous saurons quoi faire. Tout ce qui entrave leur développement fait obstacle à la véritable libération. En premier lieu, le nationalisme, la séparation des peuples sur une base ethno-religieuse ou raciale. Alors, à bas les drapeaux palestiniens et israéliens, à bas les slogans comme “La Palestine sera libre, du fleuve à la mer” : c’est un cri de guerre, pas un appel à arrêter la guerre. Arrêter la guerre au lieu de s’y battre, telle doit être la première exigence aujourd’hui. Cessez le feu maintenant ! Libérez les otages maintenant ! Arrêtez le siège de Gaza maintenant ! Arrêtez les pogroms en Cisjordanie maintenant ! Non à l’antisémitisme, non à l’islamophobie ! Assez de douleur, assez de sang, construisons la solidarité sur une base anti-nationaliste !
Sanderr
15/11/2023
Ce dessin et celui en tête d’article ont été fait par Banksy à Gaza
Ce texte a été traduit par des camarades de Controverses
1 NdT : traduction littérale de « like shooting fish in a barrel » que l’on peut restituer en français par ‘comme on tire sur des animaux en cage’.
The world watches in horror as one of the most advanced armies on earth is destroying a mostly defenseless enclosed urban zone, like shooting fish in a barrel. No wonder there is widespread outrage and a worldwide demand to stop this madness. But rather than to stop the war, many leftists want to continue it, on the side of Hamas. And they want us to ignore the violence against innocents committed by their side because it was done for a good cause. Was it?
The apologists of Hamas claim that its army are indigenous freedom fighters rising up against a colonial power and that the history of colonial wars shows that these conflicts are inevitably brutal, with many innocent victims on both sides. It is up to the ‘freedom fighters” to decide how they wage their struggle, they claim, and those who support the liberation of “the Palestinian people” should not question their methods. Especially not if they are white and living in countries which had colonies themselves. Shame about the past or present behavior of “their” countries should silence any critical thought on the tactics and goals of the “anti-colonial” struggle. They are not well placed “to hand out moral lessons to the resistance.”
The apologists of the other side, the Zionists, use exactly the same argument. Shame about the past anti-Semitic persecution of Jews in Europe must silence any critique of the Zionist state. Because there was the Holocaust, because there was the Naqba: each side claims that the brutality inflicted on them justifies the brutality they use.
But it is not your skin color or country of birth which determines whether your point of view is right or wrong.
I remember a discussion I had back in 1976 with leftist friends who said we should not criticize Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge; because we were white Europeans we had no right to do so. According to them the Khmer Rouge were freedom fighters; denouncing them meant supporting US. imperialism. Today, of course, nobody seeks excuses for Pol Pot’s killing fields anymore. Yes but that was different, they might object, the Khmer Rouge mostly murdered its own people. Right. But so does Hamas.
As IP argued in “Capitalism’s Death World”, there is no denying that Hamas knew that its October 7 action would cause mass death and destruction in Gaza and that they chillingly decided that it was worth the price. Are we still human enough to be outraged about this sacrifice of many thousands of fellow human beings for Hamas’ lust for power?
What is Hamas fighting for?
Are “freedom fighters” like Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighting for liberation? Liberation of whom from what? Would the residents of Gaza and the West Bank be free if they lived in an Islamist Hamas state? What does that mean, “Palestine free”?
Goal and means are closely linked. Everything Hamas does – violently suppressing strikes, imprisoning and torturing opponents, killing civilians, taking children and the elderly hostage, etc. – shows what its goal is: to establish a strong state that ruthlessly tramples on the freedoms of its citizens. This past summer there were many social protests in Gaza. Demonstrations demanding water, electricity, better wages. Hamas suppressed those, but less violently than in previous years (especially in March 2019), as if they were afraid to throw oil on the fire. The spectacular Hamas outbreak of Oct. 7 followed that hot summer. A connection between the two events is not impossible. Hamas was seeking to restore its prestige, both in Gaza and the West Bank. That this action would have that consequence was a reasonable expectation. The powerlessness of the Palestinians, says the Palestine expert Emilio Minassian, “produces a logic of double resentment: desire for recognition on the one hand and for revenge on the other.”
Hamas is no worse or more cruel than the Israeli state. They both act from a similar logic that leads to the blood shedding of the innocent. But as their means differ, so do their tactics and strategies. It is an asymmetrical conflict. Therefore, their brutality expresses itself in different ways. One chops off heads, the other lays bomb carpets. Both are terrorists because sowing terror is their main goal. Fear as a political weapon is becoming more and more the norm in our time.
civilians killed by Hamas (photo Reuters)
Gaza neighborhood pulverized by the IDF (photo Reuters)
Nowhere in the world is there a country that belongs to “the people.” Everywhere the land and everything on it belongs to the owners. There is not a single example of a national ‘liberation’ struggle that freed the bulk of the population from hunger and powerlessness. Every one of them has been a struggle between capitalist entities and the leftists always had a side to support.
The same leftist groups who now believe that opposing the collective punishment of Gaza implies supporting Hamas, believed that opposing the war in Vietnam implied supporting the North Vietnamese Stalinist state. Two million people died in that war. Vietnam “won”. Now it is a police state that has become a junior commercial and military partner of the country from which it “liberated” itself. Vietnamese now work in factories for the American market at wages lower than in China, with diapers on to cut toilet breaks. They now can drink coca-cola in Hanoi. Or pepsi, there’s freedom of choice.
We could go down the list of national “liberations” but that would lead us too far. Obviously, this does not mean that colonial regimes were better. That the bulk of the population in most countries that were freed from the colonial yoke live in great misery is not because of, but in spite of their national “liberation.” But it makes clear that national struggle is by definition a bourgeois struggle that does not lead to true liberation. On the contrary, especially in our time, it is an obstacle. That colonial regimes with their inherent racism were abolished is a good thing. But even of an undeniable advance such as the abolition of Apartheid in South Africa, we must see the limits. This is a country where the gap between rich and poor is among the largest in the world, where unemployment is higher than ever, where strikers are mowed down with machine guns, where undocumented workers are thrown in jail… the struggle for real freedom there has yet to begin.
Turner and Bacon
Another example used by the apologists for Hamas is the Turner rebellion. Nat Turner was a slave who led a bloody rebellion in Virginia in 1831. His goal was to kill as many whites as possible. Entire families were slaughtered. In their view, this massacre, like the Hamas massacre of October 7, was not the fault of those who committed it. It is, as Franz Fanon put it, “the violence of the colonizer that turns against the oppressor.”
That reduces Turner and Hamas to creatures with no will of their own, no agency, just automatons that reflect the violence received like a wall reflects a tennis ball. As if they had no other choice. However, there are also examples of uprisings against oppression that did not become racial or ethnic wars. The first major rebellion in America was the Bacon Rebellion in 1676-1677. In it, poor whites and black slaves fought together against the colonial government in Virginia. They captured the then capital city of Jamestown. Only when an expeditionary army arrived from England could the rebellion be suppressed.
Black slaves and white proletarians had the same interests. Even leaving aside the moral aspect (and I certainly do not want to idealize the Bacon rebellion on that score), it should be clear that the slaves who fought with Bacon chose a much more efficient and intelligent method of struggle than those who followed Turner: an alliance based on social classes with common interests rather than on skin color or religion. The colonial powers understood this, too. The Bacon rebellion caused panic in their circles. The fear was great that white and black powerless people would fight together again. Soon after, the Virginia Slave Codes were introduced, an apartheid system that hardened the racial nature of slavery and strictly limited contact between white and black.
The inescapable reality is that the black slaves could not emancipate themselves without the help of white working class and that the black proletariat in the US. today desperately needs that supra-racial solidarity as well. The same is true for the Palestinians. They cannot liberate themselves without the support of the Israeli working class. And they cannot acquire it by, à la Turner, murdering as many Jews as possible. Just as those in power after the Bacon rebellion did everything in their power to drive white and black apart, those in power in Israel-Palestine, the Zionists and the Islamists, are doing their utmost to pit Jews and Arabs against each other. Anything to prevent Palestinian and Israeli proletarians from discovering that they have common interests.
Is this an anti-colonial war?
Israel, like the US, was created by settling mostly white Europeans on land from which most of the existing inhabitants were expelled. If you put maps from different years side by side, you can closely follow the growth of both countries and the shrinking of the territory of the “natives”. And this expulsion of natives continues. It accelerated on the West Bank under the latest hard-right Netanyahu government, and since the current war began it has been in overdrive, with the settlers as fanatical shock troops. As the US did with the Indians, the Zionist state wants to lock up Palestinians in reservations. However, Israel is not a colonial power extending its territory, it already controls the territory. What it does is managing its inhabitants, pushing them in different zones that will assure their division and thus the dominance of the state.
So while the tactics may be similar, this is not a colonial war. But as Minassian points out, there is also an ideological similarity to European colonialism:
“Israel has inherited the European logic, which consists of “animalizing” the workforce based on racial criteria, drawing a barrier between the civilized and the pre-civilized world. This paradigm is in full swing in Israel; people in Gaza are currently being slaughtered according to this logic: they are being buried under bombs with no other political purpose than to “appease” them, to remind them of the hierarchy that separates human groups in this part of the world. A dog bites, you shoot the pack.” He adds, “It is important to remember that the boundaries between civilized and animal are fluid. They were and are active within the Israeli-Jewish citizenship itself. Arab Jews (mizrahis) or Ethiopians (fallashas) were for a long time on the wrong side of the fence and were a kind of native auxiliary troops used to appease the other natives.”
But colonial wars are between an indigenous population, led by cadres from the indigenous social upper class, and a foreign power that controls the state and reaps the bulk of the profits of the domestic economy. A struggle between two countries. That is not the case in Israel-Palestine, Minassian says, and in that sense, he says, the conflict is not colonial. It is, de facto, about one country, one economy, centered in Tel Aviv, of which the cities on the West Bank and Gaza are the impoverished marginalized suburbs. Gazans also use Israeli money, Israeli products, Israeli identity cards. Palestinian and Israeli proletarians are segments of the same whole. Many Palestinians from the west bank work, legally or illegally, in Israel and in the colonies. They often speak Hebrew. Minassian recounts:
“I listened for evenings to day laborers from one of the refugee camps [on the West Bank] who told me how the ethnicization of the labor force takes place on the construction sites of the Israeli capital: the construction promoters are Ashkenazi Jews, the Palestinian Israelis provide the recruitment of laborers from the occupied territories, the foremen are Sephardic Jews who also speak Arabic, etc. And then there are all the other imported proletarians: Thais, Chinese, Africans, who as undocumented immigrants are actually the worst off. None of these groups can mix with each other, each group has its own status and distinct place in the relations of production.”
Since its founding, Israel, with mainly American help, has advanced at lightning speed. Thanks in no small part to the then massive use of Palestinian labor power, it became a strong economy, a highly developed country. But the strong growth stalled in the 1980s: stock market crash in 1983, inflation of 445 percent in 1984, record balance of payments deficit. This was followed by the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, which brought massive immigration, especially of Russian Jews. Those developments meant that Israeli industry needed much less Palestinian labor. Palestinian unemployment skyrocketed. Israel became a front runner in high-tech industry but, like no other country among the front runners, has a huge amount of “unusable” proletarians to its charge. In this sense, Minassian sees in the Israeli-Palestinian economy a metaphor for the global economy.
The Israeli state’s response to that situation was a policy of separation, of enclosing Palestinians in enclaves and handing over management of them to local subcontractors.
“This great enclosure, this operation of separation between useful and surplus proletarians on an ethno-religious basis, began at the same time as the peace process, which in reality was a process ofexternalization of the social control of the superfluous,” Minassian says. So, in contrast to a colonial conflict
“We find ourselves in a situation where it is less about the exploitation of an indigenous population than about the management of a surplus proletarian population, in proportions unique to the centers of capitalist accumulation. For every worker with a labor contract in Israel, there is another who is maintained in one of the large closed suburbs under Palestinian jurisdiction: the Gaza Strip and West Bank cities. Those are nearly five million proletarians parked a few kilometers from Tel Aviv, invisible, living off the sale of their labor power from day to day, guarded by soldiers so they don’t leave their cage.”
Gaza, more so than the West Bank cities and refugee camps, is a garbage bin of the Israeli economy. Youth unemployment there exceeds 70 percent (before the current invasion). All those surplus workers survive in the marginal economy with financial help from various sources, Israel included. That money is distributed by the subcontractors, Hamas and the so-called Palestinian Authority, which also perform other state functions, primarily maintaining “order” but also raising taxes, forcing young men into their army, subduing other para-military bands etc. The subcontractors compete with each other, trying to regain their waning grip on the disillusioned Palestinian public. At the same time, they seek to strengthen their position against their client, the Israeli state. According to Minassian, therein we must look for the explanation of Hamas’ strategy. Hamas wants to make itself “incontournable”. This has nothing to do with liberation struggle.
Not a local conflict
But the internal dynamics in Israel-Palestine are only part of the story. It is also a geopolitical conflict between America and its challengers.
Israel’s creation was accompanied by a wave of decolonization, as American pressure ended most European colonial regimes after World War II. Both were the result of a global power shift from Europe to the US. A militarized white colony with a powerful, American-equipped army fitted perfectly in the US. geopolitical plans for the Middle East. And as the importance of oil resources grew, so did Israel’s importance to Washington. From the beginning, and still today, the geopolitical framework determines what happens in Israel-Palestine. In this sense, too, it is not a colonial war, but an inter-imperialist conflict. We wrote more on this in the previous article, “Capitalism’s Death World”.The US policy of forming a strong pro-American alliance around Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran has been an important factor. Iran is the patron of the military wing of Hamas (the “more moderate” political wing is funded by Qatar), just as the US is the patron of the IDF. Most of the money and weapons used in the war come from other countries. Only the casualties are local.
In that article, we pointed out the lack of perspective of the capitalist world order; the certainty that its crisis will deepen. The systemic crisis is destabilizing the world, is shaking existing equilibria. The rise of armament expenditures and of military conflicts is a global trend. Frozen fronts are melting, become active again: in Ukraine, in Africa, in Karabagh and now in Gaza. Not new conflicts but existing ones that suddenly flare high. It is to be expected that more powder kegs will explode in the coming years.
How to manage and control the unusable parts of the labor force becomes more and more a central problem in the capitalist world order. Israel may be a forerunner in that regard. What is happening now in Gaza, according to Minassian, is “not war, but the control of the surplus proletariat with military means corresponding to total war, by a democratic, civilized state that is part of the central accumulation bloc.” The thousands of deaths in Gaza, he continued, “paint a terrifying picture of the future – of the coming crises of capitalism.”
Capitalism seems to have entered a new period in which war plays a growing role. A period in which we learn to admire soldiers and ‘freedom fighters’, applaud or turn a blind eye to mass murder, consider death and destruction for the fatherland normal, and take sides in conflicts in which ordinary people are always the losers.
Liberation will not come through war and terrorist attacks but through solidarity and consciousness of the common interests of the collective worker, regardless color or creed. When we reach those we will know what to do. Everything that hinders their growth stands in the way of true liberation. First and foremost, nationalism, separation of people on an ethno-religious or racial basis. So down with those Palestinian and Israeli flags, down with slogans like “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea”: that is a war cry, not a call to stop the war. Stopping the war instead of fighting in it, that must be the first demand now. Cease-fire now! Release the hostages now! Unlock Gaza now! Stop the pogroms on the West Bank now! No to antisemitism, no to islamophobia! Enough pain, enough blood, build solidarity on an anti-nationalist basis!
Sanderr
11/15/2023
This mural and the one on top are made by Banksy in Gaza
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.
EU-chief Ursula Von der Leyen tweeting her selective outrage
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.
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.
