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 Ukraine 13, 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?
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.
Raoul Victor
August 10, 2024
Notes
1 https://www.bbc.com/afrique/articles/ce9pgkxl5p4o
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.”
3 “They were Israel’s ‘eyes on the border – but their Hamas warnings went unheard”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67958260
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.
5 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amihai_Eliyahu
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip_(2023%E2%80%93present)#cite_ref-aljazeera_2023-10-09_2-0
8 https://swprs.org/why-israel-created-hamas/
9 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68318856
10 https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/29/white-house-israel-rafah-red-line
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.”
12 Interview, The Economist, November 8, 2019.
13 https://internationalistperspective.org/and-the-war-drags-on/
http://raoul.victor.free.fr/230210_Ukraine_eng.pdf
14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_gas_field
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.
17 https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/23/us/jewish-palestinian-protest-israel-gaza/index.html
18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-egsMsUe04
19 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/22/zjjr-j22.html
20 https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
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
22 http://raoul.victor.free.fr/220118_Qui.pdf
23 https://www.bbc.com/afrique/articles/cd1pvr5z3zdo
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.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War