Gaza is without power, food and water. Bombs rain down, killing indiscriminately. This is more than revenge for Hamas atrocities committed during their incursion. This is Israeli state terror. It is barbaric and genocidal.
Yet this war crime in a series of war crimes against the long-suffering Palestinian people in Gaza – dubbed the world’s largest open-air prison – is, needless to say, ignored by the US and UK governments and by the EU.
Anyone with a cursory knowledge of international law knows what’s going on, however. As Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, said:
“It cheapens the concept of antisemitism – a real global curse – for defenders of the Israeli government to pretend that it is somehow antisemitic to hold Israel to the same standards of international humanitarian law as we use to assess Hamas’s conduct. A war crime is a war crime.”
The cold-blooded killing by Hamas fighters of hundreds of young people attending a music festival and the slaughter of men, women and children near the border was a demonstration of crude and cruel antisemitism. Of that there can be no doubt.
The fact that their actions were cheered on by the reactionary Iranian regime, whose so-called morality police beat women to death, and ignored by the authoritarian Vladimir Putin in his statement, tells you all you need to know.
What was the intention behind the attacks? To defeat Israel militarily? Obviously not. To scupper a diplomatic rapprochement planned between Saudi Arabia and Israel? Possibly. Or perhaps to inspire a new Intifada on the occupied West Bank and to end the 16-year blockade of Gaza by the Israeli state.
No one should dispute the right to attack a regime that keeps 2 million Palestinians trapped in a tiny strip of land. However, the killing of ordinary, unarmed Jews because they happen to live in Israel is antisemitism at its worst and plays into the hands of their enemy.
The targeting of civilians comes at an opportune time for the crisis-ridden, ultra-right Zionist regime led by the corrupt Benjamin Netanyahu. The country’s supreme court is due to rule whether Netanyahu’s law curbing the power of judges was constitutional.
Opposition to the law provoked massive demonstrations against authoritarian rule, with air force reservists, for example, refusing to serve unless the government backed down.
Now Netanyahu has been able to form a “national unity” government to pursue his war against an entity with no means of defending itself from air raids and shelling. So the Israeli military is killing with impunity while the major powers look on.
Complicit in this denial of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination are neighbouring Arab states and especially the dictatorship in Egypt, whose government essentially reinforces Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
What is crystal clear is that the so-called “two-state solution” is no solution. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 for signing the Oslo Accords with the PLO chairman Yasser Arafat signalled that. After that, West Bank settlements increased, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in occupied territory, protected by the police and army.
In 2022, the West Bank had about 199 settlements and 220 outposts, and as of 2021, the area of the Israeli settlements was about 201.1 square kilometres, representing 3.6 percent of the total area of the West Bank.
As a result, Some argue that there already exists a one-state reality, except that it is based on Jewish supremacy as conceived by right-wing Zionism as a mean of keeping its grip on political power. Within this “reality”, Palestinians in and outside Israel are reduced to second-class citizenship in a sort of apartheid.
For the present state to become democratic, secular and inclusive for both Jews and Palestinians will require brave, bold and fresh, forward-thinking leadership in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. For sure, there is no future along the present path except pain and suffering on all sides.
Today (Oct 12) armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank killed 2 Palestinians, who were attending the funeral of 4 of their colleagues murdered by settlers the day before. There have been over 800 such violent incidents so far this year in the West Bank. The extreme right-wing Israeli leaders encourage these settler bands, who are protected by the Israeli army, to disrupt the Palestinian neighbourhoods, to set fire to their homes, kill them or drive them out in order to seize the land set up new modern towns. None of this is legal of course. It is one of the policies for the illegal expansion of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians whose land it used to be–and still is in law. The West Bank is now an archipelago of disconnected Palestinian islands, all cut off from each other, with travel between them made impossible by the Israeli army. Meanwhile in Gaza, the bombs and shells keep falling, destroying homes, small factories, mosques and people, day and night. Nearly 1500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have died so far, about 500 of them children. Israel has cut off the supply of food, water, medecines and electricity. It has blocked all escape routes from the tiny enclave, and is assembling a monstrous armada of tanks, big guns, bulldozers and armoured personnel carriers for an invasion. Under international humanitarian law there is a right to resist for those under occupation. The collective punishment of civilians is outlawed, as is their deliberate starvation. But neither the law nor countless UN resolutions have ever bothered successive Israeli governments, protected as they are by the US. Neither they or the US have recognised the International Criminal Court. And yes the massscre of Israeli civilians was a war crime, but the Israeli government is poised to carry out a far bigger one, and to use the Hamas war crime as cover. “No one will preach morals to us”, says the Israeli Health Authority minister–surely the words of a human fossil from the medieval era. Israel is an expansionist state founded on the dispossession of another people. It is also the paid watchdog of Western imperialism, and only a revolution of the Arab masses can give any hope of lasting peace.
An excellent analysis of the situation now and its background, as well as what these attacks on both sides lead to: “For sure, there is no future along the present path except pain and suffering on all sides.”
A very good and correct statement. As you say, the shocking thing is that Hamas’ actions have bolstered both the Israeli and Iranian regimes at a time when both were facing massive internal opposition from democratic forces. And of course, lurking in the background, the villain Putin, falsely claiming that Ukraine has been arming Hamas. Their bot army has swung into action – the only Russian army that actually functions.