Yes, This Is Not a War Against Hamas, But …

Jeremy Scahill:

“From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his ‘great, great friend’ Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction.

Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.

Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of proportionality or legality. Israel’s own crimes dwarf those of Hamas and the other groups that participated in the October 7 operations. Yet Biden and other U.S. officials continue to defend the indefensible by rolling out their well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to ‘self-defense’.

If we apply that rationale — promoted by both the U.S. and Israel — to the 75 years of history before October 7, how many times throughout that period would the Palestinians have been ‘justified’ in massacring thousands of Israeli children, systematically attacking its hospitals and schools? How many times would they have been acting in ‘self-defense’ as they razed whole neighborhoods to rubble, transforming the apartment buildings Israeli civilians once called home into concrete tombs? This justification only works for Israel because the Palestinians can enact no such destruction upon Israel and its people. It has no army, no navy, no air force, no powerful nation states to provide it with the most modern and lethal military hardware. It does not have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Israel can burn Gaza and its people to the ground because the U.S. facilitates it, politically and militarily.

Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7.

You cannot discuss the crimes of Hamas or Islamic jihad or any other armed resistance factions without first addressing the question of why these groups exist and have support.

Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized nonviolent demonstrations, they have been attacked and killed… Children who throw rocks at tanks or soldiers are labeled terrorists and subjected to abuse and violations of basic rights — that is, if they are not summarily shot dead

But in the broader sense, a sincere examination of why a group such as Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians or why people in Gaza turn to armed struggle must focus on how the oppressed, when stripped of all forms of legitimate resistance, respond to the oppressor. It should be focused on the rights of people living under occupation to assert and defend their self-determination. It should allow Palestinians to have their struggle placed in the context of other historical battles for liberation and independence and not relegated to racist polemics about how all Palestinian acts of resistance constitute terrorism and there are not really any innocents in Gaza.

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So far so good, Jeremy. Here is where short-sightedness interferes with going further into the analysis:

“The notion that the Palestinians of Gaza could end all of their suffering by overthrowing Hamas is just as ahistorical and false as the oft-repeated claims that the war against Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered and released all Israeli hostages. ‘Look, this could be over tomorrow’, Blinken said December. ‘If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered’. That, of course, is a crass lie. With or without Hamas, Israel’s war against the Palestinians would endure precisely because of Blinken and his ilk in elite bipartisan U.S. foreign policy circles.”

With or without Blinken, Biden and his ilk, U.S. would support Israel, as it did before. Here is where the analysis should go further by addressing the origin of the Israeli state, Britain’s role and then the U.S.’s role in protecting and supporting such a state, the role of the Israeli state in the Middle East, the class structure in the U.S. and the lobbies, the arms industry, American capital, etc. Today, the context is of a geopolitical struggle with states such as Russia and China and the ‘normalisation’ process disrupted by Hamas’s operation. A disruption of reestablishing favourable ‘stability’ whose end is the continuation of plunder and capital accumulation.

Major Western states such France, Britain, Germany and the U.S. have a history of colonialism and genocide. Today, they have a new ‘mission civilatrice’ cloaked in ‘the free world’, ‘liberal democracy’, ‘fighting terrorism’, ‘human rights’, ‘the fight between democracy and authoritarianism’, ‘our values’, ‘aid’ …

Jeremy is wrong in individualising the issue of power relations and ignoring class relations, domination and oppression across countries and states. These features have been part and parcel of the major Western regimes whether France under ‘the Socialists’, the U.S. under the Democrats or Britain under Labour.

Furthermore, the notion that the U.S.-led war against Russia via Ukraine, the war and invasion of Iraq, ‘the war on terror’, the class wars at home, dispossessions, exploitation and economic oppression and domination, the war on refugees, the destruction of the eco-system … are separate from the war on the Palestinians is myopic..

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".

"If you don't attack the economic power of the elite, soon or later it will attack you." That's what the Arab uprisings, for instance, were unable/failed to do. K for Karl – Revolution (episode 3)

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

"In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged to work. . . . Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the production of a...

Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

US

Written in June: The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again. Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-c...

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