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In the wake of the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel and the fascist atrocities now being carried out by Israel in Gaza, peace activists must retain their morals, a clear head and stay strong. This does not licence the attack by Hamas nor Israel’s genocidal response – but ending the bloodshed requires multiple perspectives and will permit no naiveite about the dynamics of elite power.
Why did Hamas attack?
Simple revenge cannot be easily dismissed. The atrocities of the Israeli invasion, occupation and apartheid provide ample explanation (not justification) for revenge. That said, hatred can have a more sophisticated plan than initially meets the eye and many have speculated that Hamas has planned this well and is leading the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) into a trap.
What will happen next? Will the IDF invade Gaza?
Hurling missiles and rockets into a defenceless city is pretty easy work for an Israeli army that is wholly protected by the sophisticated U.S air defence system (Iron Dome) and as Israeli journalist Gideon Levy noted, arresting defenceless Palestinians mob handed in the middle of the night is not really soldiering nor useful training for actual combat, when people shoot back.
The war in Ukraine has shown how extraordinarily difficult it is to fight block by block in an urban environment. The Russians needed 11 months of ceaseless bombardment and savagely bloody close quarters fighting to take the small city of Bakhmut that had a pre-war population of just 71,000. The IDF is now preparing to invade a densely built up area of 2.2 million.
As the Russians discovered to their bitter cost – supply tunnels can be dug and units maintained almost indefinitely. It is surely fanciful to imagine that Israel can just roll into Gaza and take over – at the very least, the requisite aerial bombardment will be savage, time consuming and costly in PR terms.
Once troops actually enter Gaza, the opportunities for Hamas snipers and booby traps will be almost endless. Is Israel truly prepared for a steady stream of body bags coming back from Gaza? Israeli deaths have been historically low and Palestinian deaths enormous – if that dynamic evens out, it is unclear how Israeli society will respond.
Just how much of a combat army is the IDF and can the U.S. even supply enough ammunition? The Ukraine war has depleted U.S stocks of ammunition and their capacity to resupply the IDF is unclear right now.
What about Gazan refugees?
Millions are on the move in Gaza but have nowhere to go. While right wing elements in Israel would dearly love to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by way of a ‘humanitarian corridor’ to Egypt – Egypt has many reasons to keep its border tightly shut. More straightforwardly fascist actors in Israel would delight in a massacre of all the Gazans remaining in the strip and thus far the west seems content to basically cheerlead as long as it can be managed in PR terms.
What about global public opinion?
The PR implications of a Palestinian holocaust inflicted by Israel are multiply vexed. Mass global demonstrations for the Palestinian cause will give the western political and media class pause. It is one thing for Russia (a nominated enemy) to relentlessly shell a small deserted city like Bakhmut for months on end, quite another for Israel (a nominated friend) to unload ungodly amounts of ordinance on to Gaza while it remains densely populated.
Israel has cut internet access to Gaza and little real journalism will be possible or permitted. Still it seems implausible that Israel can hide a massacre on this scale.
Western platitudes about Israel’s ‘right to exist and defend itself’ and attempts to licence an Israeli genocide by blaming all violence on Hamas can surely only stretch so far.
The damage to the west’s much cherished capacity for narrative management has already been strained by Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and a looming defeat in Ukraine. This may mean that hiding an Israeli genocide of Gazans is either deemed too risky or impossible. You can only fool people so many times and trust in western narratives is already at an all-time low .
As an analyst it is unclear to me what Israel will do next, but it is clear that western PR concerns will weigh heavily on the outcome.
Why are ongoing protests so important?
As a peace activist I note how absolutely vital it is that protests in support of the Palestinian plight continue. The alt-right’s response to seeing a Palestinian flag waved in support of a defenceless and trapped civilian population has been callous and straightforwardly fascist. The powerful Israeli lobby in collusion with outlets like The Guardian and the BBC is frantically trying to stifle debate. The British and France governments have tried outlaw and intimidate protestors.
If protest is defeated then the battle to spare rivers of Palestinian and Israeli blood will be lost, and that butchery will have echoes for the human soul for generations. A global fascism almost triumphed once before and I see fascism taking hold of politics and culture once again.
If we don’t continue to confront hatred and fascism then it will triumph – and what a savagely ironic tragedy it would be if the cradle of that triumph…was Israel.
So many in Israel have come from USA and other nations and in my opinion, none of them should be living there. Israel people are like a festering sore in the midst of Arab Moslem countries. Israel was set up in about 1917 by UK which was governor of several Middle Eastern and North African countries, at that time. Wealthy Jews in Kent and London, were big donors for the setting up of Israel. The Palestinians were forced to move to the tiny coastal strip, called Gaza. One needs to read the history of the British in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the Arabian peninsula. They were really there seeking a good supply of oil, which was found in Afghanistan as well as in Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, as well as Iran. The search for more and more fields of oil has been the driver of British in this foreign region.