Some words on the Gaza/Israel Conflict, 2023

 

In recent history a two state ‘solution’ has often been put forward for the Palestine/Israel problem.

The most salient problem it seems to me is that in 1948 a number of people declared Israel a state (in the special circumstances of post WWII), a state effectively within a land that was not clearly defined as distinct from Palestine, so that Palestinian people became at this point automatically dispossessed from any possible statehood, and this dispossession process has continued to this day as actual dispossession, the expropriation of land and so wealth, or capital.

But a two state solution in Palestine/Israel cannot work. Why? Because these two states cannot rule the same geographically contested region, and it is all contested. That it might possibly be able to is an idea which fundamentally misunderstands and overestimates the real power of a state apparatus and the source of that power, which chiefly does not exist in human will, democracy and elections but in economics, and the class struggle.

This mistaken idea of the state and its power often leads to incredulous frustration at the ineffectiveness of the state, or indeed any state, or the supra state institutions, to solve these problems, no matter how urgent they are and in spite of the fact that we think of the democratic state as a personification of the peoples’ will and presume that this should prevail, with all its good intentions.

Two states can only have a small hope of being successful, in this case, by dividing up the contested region geographically into separate contiguous areas that are governed by the different states, so essentially two distinct nations are formed side by side.

This is of course very simple, easy to imagine, but it has no current chance of happening at all.

In the current Palestine/Israel theatre the long term problem is, as stated, precisely the contested land, and that two distinct geographical areas do not exist. And they are in any case resisted by the dominant economic power in the region, Israel. Does a dominant capitalist power ever voluntarily give up its profitable gains, if it can help it?

A lot is often said about the 1967 borders, as if those would magically solve things, but they are already inadequate for Palestine, dividing it up into separate components with borders governed by Israel, which de facto have already formed the basis for the occupation and are useless for independent trade, imports or exports.

The Israeli state is based on its economic forces, as is the Palestinian, both are capitalist. Israel’s strong economy is however backed chiefly by the might of the US capitalist economy. Palestine has some rich Arab nations as apparent friends and ethnic partners, but many feel unstable as ruling classes and themselves rely on the US for much of their protection from their own working classes.

For the US and the west, Israel is a western entity within a region strategically important to it, mainly because of the fossil fuel resources and their effect on the global market.

States arise upon an economic base, the strongest economic forces create their state in a territory, based in the need and desire for the dominant class to maintain their rule, in the end by force. If two distinct ethnic ruling class powers within a single land are unequal in these terms, then the poorer economic force will not be able to sustain a state, for it will automatically be subsumed by the stronger state and its class struggle, because the stronger state derives from the stronger economic base.

As implied already, the only way a single land could be shared by two states, is if the two sides were relatively equal as economic powers. But even if this became possible, it would likely still fall into conflict, because any state, as a capitalist force, understands these resources are finite and to be fought for, if they are not owned universally.

To get to a stage where there is a respect for sharing such resources is obviously pie in the sky, an ideal, but such a single state also cannot happen here because of the deep religious differences.

It is clear that a single state that is secular and modern that could embrace both Israel and Palestine in religious terms in the same region must be preferable to what exists, but many various imperialist actors involved, on both sides of the conflict, do not want this because it would need a certain amount of socialism and class struggle that is unacceptable to their strategic economic interests.

In general, the western world is experiencing a slow but exponentially rising political tide of Nazification that we can see particularly well at the moment arising in this conflict.

The term Nazification was used by Putin, but it is not wrong because of that. The too enthusiastic western support for Ukraine Nazi battalions, the tacit support for Israel’s series of war crimes against a caged and occupied civilian people in the Gaza Strip, the gross hypocrisy of challenging one occupation as a war crime (Russia) but supporting another (Israel), the prevention of a ceasefire and the continuation of bombing trapped civilians, including a high proportion of children, US President Biden calling the deaths of over 400 people in the Gaza hospital blast the work of the “other team” - is this not an entirely inappropriate and belittling phrase for such a terrible event, and strangely disconnected from reality?

This all normalises things that hitherto would have been, at least in this open way, unthinkable. Certainly Russia and Israel are not equivalent, but both ethnic groups lost very many people during WWII against the German Nazis, and so multiple questions cascade as to why we must think of one occupation so differently to the other. Is it that a democracy may commit war crimes but others not? Partly I fear it has something to do with how the dominant news media can continue to report on both conflicts (the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and the ‘expanded ground operation’ in Gaza) with any credibility, moral or rational.

Look at the language: Israel has the right to defend itself, this is of course correct, but does this not also mean the Palestinian people have this right to defend themselves? Over the recent years their situation as an oppressed and occupied people has simply been ignored by the media. Let us be clear, this occupation is not benign, it represents continuing decades long violence at a low simmering level by the Israeli state.

If Hamas, representatives of Gaza, (a part of the Palestinian ruling class) currently have chosen an extreme way to express the defence of blockaded Gaza, one that includes killing civilians, the war crime of hostage taking, and the use of human shields, this is a war crime, yes, but we must recognise this is happening within an existing war crime against Palestinians. This is not to be used as an excuse, but it is not as simple, as Biden suggested in his recent speech to the US nation, that it is mere ‘neighbour on neighbour’ violence and antisemitism by Hamas, because the Gaza Palestinians could be regarded also as hostages, so hostages who have taken hostages. The violence of the Hamas attack is a violent extreme event in a long line of extreme violence in this conflict, which has a history.

But the media begins where it wishes to so as to frame the events for the ruling classes and to more easily and readily describe who is the evil to the masses: the Gaza population as such becomes the universal perpetrators of evil, even being associated with the Nazis of WWII.

But let us carry this logic onward: If the Palestinians are entirely responsible for Hamas, and evil because they elected them, then logic would dictate that the German people would also have been responsible for the Holocaust, and are therefore also evil, forever, for such evil derives from mystical essences that do not live or die in flesh and blood like us, they are timeless.

This is of course not taken as being the case for Germany in current accepted political discourse, reflecting how usually we do not consider democracy to function so perfectly that it really represents people or their interests very well, if at all (which is especially true in an occupied territory you would think), yet the far right Israeli leaders justify their bombing of Gaza by this exact claim: the Gazan people elected terrorists. Actually, it was surprisingly quickly that the west was able to forget the gross war crimes and crimes against humanity of the German Nazis and carry on with business as usual.

Anyway, this twisted logic is a tactic that is beginning to expect, and prepare for, the genocide of Palestinians, who represent, among other things to the current Israeli leaders, a thorn in the flesh of their capital expansion. - That capital seeks to expand in such a region in such a way is not surprising also I think due to some unique and broader factors operating today that you can notice.

A major one is the backlash in bourgeois ideology and aesthetics to the two recent global economic crises, plus the global pandemic which necessitated certain socialist style measures for the protection of people. This ‘rebound’ is happening in tandem with the rise of the new crisis of capital. I suggest it is this effect that has helped push the Nazification process to this extreme, in other words it is a kind of inflation of the powers of the superstructure and state and its enforcement to a crazed degree, perhaps even more so because it always feels its own lack of power over civil society and that it must compensate for this lack by going to ever greater lengths (re: the two standing ovations given by the Canadian parliament to a Nazi recently, this is a sign of this tendency).

In an article in The Guardian by Jonothan Freedland “Warning: Benjamin Netanyahu is walking right into Hamas’s trap” (21/10/23), it notes Netanyahu’s personal role contributing to generating this conflict, and how the poorly condition of the Israeli state and its current political culture has led to Israelis seeing him as culpable for the conflagration, due partly to his past hands-off policy towards Hamas. What it also points to, but which is not openly mentioned, is how the interplay between the two ruling class factions of Hamas and Likud engenders a kind of hellish mutually assured need to stay in power, as institutions, by always ramping up the stakes and the violence. This is not a sign of evil essences at work, but of class struggle and institutional strategic opportunism and profit seeking, and this is tacitly understood by the ruling class participants in this mundane struggle.

Obviously, Israeli citizens understand this situation much better than most foreign politicians (surveys point to this), who seem blind to it and line up to show visible support for Netanyahu, helping cement his position. But because his power seems likely to end after the conflict ends and he faces the music, his interest is of course to prolong the conflict indefinitely or to take it to such an extreme level that there is a chaos in which everything becomes blurred and upended.

This therefore reveals what the big capitalist world powers must want, not any real resolution of the problem in any real ‘two state solution’, but a continual diminishing of any prospect of progressive class struggle in the region: a stasis, forever. No better example perhaps than the peculiar timing of the Hamas attack on Israel which comes when Israeli social protests have been strong against the far right ruling factions. This is a sign that Israel society is becoming mature and more normalised in terms of its internal class system and struggle; this is also under attack. But this in its turn tells us that it is this class struggle that offers some hope even in the midst of this terrible nightmare.

Notes on Fidel Castro (part 1) on Obama’s speech to the 60th Session of the United Nations General Assembly regarding Libya, Syria, Palestine, and the Arab Revolutions of 2011

by Gary Tedman

The Fidel text was published online in Granma (English) Havana, dated September 26, 2011

See:
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/reflections-i/26sept-40Reflex1a.html


I would like to first point out that I have the utmost respect for Fidel, but at the moment I find the arguments of some socialists and communists to be mistaken, at least in part, and I would like here to focus on a text by him which gives the chance to approach the subject head on.

To begin with, Fidel asks the rhetorical and rather loaded question:

“…what position to adopt on the NATO genocide in Libya?”

The conclusion contained in this question is that genocide has in fact taken place in Libya, conducted by NATO.

Now, asking loaded questions are more a trick of bourgeois law than Marxist science (it seeks to win the argument through rhetorical means), but here we have it. Fidel asserts the intervention in Libya is essentially the same as that of Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan and uses the same reasoning to justify it. To justify these assertions, he uses the following evidence drawn from past history:

“Was it not precisely the government of the UN host state which ordered the butchery in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the mercenary Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba, the invasion of the Dominican Republic, the "dirty war" in Nicaragua, the occupation of Grenada and Panama by the U.S. military forces and the massacre of Panamanians in El Chorillo? Who promoted the military coups and genocide in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, which resulted in tens of thousands of dead and disappeared?”

Note that, while all these latter accusations are correct, this does not by itself prove or mean that by default today’s military intervention by NATO in Libya is the same. For each intervention and each revolution, conflict or war has to be judged according to its specific material situation and historical circumstance. This must be done according at least to Lenin’s principles.

“Socialists have always condemned war between nations as barbarous and brutal. But our attitude towards war is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois pacifists (supporters and advocates of peace) and of the Anarchists. We differ from the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within the country; we understand that war cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created; and we also differ in that we fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary. We Marxists differ from both the pacifists and the Anarchists in that we deem it necessary historically (from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical materialism) to study each war separately.”

It is a slightly worrying sign when past history is used exclusively to damn certain actions, because history is undergoing development all the time, and things, especially political positions in a time of massive economic crisis, change and often invert. We must study each war separately.

Besides, military interventions by ‘western’ powers have not all been imperialist and negative in history: the most obvious example is the intervention against the Nazi’s in Europe in WWII.

Is NATO’s intervention in Libya genocidal? Did it seek to wipe out all Libyan citizens?

I think this is untrue, I suggest that there are two sides to the conflict in Libya, and this means the situation cannot be reduced to a simple ‘NATO genocide’, ‘against Libya’. It is only possible to assert such a thing by completely separating the popular revolution that began there from its roots in the Arab Revolutions across the region, in Egypt and Tunisia, and the other uprisings that began in Algeria, Morocco, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Oman, as well as the protests in Iraq, and by failing to even acknowledge that the ‘rebels’ in Libya were revolutionary and received de facto support from NATO (yes, not for ‘pure’ humanitarian reasons, but the reasons do not matter much to a materialist, what matters is the act). Does Fidel think that the siege of Misrata by Gaddafi’s forces and the attack on Benghazi should have been allowed to go ahead, to proceed to their conclusion? The answer seems sadly to be, yes. With the firepower available to a modern army it is possible for a relatively small unpopular contingent, a regime, to massacre very many protesting people, perhaps to commit genocide, in order to protect its position. What was possible in the Cuban revolution (the armed guerrilla struggle against the unpopular regime) was not possible in Libya, with its different landscape (desert), number of people, and large number of foreign workers and the pre-planned use by the regime of foreign mercenaries, as well as the particular history of the borders being created to corral the Arab people into different areas capable of being overseen by imperial powers. None of this can be passed over without comment, and, frankly, the attempt to do so points to problems.

Let me skip this next bit of Fidel’s piece, where he refers to the 'race' of certain South American political leaders, I find it embarrassing that a communist should worry about ‘race’ in this way, and refer to Evo Morales as “pure millenary indigenous origin” as if it were by itself a good thing, as proof of something. It is not.

Fidel quotes extensively Chavez’s message to the UN:

“I address these words to the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization […] to confirm, on this day and in this forum, Venezuela’s total support of Palestinian statehood: the right of Palestine to become a free, sovereign and independent country. It is an act of historical justice to a people who have carried within themselves, always, all the pain and suffering of the world…”

Of which this support for Palestinian statehood is an exemplary Marxist position, without any doubt. Of the rest of the quotations we can only agree too, Chavez provides a very good, clear analysis of the Israel/Palestine situation.

We move on here to Fidel’s analysis of Obama’s comments on Tunisia and Egypt and the Arab Revolutions.

It is perhaps noteworthy that Chavez, at least in the quotes that Fidel sets before us, do not contain any reference to these massive revolutions, which you might think a little surprising from a communist point of view, and which you might think would have a profound bearing upon the Palestinian situation.

Fidel:

“…A bit later he [Obama] mentions Tunisia and takes credit for the popular movement which overthrew the government in that country, which was an ally of imperialism.
Even more astonishingly, Obama fails to acknowledge that the Untied States was responsible for the installation of the tyrannical, corrupt government in Egypt of Hosni Mubarak who, absconding with the principles of Nasser, allied himself with the imperialists, stole billions from his country and tyrannized his valiant people.”

This is true, but again rather rhetorical, and what can be said of Mubarak can equally be said of Gaddafi, they follow the same mould. And can we really expect a President of the US, even if he were to disagree with past US actions, to openly criticise past US foreign policy under past Presidents? Not really. So a ‘failure to acknowledge’ is not surprising and beside the point. What matters is what this relatively new President of the US does and is doing today. We know that the US supported these tyrannical leaders during the post WWII period and they should be and are condemned for that. What’s harder to explain here is not Obama’s position, but the small element of sleight-of-hand and evasion in this argument of Fidel’s.

Fidel quotes from Obama’s speech:

“Day after day, in the face of bullets and bombs, the Libyan people refused to give back that freedom. And when they were threatened by the kind of mass atrocity that often went unchallenged in the last century, the United Nations lived up to its charter. The Security Council authorized all necessary measures to prevent a massacre. The Arab League called for this effort; Arab nations joined a NATO-led coalition that halted Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks.
"Yesterday, the leaders of a new Libya took their rightful place beside us, and this week, the United States is reopening our embassy in Tripoli.
"This is how the international community is supposed to work — nations standing together for the sake of peace and security, and individuals claiming their rights.
"All of us have a responsibility to support the new Libya — the new Libyan government as they confront the challenge of turning this moment of promise into a just and lasting peace for all Libyans.
"The Qaddafi regime is over. Gbagbo, Ben Ali, Mubarak are no longer in power. Osama bin Laden is gone, and the idea that change could only come through violence has been buried with him.”

This is the point where Fidel’s logic begins to show the strain of its position. There is an attempt in the following, while commenting upon Obama’s speech, to make us somehow feel sorry for Osama bin Laden and the manner of his killing, and then, the (unproved, even un-evidenced in this article) re-invocation of Libya as a NATO conducted genocide is used to defend the Syrian regime from similar intervention and interference. There is no real challenge to Obama’s remarks on Libya, no grappling with the detail of the story of the conflict in Libya.

In effect, this is an attempt to theoretically defend the very obviously fascist regime in Syria from revolutionary justice, from the same justice as has been meted out in Tunisia and Egypt, against Ben Ali and Mubarak and their regimes.

By implication Fidel’s justification for his position is that US –

“…intelligence services along with those of Israel, systematically assassinate the most outstanding scientists involved in military technology”

This is decidedly weak. In those countries, this, while it may be true, does not mean (pretty obviously) that the peoples uprising in Syria (like in Libya) is any less legitimate. It just means it is complicated.

It is in any case, as Obama’s speech demonstrates with its calls for ‘peaceful transition’, by no means certain that any military intervention on the side of the people of Syria or Yemen will happen from the direction of the US or Europe, and certainly the interests of the US are at this moment on the side of the repressive regime in Bahrain, where a hypocritical reformist agenda is being supported (Fidel notes the US has the naval base there). But it would seem that from the statements of Fidel he would not support any help to the Bahraini, Syrian or Yemeni people either, anyway, so in this sense would be in fact in the same essential (materially speaking) boat as Obama -: the people, through weak theoretical pseudo justifications, must be left to ‘their own’ brutal repression. This kind of conclusion I suggest is not worthy of a communist or Marxist, doing nothing is not an option.

We move on here rapidly to the question of Israel and Palestine in Obama’s speech.

Says Fidel of Obama:

“He then launches into a long lecture explaining and justifying the inexplicable and unjustifiable”

He is right about this, what follows is mealy-mouthed and half baked pseudo justifications for the status quo to remain as it is, and Fidel points out -:

“The least Obama could have done was acknowledge that Israel's own citizens are tired of the squandering of resources invested in the military, denying them peace and access to the basic means of life. Like the Palestinians, they are suffering the consequences of policies imposed by the United States and the most bellicose, reactionary sectors of the Zionist state.”

And Fidel rightly shows how Obama edges sneakily from talking about Palestine into talking about nuclear weapons, and from here brings in the argument against Iran and North Korea, as if this has a bearing (unstated in an open fashion) on what can happen, or be allowed to happen, with the Palestinian situation.

When UNICEF confirms Cuba as the only Latin American country with no child malnutrition I consider this as more important to Cuba than the above theoretical disagreement. However, to the people suffering and fighting in Syria and Yemen, their own circumstances and the foreign support they get is more important to them, even if it is only theoretical support, and I think the position as regards much of the South American progressive leaderships towards their comrades in the Middle East and North Africa is inconsistent and mistaken in many crucial respects.

The Libyan intervention was and is a complex event. It did not happen in isolation from the people of Libya, who were uprising against the Gaddafi regime, nor did it happen in isolation from the revolutions that happened in neighbouring Arab countries, Tunisia and Egypt. This in itself is a great difference, and a crucial one, to that of Afghanistan and Iraq, which were imposed under false pretences. Also the method that NATO and the US used to intervene was different in terms of tactics and strategy: there was to be no occupying force, and the intervention sought approval from the Arab League and not only the UN Security Council.

Whilst the intervention was put forward ideologically as to be on ‘humanitarian grounds’ to protect the civilians from massacre and genocide (from Gaddafi’s forces and their threats), you cannot bomb people in a humanitarian fashion, and so we can see here the limits of the bourgeois understanding of its intervention as far as the UN is concerned. Yet this does not of itself de-legitimise the intervention. It had to be sided, and in fact it was sided. The notion of humanitarian protection was and is a myth that is always present in bourgeois ideology – the myth of the universal middle line, countering the false dialectic of opposed forces of good and evil, and the UN has to stick to this

The reasons for the NATO intervention were probably ‘impure’, in the sense that one consideration was probably the oil resources and that they (the nations represented by NATO) might lose access to them if they lost. Another reason was probably that Gaddafi often pretended to socialist credentials, and the intervention could ostensibly appear as also an anti-socialist intervention at a time when capitalist democracy was under severe threat from internal strife due to the economic crisis, i.e. in Spain and Greece in particular, and it wanted to portray itself as progressive but anti-socialist (famously Gaddafi was thought to perhaps be escaping to Venezuela in a mischievous comment by Hague). That Gaddafi was not socialist in any genuine sense seems to have been shown up even more through the revelations about western collusion with the regime since the liberation of Tripoli and since Gaddafi has reverted to being the terrorist that he always aided while keeping up the rhetoric against terrorism.

But to understand the reasons for the intervention we must understand what it would have meant had the western powers generally sided with the forces of reaction in the Middle East and North Africa, against specifically the Egyptian people. Faced with such an obvious and open reactionary stance, the people of Europe, already angry at the austerity measures being thrown at them, would be far more sure of who their social enemy was. After the Libya intervention, the global bourgeoisie have for once shown a small progressive side, and we must give credit to the people of Europe for pressurising for this. At the same time, though, if the Tunisian and Egyptian people had not struggled quite so hard and not been so brave and resolute, the western powers would have continued to support these regimes in total.

It is clear at the moment that the Arab revolution is not over, that it has many facets, and that the position of the advanced western powers towards them vacillates. The circumstances, however, of the Palestinian people are now greatly enhanced. No longer do they need to see the endless almost ritual violence between the Israeli rightist government and the Palestinian factional leaders as the only ‘solution’, or the fake ‘peace negotiations’. Now the solution appears to be happening by default through the revolutions in the region, and it is with these revolutions that the Palestinians will find their goal, as too will the Israeli ordinary people, who have shown that their voice is also being ignored and that they too are part of the movement.

Ceasefire in Gaza: Keep up the pressure

From Churches for Middle East Peace:

Please take action today and ask Congress to immediately move forward on helping to achieve a cease-fire, address the pressing humanitarian situation and pursue a long-term political solution.

The Congressional Gaza resolutions, S. Res. 10 and H. Res. 34, passed unanimously in the Senate and by a vote of 390 in favor, 5 against, 22 present and 16 non-voting in the House. The resolutions expressed unwavering support for Israel and placed exclusive blame on Hamas for the current crisis, while including key positive elements in the important action-oriented "resolved" clauses: urging protection of civilians on both sides; recognizing the humanitarian needs of the residents of Gaza and calling for long-term improvement in daily living conditions; and expressing support for achieving a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The resolutions also encouragingly called for a "durable" and "sustainable" cease-fire "as soon as possible", which though falling short of urging an immediate end to hostilities, was a significant development, especially given that earlier in the week Congressional leaders had said a "cease-fire" would not be demanded at all.