Israel and Palestine One Year After the Massacre of October Seventh
On 8 October 2024, we can look back across a whole year of Binyamin Netanyahu’s genocide against the people of Gaza. We weep for the people of Israel and for the victims of the Hamas massacre ... and we weep for Palestine, for the whole Semitic world of Arabs and Jews. And we weep for the Iranians and Turks and other folks who live next door to these squabbling tribes.
Israeli bombing of Gaza (picture from The Guardian)
Exactly one year ago, armed militants from the Palestinian political movement Hamas stormed across Israel’s southern border and murdered 1200 Jewish people. They carried 245 hostages back to Gaza, some 100 of whom have not yet been released or found. Netanyahu could have focused on hostages, and on building peace. Instead, he chose retaliation: his government (not, I emphasize, the people of Israel) has focused the past year on destruction. The Gaza Strip has been reduced to rubble. 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and millions have been turned into refugees. Ten or twelve or fourteen thousand children have been killed. Thousands are maimed, amputated, have had their future destroyed by the mis-named Israeli Defense Force. Hundreds of Palestinian adults and children lie treated or untreated in the ruins of hospitals that have been bombed by the IDF.
A different leader would have saved the hostages, negotiating without bombs in favor of peace. If he wanted lasting peace for Israel, Netanyahu would have taken a different route, supporting Saudi and other initiatives to build a prosperous Palestinian State within an overall peace across the Middle East. Instead, Netanyahu has opted for destruction and genocide: and I agree with the governments of South Africa, Brazil, and others that genocide is what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza.
Of course Israel has the right to defend itself. But defense is not what Netanyahu is doing. He is making the future of Israel more precarious, storing up generations of hatreds against Israelis and – as an extension of his policies – against Jews. Netanyahu is the world’s greatest agent of anti-Semitism. That probably pleases him: the longer he can maintain fear, the longer he can maintain his fragile grip on power. The more he can accuse others of antisemitism, the more he can argue that he needs to keep on killing people. First Gaza, then West Bank, now Lebanon … and then Iran? War with the whole Middle East ? Where will this crazed megalomaniac stop ? When will NATO allies stop providing him with the weapons for genocide ?
The Americans wasted twenty years trying to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, and they failed: you cannot defeat an idea with firearms. In Afghanistan (although American policy makers never worked it out) the idea they were fighting was the Pashtunwali, the Pashtun Honor Code which has existed for a thousand years. With greater understanding and subtlety, NATO’s mission in Kabul might have partnered with the Taliban and persuaded them to modernize their Pashtunwali. Hamid Karzai wanted to have Taliban partners, but the American army would not allow it. By trying to destroy the Taliban, the Americans simply reinforced the traditional, reactionary values of Pashtunwali. Afghanistan’s women have been crushed as a result.
Afghan women all dress the same, after 20 years of American misrule
Unwilling to learn anything from America’s mistakes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, President Biden and his team continue to supply the Israelis with American weapons to blast their way into a similar impasse. The IDF has already stated that Netanyahu’s desire to exterminate Hamas is impossible. For every Hamas fighter they kill, three more Palestinian children vow to avenge their fathers and uncles. The same will be true for the sons and nephews of the Hezbollah fighters Israel is assassinating in Lebanon and Syria. Of course, Netanyahu will be dead before these bitter, angry orphans are old enough to take up arms against Israel. That is one of the weaknesses of Western Democracy: winning the next election becomes more important that prosperity for the next generation. Netanyahu’s political position dominates Netanyahu’s vision, and Israel be damned !
After this visit from Israel’s IDF, members of this mosque in Gaza will not feel friendship
Israel is America’s agent in the Middle East. The cold-warrior neocons of Joe Biden’s administration have given support to Israeli destruction of Gaza and now Lebanon. Most of them either have or will in the future work in some way for the U.S. defense industry, which makes fat profits from waging war. Israel is one manifestation of White European and White American war-mongering imperialism and racism.
This racism is based on White Supremacy, rather than antisemitism: Arabs are Semitic, and they are more Semitic that many Israelis whose parents were born in Europe. The Israel-Palestine problem is far more general that that of Gaza: we are witnessing just one more example of Northern domination over the Global South and the White Male post-colonial consensus over rules-based exploitation of the world’s resources.
In the U.S.A. the same White Male domination is represented by the deep-seated racism that has taken the Republican Party back to the days of White Supremacists like George Wallace and Barry Goldwater. Similar movements exist in modern Britain, France, Germany, Italy ….. focusing anger against the immigrants whose labors keep Europe’s economy ticking over and whose very existence is due to Northern economic exploitation of the Global South. Many nations are impoverished by debts fostered by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund while many also fall victims to NATO’s racist wars from Afghanistan to the Sahara Desert.
The Message, a new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, expresses these interrelated expressions of racism and domination more eloquently than I can manage. After reading me, please read him!
