Ever since Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2007, Gaza and Israel have been locked in a continuous, nightmarish, and seemingly inescapable cycle of violence, which takes the following form in each repetition:
- Hamas launches rockets and/or suicidal knife attacks on random Jewish civilians, sometimes, but not always, in response to a deliberate provocation.
- Israel responds by tightening its control over goods and services entering or leaving Gaza, and launches a massive and disproportionate military assault, centred on air power and bombing in order to minimise their own casualties. This kills some Hamas fighters and takes out some military facilities, while also killing many Palestinian civilians, and wreaking widespread destruction on residential and other buildings in Gaza.
- International news media turn their attention to Gaza, worldwide protest demonstrations mount against the Israeli bombing, building political pressure to force Israel to desist.
- The political pressure increases, and the military rewards reduce, to the point where it is no longer in Israel’s interest to continue the bombing. A ceasefire is agreed, Israeli military operations are suspended, and the ‘peacetime’ phase begins.
- World news media turn their attention elsewhere. Out of the glare of world media, Israel resumes encroachments on Palestinian land in the West Bank and tightens the noose on Gaza, while Hamas rebuilds its military structures and supplies in preparation for the next round of attacks.
- The cycle repeats.
Some readers will object that this process does not start with Hamas rocket attacks. “This did not begin on 7th October!” read a placard at a recent Palestine solidarity demonstration.
Quite right! You could start a description of the process at any point in the cycle, and it would make no difference at all. The key thing to understand is that it is a self-perpetuating cycle, each phase leading inexorably to the next, endlessly repeated.
There have been at least five repetitions of this cycle since Hamas took power in Gaza in 2006: in 2006, (including the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit), 2007 during the civil war through which Hamas consolidated its power, early 2008 (which Israel codenamed “Operation Hot Winter”), then again beginning late 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead”), then a few years of relative lull due to Hamas being embroiled in the Syrian civil war, then 2014 (“Operation Protective Edge”) 2018-19 (called by Palestinians the “Great March of Return”) and May 2021. And again now.
Some further things to note about this cycle:
- The chief casualties on both sides have always been civilians. Hamas is far too weak militarily to engage the powerful Israeli Defence Forces directly, so it attacks unarmed Israeli civilians. The Israeli bombardments mostly target Hamas military command centres, weapons stocks, and rocket launchers, but these are often embedded beneath or close to residential buildings, schools, supermarkets, hospitals, mosques, and so on, and so many civilians are caught in the line of fire. The Israeli military machine absolves itself of any responsibility for these deaths.
- Hamas depends heavily on this use of Palestinian civilians as human shields for their combatants, and makes no secret of it – its spokespeople express it this way: “This attests to the character of our noble, Jihad-fighting people, who defend their rights and their homes with their bare chests and their blood. The policy of people confronting the Israeli warplanes with their bare chests in order to protect their homes has proven effective [my emphasis – JR] against the occupation.”
I trust it is unnecessary to point out that it is not effective militarily to confront modern warplanes unarmed – but the Hamas ‘military strategy’ is to sacrifice the lives of civilians in this way for the political sympathy it wins at Israel’s expense when it displays to the world the bodies of Palestinian children killed in the Israeli bombing.
- The worldwide protests are an integral part of the cycle. The Hamas strategy rests on mobilising international opinion against the civilian casualties Israel inflicts.
- The calls for a ceasefire, which seem so reasonable – after all, who but the most ardent supporters of the Israeli assault could object to a halt to the slaughter of civilians! – do absolutely nothing to break the cycle of violence. They merely advance it to the next phase, and bring closer the next repetition.
The events since October 7 have fallen entirely within this pattern, with one difference: they have raised it to a new level of civilian bloodshed on both sides.
The Hamas atrocity of 7 October was the biggest single massacre of Jews since the holocaust, an anti-Jewish pogrom similar in many ways to those that occurred in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It qualitatively raised the stakes. Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad has threatened further actions like those of 7 October. When asked whether this meant the complete annihilation of Israel, he replied: “Yes, of course.”
“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times. The Al-Aqsa Deluge [the name Hamas gave its October 7 onslaught] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth,” Hamad continued. “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs…”
“We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October one-millionth, everything we do is justified,” Hamad said.
This is a truly genocidal vision: two, three, a million pogroms against Jewish civilians up to the ‘complete annihilation’ of Israel. And also suicidal for Palestinians: “we are proud to sacrifice martyrs” (except that you can be sure that Hamad and his family will be safely tucked away in Qatar or Beirut, and won’t have to worry about becoming a martyr himself.)
The vision of the Israeli ruling class is almost a mirror image of this. The ruling class, its ruling Likud party and governing coalition, are more fragmented and are distinctly unpopular. Nonetheless, Ariel Kallner, a member of the Israeli parliament for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, has demanded a repeat of the mass expulsion of Arabs in 1948 known to Palestinians as the Nakba or Catastrophe. “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948,” he said. These threats of campaigns of ethnic cleansing have been echoed on the ground in the West Bank – which is not under Hamas control – and there are many reports of stepped-up evictions of Palestinians there.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.” ‘Animals’ would not be such an inaccurate description, if it were only referring to the barbarity of the Hamas thugs. But the measures he proposed – no electricity, no food, no fuel – were aimed at all Gaza residents, and so we must assume that that is who he meant by ‘animals.’ Heritage Minister Amihay Eliyahu, from a far-right party in the coalition government, indicated that the use of nuclear weapons was “one way” of dealing with the problem, though he was immediately suspended from cabinet for doing so.
The Israeli government has stated that the goal of their military operation is to eradicate Hamas. Even if we allow the most generous interpretation of that goal, if we accept that in general the Israeli Defence Force is not deliberately targeting civilians, even if we accept that they are taking all reasonable steps to minimise civilian casualties, we still need to ask the question: what would a military solution that succeeds in destroying Hamas require, and what would it require to prevent Hamas from re-establishing itself later?
At the very least, this course of action would require thousands or tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and colossal destruction of housing and economic and social infrastructure, in order to destroy the tunnels in which Hamas fighters have entrenched themselves. It would require the establishment of broad new ‘buffer zones’ in northern Gaza – that is, the displacement of the already-displaced and crowded population of Gaza into an even smaller area. That, in turn, would also require mass emigration from Gaza altogether, across the border to Egypt or beyond. Neighbouring countries have already expressed a strong reluctance to accept these refugees. Israel has already warned 1.1 million civilians living in northern Gaza to move south of the Wadi Gaza river, with no guarantee that they will ever be permitted to return, and several hundred thousand have already heeded the warning, despite the threats and obstruction of Hamas.
And that still leaves the question of the post-war political regime in the reduced Gaza, seething with heightened discontent and hatred for Israel. A US proposal for Palestinian autonomy in Gaza under the rule of the Palestinian Authority would – obviously, to anyone who knows how unpopular the PA is – soon lead to a recurrence of the process by which Hamas took power after Israel ended its earlier occupation in 2005. So a Gaza freed from Hamas by Israeli military might would necessarily require some form of ongoing Israeli supervision of the post-Hamas political regime, that is, re-occupation of Gaza for an indefinite period, as Netanyahu has declared. And all that assumes that they can keep the even more extreme voices in check, which is far from guaranteed.
Thus, the vision of the Israeli ruling class, too, and the first month of its implementation, can only be described as genocidal.
So this is where the ruling classes of Israel and Palestine have delivered the working people of the region and the world: to a point where both their Israeli and Palestinian components can offer only genocidal solutions. They would now like us to choose which of the two genocides is the more just and worthy of support.
Some of my friends have made their choice. Some have done so with enthusiasm, some with misgivings, and some unwittingly.
Most have opted for the Hamas camp, and have joined the Palestine solidarity protests.
One or two of these have completely lost their moral bearings, and have attempted to defend the Hamas pogrom of 7 October as some kind of justified resistance to oppression, to deny or downplay the horrific nature of the massacre, and to place the blame for the civilian deaths of 7 October exclusively and entirely on Israel. There is little discussion to be had with these – one can only watch in horror as they head towards the abyss.
A much larger number of my friends dispute my assertion that the political character of the pro-Palestine protests is dictated by Hamas, and have joined the protests to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people facing annihilation in Gaza. Some of these have publicly denounced the October 7 atrocity; I don’t deny their sincerity for a moment. Others have pointed out that it was a minority of the Sydney demonstration who chanted “Gas the Jews”, and the protest organisers disavowed and denounced these elements. “Do you really believe that the majority of people on these demonstrations are Jew-hating Islamists and rightists?” one friend asked me.
No, of course I don’t believe that. The participants in the largest demonstration in Auckland were a heterogeneous bunch, who shared little beyond a disgust for the bloodletting in Gaza. I’m told some of the speakers at the first rally in Auckland denounced the 7 October attack.
But the character of a demonstration is not determined by the inner beliefs of the participants – it is determined by the leadership and the slogans around which the demonstration is organised. And those slogans – for a ceasefire, and the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” – are entirely consistent with supporting the Hamas course and strategy. Noticeably lacking from these demonstrations was any expression of solidarity with the Jewish victims of 7 October, any call for the unconditional1 release of the hostages held by Hamas, any call for Jewish-Palestinian cooperation and coexistence, in short, any means of distinguishing it from a Hamas rally.
When I pressed a friend who had joined one of these protests about this, she replied that in her view, so long as the hideous bombardment in Gaza is under way, “Now is not the time to criticise Hamas.” It was a revealing statement, one which expresses a sentiment that is quite widely held among the marchers. It signifies that they are placing themselves under Hamas leadership, despite whatever misgivings they might have about Hamas. Such is the political pressure on us, when we have to choose between two genocides.
The sense of urgency created by the colossal scale of the death and destruction being visited on Gaza fuels the stampede into the Hamas camp. The suffering is hard to watch, for sure, but in such times a clear head is needed more than ever. And eyes to see, and a voice to denounce the poison of anti-Semitism. It’s not enough just to decide who to ‘stand with’ – what is needed is to find a way out of the trap.
As time goes on, the Hamas-dictated character of these protests and their leadership becomes clearer. At the Auckland protest on 4 November, Member of Parliament Phil Twyford got shouted down when he denounced the Hamas atrocity of 7 October, and was interrupted and cut off by the organisers before he finished his speech. He needed a police escort as he left the rally grounds, mobbed by a section of the crowd.
Meanwhile a leading Auckland activist in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle calls for a boycott of an Israeli brand of hummus, using the slogan “Don’t let your hummus be soaked in blood”. I’m sure he was talking metaphorically about the Palestinian blood being shed in Gaza – but this slogan is nonetheless a creepy echo of the ‘blood libel’2 which launched many anti-Jewish pogroms in the past.
Another leading campaigner in solidarity with Palestine, John Minto, publicly defended the perpetrators of a graffiti attack and attempted arson at an Auckland synagogue. “While PSNA [Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa] was not involved in this graffiti and arson incident and we don’t see it as helpful for the Palestinian cause we can absolutely understand the motivation. There is nothing anti-semitic in it,” he said.
I have known John Minto for many years; he is an honourable man, and I do not believe for a minute that he is a Jew-hater. Yet here he is, on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht,3 trying to argue that there is “nothing anti-Semitic” about an arson attack on a synagogue! Once again: such is the logic of having to choose between two genocides.
I also have friends who have joined the Israeli camp. Among them are Jews who see the Israeli state as their only protection against the obliteration of their people. There are also others who declare that the only road to liberation of Palestine goes through total elimination of Hamas.
I don’t disagree with the elimination of Hamas, but it is another matter altogether to imagine that the Israeli state, under whose rule Hamas has grown and strengthened and embedded itself in Gaza – socially and politically as well as militarily – is now somehow capable of annihilating Hamas by military means. This is a case of what Malcolm X taught us many years ago: a chicken cannot lay a duck egg.
So then, if we refuse to ‘pick a side’ and support either of the two genocides, does that mean we are reduced to the role of hand-wringing spectators as the bloodletting escalates? Not at all. But as Trotsky often explained, in order to fight war, one must understand the causes of the war and identify the forces that can put an end to it. Pacifistic flailing of arms, and shrill appeals to the belligerents to lay down their arms, achieve nothing.
Israel is often described as a colonial-settler state, and an apartheid state. Both of these designations are false and misleading, and both are obstacles in the way of such an understanding.
The state of Israel was born in 1948 as a colonial-settler state, that much is certainly true. A colonial-settler state defends the interests of all the settlers against indigenous resistance to encroachment on their land. New Zealand and Australia were created as colonial-settler states in the nineteenth century, as were Canada, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, and many other countries in earlier times.
But a colonial-settler state is a transitory phenomenon. A settler-colony cannot exist for long before the colonial population itself differentiates into opposing classes, the society becomes transformed into a modern class-divided capitalist society, and the settler state into a class state, defending the interests of its capitalist ruling class.
New Zealand, the example I am most familiar with, was a colonial-settler state from the time of its formal annexation by Britain in 1840. From 1854 there was an elected legislature, but no political parties, because there was only embryonic class differentiation within the settler population. It was this state that violently dispossessed the indigenous Māori of their lands in the 1860s. Already by the 1880s, class contradictions within the settler population had begun to crystallise and harden. In the massive Maritime strike in 1890, the classes of modern capitalist society took shape and the capitalist state emerged.
The alienation of Māori land continued under the capitalist state. So what had changed? The working class had been born, with the dispossessed Māori as a major component, along with the exploited wage-labourers among the settlers and their descendants. Within a few decades, a fighting multi-ethnic labour movement grew up, which formed alliances with Māori resistance to their continuing dispossession. All this developed in little over sixty years since the founding of the colonial-settler state.
What relevance does this have to the war in Gaza? Because the transformation brought into being the class which alone could bring about the advancement of both indigenous Māori and immigrant workers, the only class which exploits no one and oppresses no one. The process didn’t, and doesn’t, happen automatically – it took both time and leadership for the members of the emerging class to recognise each other and discern their common class interests, and to understand how overcoming the remaining inequalities among them is in the interests of the whole class. It is working-class leadership that is lacking in Israel and Palestine at present, as it is lacking in every other country on the planet. But the class that is key to the future of Palestine-Israel already exists.
Israel was the last colonial-settler state to come into existence, in 1948 – already something of a historical anachronism – and it was this colonial-settler state which carried out the Nakba in 1948 and the 1967 expansionist war. Its own economic development hampered in the early decades by continuous wars and Palestinian resistance, the colonial settler-state remained for a time mainly a military outpost of US imperialism, a garrison state with a largely agricultural economy, heavily dependent on US aid.
In the 1980s that began to change; the changes accelerated in the 1990s, especially with the massive new immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union, and further again with the discovery of significant deposits of natural gas in the 2000s. Long-established chemical and textile industries grew rapidly, as well as shipbuilding, production of metals, machinery, electrical goods, pharmaceuticals, construction materials, and food products. A large high-tech sector sprang up, leading in semiconductor design, and producing aviation and space equipment, drones, and weapons. There was a rapid growth of GDP – as well as a growing class polarisation.
In short, by about the year 2000, a half-century after its founding, Israel could no longer be described as a colonial-settler state. Today it is a modern capitalist state, ruling over a large and potentially powerful working class, which is both Jewish and Palestinian in ethnicity. This is the class which will put an end to the genocidal plans of both Hamas and the Israeli capitalist class. This is the class which true fighters for Palestinian and Jewish rights and freedoms must keep their eyes on.
Despite the myriad forms of legal and informal discrimination against Palestinians embedded in the Israeli state and the occupied West Bank, severe ‘birth defects’ which must still be fought and overcome, it is nonetheless clear that the germ of working class organisation across the ethnic divide already exists, primarily in the trade union organisations which bring workers of all nationalities together, but also in the episodic organisations of mutual self-defence which spring up to oppose ethnic violence in the mixed neighbourhoods and towns. Typically these efforts at Jewish-Palestinian solidarity disintegrate under political pressure and state repression when open hostilities in Gaza break out. The fact that today, in rare instances, Jews and Arabs are managing to organise politically across the ethnic divide even in the midst of wargives us a glimpse of the potential power of this class to re-write the course of history, given the chance.
I have written elsewhere about the way the often-used ‘apartheid’ analogy confuses and obscures the Israeli situation, and I don’t intend to repeat that here; suffice it to say that one of the biggest problems with this analogy is the way it obscures the existence and seminal importance of this multinational working class.
This is the context in which to evaluate the debates over the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!”
Slogans can change their meaning, and even come to mean the opposite of what they first meant – as Orwell satirised with “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” The ‘From the River’ slogan goes back to the late 1960s, when it was coined by the revolutionary-nationalist Palestine Liberation Organisation under Yasser Arafat, as a poetic expression of its demand for a democratic and secular Palestine, with equal rights for Jews and Arabs. But the revolutionary PLO is long gone; only a corrupt and thoroughly degenerated vestige of the organisation remains. Its place has been taken by its counter-revolutionary negation, Hamas – which has adopted the slogan as its own, and filled it with the exact opposite content to its original meaning. When Hamas shouts the slogan, they mean “Palestine will be free of Jews”. They made that unmistakably clear on 7 October.
When I point this out to people who are still using the slogan, they invariably insist that it is not a Hamas slogan, and that they are using the slogan in its original meaning. But a slogan is meant to convey your demands succinctly and clearly to anyone observing the demonstration, and to win new supporters to the cause. If you are shouting a slogan in unison with people who have goals directly opposed to your own, then what exactly is the cause you are winning people to? Put yourself in the shoes of a Jewish worker observing the demonstration, trying to distinguish between those who see Jewish workers as part of the future Palestine, and those who want to murder them!
In the end, using this slogan becomes yet another way in which Leftists fall under the spell of Hamas. The rulers in Europe and the UK are taking full advantage of the double meaning of the slogan to push anti-democratic bans on demonstrations and speakers who repeat it.
Proponents of the South African Apartheid analogy rarely mention the one aspect of the analogy that could really throw some light on the Palestinian situation: the powerful, wide, and deep mass movement of the South African working class and its allies that brought that hateful Apartheid system crashing down. It took decades for this movement to develop – decades of the most brutal privations and repressions, of evictions, firings, cop beatings and shootings, decades of long jail sentences and exiles, and of assassinations of courageous and far-sighted leaders, decades of learning how to cope with police spies and provocateurs, and political splits. At the centre of this movement was a political programme, called the Freedom Charter, and a leadership committed to fight for it. The Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955 and held high throughout those most difficult decades4. It makes your spine tingle to read it today, 68 years on, with Palestine in mind. And in the very first line of the Freedom Charter was the declaration that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”.
I have a dream: that this manifesto will somehow make its way into the hands of the working class of Israel and Palestine, and it will light their way, and guide all their supporters around the world. Just imagine what a huge impetus towards freedom from genocide it would be if, instead of shouting “From the River to the Sea” in unison with the Hamas murderers, the Palestinian solidarity organisations would make a simple declaration similar to the opening line of the Freedom Charter: that the land of Palestine belongs to all who live there, Palestinian and Jew. That “our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality; that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities; that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief…” And the rest of the Charter.
It would cleanse the Palestinian movement of Hamas and all its Jew-hating sympathisers worldwide. It would open the door to large contingents of Israeli Jewish workers, most of whom already detest Netanyahu and know very well that the old Israeli practice of overwhelming military retaliation is not providing them any kind of safe haven. It would give voice to the Palestinians who hate Hamas for their brutality and their crimes, and give them hope that their seemingly endless martyrdom need not last forever. Above all, it would open political space for the working class organisations in the whole region to enter the struggle and lead the movement, as they did in South Africa. It would pierce and deflate the war frenzy the way no pacifist call for ceasefire can.
I don’t expect this to happen any time soon. The dreadful logic of the Hamas death cult has yet to fully play itself out. It is, nonetheless, a far more practical and realistic road to ending the genocidal wars than forming alliances with either the Israeli regime or the Hamas rightists.
Footnotes
- I have seen despicable efforts to couple the demand for the release of the hostages taken by Hamas to the release of prisoners in Israeli jails. This is not a call for the release of the hostages: it is a call to use the hostages as bargaining chips – which is of course why Hamas took them in the first place. Supporting such a coupling lowers your moral standing to that of Hamas.
- The ‘blood libel’ was a rumour circulated in Europe, from medieval times up to the nineteenth century, that Jews were kidnapping and murdering Christians, especially children, to use their blood. The accusations led to Jews being arrested, tortured, and killed. Often it led to mass pogroms which drove all the Jews out of a town or region. (The word pogrom is borrowed from the Russian language; such anti-Semitic riots were common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Russian empire.) According to Wikipedia, “Blood libels often claim that Jews require human blood for the baking of matzos, an unleavened flatbread which is eaten during Passover. Earlier versions of the blood libel accused Jews of ritually re-enacting the crucifixion. The accusations often assert that the blood of children is especially coveted, and historically, blood libel claims have been made in order to account for the otherwise unexplained deaths of children.”
- Kristallnacht was a pogrom against Jews in Germany in 1938, organised by the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces. Armed with axes sledgehammers, gasoline and pistols, Nazi thugs murdered at least 91 Jews across Germany and occupied Austria and Sudetenland — today part of the Czech Republic — raped hundreds of women; destroyed at least 267 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses; vandalized cemeteries and schools; and destroyed an untold number of homes. Some 30,000 Jews were seized and sent to concentration camps, where more than 1,000 perished.
- The Freedom Charter was itself the product of an extraordinary process of mass consultation, in which tens of thousands of volunteers fanned out to every city, township and farm, to listen to and discuss the demands of the people, which were then distilled into the Charter. Adoption of the Charter required a political split with forces who objected to the ‘non-racial’ character of it – there were elements of the South African movement too who insisted that “One settler, one bullet” was the way forward. These debates are not entirely new.
Source: convincingreasons.wordpress.com
