There may seem an obvious contradiction between Trump’s calls for Israel to be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza, and his statements that he wants Israel “end the war quickly,” both of which he has made over the last year or so. The easiest way to explain it is simply that he is a liar, simply says what his audience wants to hear, and is smart enough to word these statements vaguely enough so that they are open to interpretation. In that sense, the circle is easy to square: Trump wants to allow Israel to go even harder, as hard as humanly possible, in order to “finish the job” (ie genocide), and that way, he can “end the war quickly.” “Peace through strength” and all that.
However, there is another way of looking at this. Israel has already won the war in Gaza, we must regretfully admit, notwithstanding many illusions to the contrary. A recent UN report showed that Gaza had been set back 7 decades, while another claimed that it would take 350 years to rebuild to what was there before. It would take at least 14 years just to clear the 42 million tonnes of rubble. Everything necessary for human existence has been destroyed. Probably several hundred thousand over time, “by hook or by crook,” have crossed over into Egypt, and from there “to some other corner of the world,” according to Professor Norman Finkelstein, and can never return; the numbers of dead are estimated to be many times the official 43,000 count. Sure, Netanyahu has not been able to drive all 2.3 million Palestinians into Egypt as initially hoped because the Egyptian al-Sisi dictatorship hates Palestinians as much as Israel does, and so shows … “resistance” to the new Nakbah. And sure, the second plan, the currently under-implementation ‘Generals’ Plan’, to push everyone remaining in northern Gaza into the absurdly crowded south, across the Netzarim Corridor which cuts across the middle of Gaza that will remain occupied by Israeli troops, and hence annex the norther half, is not complete, but has been in operation for the last 6 weeks and there are only estimated to be 75-95,000 Palestinians remaining in the north, and they are under immediate threat of mass starvation; Israel now admits it will not allow anyone to return.
Just to clarify, we often hear that Israel has not achieved any of its “stated aims,” namely to “destroy Hamas” and get the hostages home, “all it has achieved is genocide.” Genocide, however, has been precisely Israel’s aim all along; the “stated aims” are just smokescreens. It never had anything to do with the absurd idea of “destroying Hamas”, because everyone, especially Israeli leaders, knows that a resistance movement cannot be “destroyed” as long as people are under brutal occupation; one might claim therefore that Israel is removing the people themselves in order to destroy the resistance movement based among them, but even that is putting things in reverse: the aim is to remove the people, and having a “stated aim” that is absurd and unachievable allows Israel to just keep on carrying out the actual aim. Though of course a resistance movement like Hamas can be drastically weakened, and this has been achieved, alongside its leadership being wiped out. As for the hostages, if returning them alive was the goal, Israel would have agreed to a ceasefire and hostage exchange long ago; no rational person thinks this can be achieved via genocidal bombing, which has already killed plenty of Israeli hostages.
Why then has Netanyahu resisted calls by a host of Israeli political leaders of the Zionist “centre” (who would not be “centre” anywhere else in the world, eg, hard war criminals like former prime minister Ehud Olmert), and, toothlessly, by Biden, to wind up the war – as Olmert assessed back in May that “we have seen a genuine, impressive and unprecedented victory” – and do a deal to get Israeli hostages back? Seems to me it has a lot to do with Netanyahu wanting to get Trump back into power. Keep the war and killing going, know that Biden/Harris will do nothing except issue statements of concern, Trump returns. Indeed, Trump even asked Netanyahu to not sign any ceasefire/hostage exchange deal before the US elections as it might ruin his election chances.
So, now that Trump has returned, well, kill a while longer, especially to complete the Generals Plan in northern Gaza, so by the time Trump assumes full office in late January, he will be able to say “OK Bibi, that’s enough for now,” and Bibi will (perhaps) be in a position to finally sign on to a ceasefire as he has “finished the job,” and Americans and the world see that Trump “ends the war”.
OK, but in that case, if Israel has indeed finished the job, why would it need to continue it just to help get Trump elected, because in that case, why would it even need Trump? Since Biden/Harris already quite happily let Israel “finish the job” as Trump requested of them, without even needing his requests?
Yes, absolutely, but Gaza is not the prize. For Israel, the prize is the West Bank, which is about 17 times the size of Gaza, despite having an almost similar number of people. Gaza needed to be destroyed, because it is a giant refugee camp from 1948 Israel; a living embodiment of the first Nakbah. In itself though, its value is limited, though of course Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has stated that once the population is removed from Gaza by driving them into Egypt or the desert, it will be prime real estate as its “waterfront property could be very valuable.” But the West Bank is the real deal.
Netanyahu therefore has good reason to believe that Trump and his far-right team (and on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there is no difference between the Trumpist/nativist far-right and the neoconservative far-right in the Republican Party) will allow Israel to outright annex the West Bank, or at least annex about half of it, where the Israeli “settlers” and their settler-only highways, cutting up the Palestinian population centres, are located. Indeed, as soon as Trump’s election victory was announced, Netanyahu appointed an extreme right-wing supporter of West Bank “settlement,” Yechiel Leiter, as new Israeli ambassador to the US. Leiter has called for Israeli ‘sovereignty’ over the West Bank, and is a former member of the extreme right-wing Jewish Defense League, founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, which was designated a terrorist organisation by the US and even by Israel in the 1990s; now Itamar Ben-Gvir, another Kahanist, is Netanyahu’s Minister of National Security.
Outright annexation of the West Bank, or the parts colonised by Israel, would leave the major Palestinian population centres as mere reservations, towns with no economy and no land, to rot, its people merely cheap labour at best for Israeli bosses. Of course, that is already the de facto situation, but if Netanyahu were to formally annex the region and Trump were to recognise it, then perhaps Trump and even Netanyahu may be happy to call these disconnected towns a “Palestinian state” and demand Palestinians accept this as the “deal of the century” if they really want “peace.”
Not that Biden, Harris and the Democrats would have done a thing to stop Netanyahu if his regime did go ahead an annex all or half the West Bank; but it is very unlikely that they would give it formal recognition. Throughout the past year, even while continuing to arm the genocide and allow Israel to cross every ‘red line’, Biden and his ministers have continually said that after Israel was done “defending itself,” there would need to be a settlement based on the “two-state solution,” that Palestinians also have some rights and so on. Of course, Biden’s “two-state solution” is not the international consensus two states, ie, based on a Palestinian state in all of the territory occupied by Israel in 1967 with Jerusalem as its capital; but nevertheless, any idea of “two states” with at least enough basis for the reactionary Arab states to sign on to is still based on the international legality of UN resolutions, rather than by formalising the violation of them as Netanyahu and Trump prefer. Even on Gaza, while allowing Israel to do everything, the Biden government has still said there can be no annexation or re-settlement of Gaza or part of it.
So, while it would do nothing if Israel formally annexed the West Bank, and would probably continue to arm Israel to the teeth anyway, a Harris-led government would however express a lot of “concern” about the move, declare that it does not help the “peace process,” tut-tut a lot about it, keep talking about the need for a half-baked “two state solution,” talk about “diplomacy” and “international law,” refuse to give it formal recognition. With Trump, Netanyahu doesn’t need to listen to such sermons; he gets full recognition of the annexation of the West Bank, and then everyone can blame the Palestinians for rejecting “the best ever offer.”
The global media unanimously and lazily claims that Hezbollah initiated “attacks on northern Israel” on October 8 (in response to Israel beginning its genocidal attack on Gaza), which Israel “responded” to. Yet strictly speaking, this is not correct.
On October 8, Hezbollah attacked Israeli military facilities in the Shebaa Farms, a piece of territory claimed by Lebanon under illegal Israeli occupation since 1967, not recognised as “Israel” by the UN or almost any country internationally (Israel’s claim, which the UN agrees with, that it is part of the illegally occupied Syrian Golan rather than of Lebanon hardly justifies Israel’s position!). Resistance to occupation is legal in international law. Indeed, alongside solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah also declared its operation was “On the path to liberate the remaining part of our occupied Lebanese land.” Hezbollah in other words did not attack Israel on October 8! Israel responded with attacks into Lebanon, thus Israel was the first to attack the other country’s sovereign territory, not Hezbollah.
The next day, October 9, Palestinian militants – not Hezbollah – based in southern Lebanon slipped across the Israeli border and killed an Israeli soldier, wounding several others; Hezbollah had no involvement. There are some half a million Palestinian refugees in southern Lebanon, who aim to return to their country; they will join a battle involving Palestine whether Hezbollah does or not (for example, as they did earlier, in April 2023, when Israel attacked the al-Aqsa mosque). Israel retaliated with a helicopter-gunship attack on Lebanon which killed three Hezbollah militants; Hezbollah then responded to these killings later that day with guided missiles aimed at Israeli command centres in northern Israel, the first actual attack by Hezbollah into Israeli territory, only after two Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Following this, Hezbollah “calibrated its attacks in a way that [has] kept the violence largely contained to a narrow strip of territory at the border,” and initially at least, Israel did likewise. In December 2023, Andrea Tenenti, from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), said both Israel and Hezbollah “unfailingly accepted messages passed through UNIFIL in procedures designed to deescalate potentially dangerous misunderstandings.”
But if it was Israel that in fact struck first – twice – then on what basis can the claim be made that Israel had to “defend itself” against Hezbollah, which just wouldn’t stop its attacks over the border, by blowing up the whole of Lebanon? Who was responding to whom?
OK, one might say, that was the beginning, but Hezbollah has insisted since that it would keep up some level of attacks over the border until Israel agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza.
However, Israel’s responses became far bloodier over time: not only vastly disproportionate in sheer number, but also far more targeted at civilians; until September, Israel had launched 8313 attacks on Lebanon, to Hezbollah’s 1901 attacks on Israel; Israeli attacks had killed 752 Lebanese, including hundreds of civilians, to only 33 Israeli deaths, overwhelmingly military – a ratio of 23 to one! Israeli attacks had already displaced 90,000 Lebanese before the current massacre began in late September. In July, the BBC reported that over 60 percent of Lebanese border communities had suffered “some kind of damage as a result of Israeli air and artillery strikes,” and 3,200 buildings had been damaged; Human Rights Watch verified that Israel has used white phosphorus in its attacks on some parts of southern Lebanon.
So if you consider this data, the notion that it was Hezbollah insisting on attack while Israel merely defended itself makes little sense in practice – if Israel has been attacking Lebanon at a rate of over 4 times that of Hezbollah attacks on Israel (and with 23 times the numbers of deaths, indicating that Hezbollah mostly fired to make a statement and avoid casualties), then when was the moment that Hezbollah could have paused or stopped firing anyway if there is simply so much more Israeli firing at them all the time? The bare numbers suggest it was Hezbollah responding, not Israel.
Despite occasional flare-ups – in early January, in June and in August – when Hezbollah briefly responded more forcefully following Israel’s killing of top Hezbollah commanders – this pattern of low level tit-for-tat, with Israel’s attacks far more murderous and escalatory, continued through till late September.
OK, again, but perhaps Hezbollah could have agreed to a ceasefire, to end the attacks and discuss UN Resolution 1701 and so on at the last moment, in order to avoid being decapitated, and to help prevent Lebanese civilians being massacred by Israel’s savagery since last September.
Again, however, it appears that Nasrallah did agree to a “complete ceasefire” just hours before he was killed. There is no dishonour in recognising limitations, in recognising that the blood paid by innocent Lebanese civilians and children is just too high, that you have attempted to do what you can (and the reality is that Israel has essentially completed its genocidal goals in Gaza, with nothing Hezbollah has done making any difference).
But if Nasrallah agreed to it, why did Israel still proceed to kill him? Even if it “just had to” kill him as a war trophy, why continue the horrific war against the Lebanese people after that? Why continue the mass killing after the new Hezbollah leader, Naim Qassem, also said on October 8 that the organisation was supportive of the Lebanese government’s moves to reach such a ceasefire? If that’s what Israel wanted, wouldn’t it have paused to see what came of such negotiations?
In other words, Hezbollah’s alleged “refusal” to end its side of the conflict was never the issue – neither at the outset, as outlined above, nor during the year, given the reality of who was attacking who in practice, nor at the end, when these concessions are ignored and Israel continues to bomb, kill and invade. There was simply never a chance.
Think what you want of Hezbollah politically – the above is all separate to the question of whether or not Hezbollah was doing the “right” thing, whatever that may mean in the context of Israel’s holocaust against the Palestinian population of Gaza. Many argue that, regardless of who shot first, keeping up some level of fire at Israel in solidarity with Gaza was an honourable thing to do; many others, especially many Lebanese who may hate Israel but not like Hezbollah, argue that Hezbollah did not have the right to put Lebanese civilians in danger of the horrific Israeli “retaliation” now taking place; still others may argue that Hezbollah’s attacks were too symbolic, and that it should have attacks on a level that could have actually helped Gaza; others that it could not do this, as neither the Lebanese people, nor Hezbollah’s Iranian paymaster, wanted such escalation; some may argue that Hezbollah had already burnt too many bridges with non-Shia communities in Lebanon to be able to act, and be accepted, as a vanguard for Lebanon (or that it had committed vastly more crimes in Syria to be accepted by the Arab world more generally); while some might say that was precisely why it had to do something, symbolic or otherwise, to rescue its credibility, and whether it had successfully done so or not would also be debated.
More generally, some things are probably undeniable: that Hezbollah greatly overestimated its own strength, underestimated Israel’s immense power, technological advantage and ability to “do Gaza” on another country while still in Gaza itself, and overestimated the likelihood of its Iranian sponsor doing anything at all to defend it in its hour of need.
All of this is a valid discussion, which needs to be had, but is outside the question here. Right now, Hezbollah cadres on the ground – and others allied to it that have never been its political allies – is resisting Israel’s new invasion of southern Lebanon in its own country, while Israeli state terror has killed over 1200 Lebanese civilians; over 2000 Lebanese have been killed by Israeli attacks over the last year, 60 percent of them in the last week of September and first week of October 2024, and this includes 127 children, and, for good measure, by the beginning of October, 96 Syrian refugees, while it attacked and killed 24 in the Christian town Aitou in northern Lebanon far from the border, and has even bombed a town council and killed the local mayor. Some 1.2 million Lebanese have been forced to flee their homes – given that Lebanon’s population is only about 4 million, with up to 2 million Palestinian and Syrian refugees, this is around a quarter of the population.
What is the end-game? It appears that, intoxicated after having been able to essentially destroy Hezbollah’s communication networks, much of its launching capacity, and most of its command structure and leadership, all within about a week, Israel’s sights may be set on re-occupying, perhaps effectively annexing, Lebanon south of the Litani, until just recently only an idea entertained on the far-right fringes.
The Australian government, like a number of other western governments, lists Hezbollah as a “proscribed terrorist organisation.” This led to a great deal of hysteria among Australian politicians of both major right-wing parties and among talking heads throughout the monochrome Australian media after Hezbollah flags and photos of its dead leader, Hassan Nasrallah, were displayed by some of the crowd at last Sunday’s weekly rally against Israel’s Gaza genocide. The display of such symbols, aside from being illegal, allegedly causes great “distress” among Jewish-Australians, who do not feel “safe”, and all “antisemitism” must be rejected and so on and so forth.
Just as an aside on that rally: it is worth noting that from the beginning last October, organisers of the weekly rallies asked marchers not to bring symbols associated with proscribed “terrorist” organisations, for legal reasons, to prevent the rallies being closed down, while not making judgements on the politics of these organisations. However, it was to be expected that with emotions high just after Israel had killed about 1200 Lebanese people in around a week, sent over a million fleeing, and also killed Nasrallah, that some members of the Lebanese community who supported Hezbollah might bring Hezbollah symbols, and it would have been difficult for rally organisers to prevent this in the circumstances. However, it was not their choosing, and many at the rally, who were happy to rally for the Lebanese people as well as the Palestinians, were not so happy with the focus of part of the rally being turned to Nasrallah. But let’s get back to the point.
I hold no brief for Hezbollah, at all, as I will explain below, and much less for its reactionary Iranian paymaster. However, at this moment it is the Israeli state, backed by the Australian government and other western governments, that has carried out a virtual holocaust in Gaza over the last year, is actively stealing land and killing with impunity in the Palestinian West Bank while the world looks away, and has just carried out a devastatingly murderous attack on the neighbouring sovereign state of Lebanon, bombing entire city blocks in the capital Beirut with 2000 pound bombs in the process of killing a handful of Hezbollah leaders. If “terrorism” means killing civilians as part of a political action, then the Israeli regime is one of today’s arch-terrorists. However, let’s put that aside for the moment and classify that as “state terrorism,” and focus instead on the “terrorism” of non-state actors.
In that case, Hezbollah is not a “terrorist” organisation in any conventional sense. It is unclear why its flag should create “distress” among Jewish Australians. When has Hezbollah ever planted bombs in cafes or on buses, when has it shot up civilians in shopping malls, when has it specifically targeted Jews as Jews? This is quite simply not how Hezbollah has ever operated. The “terrorist” label therefore is simply driven by the political views of the US and Israeli states; it is worth looking at where it comes from.
The source of the bogus “terrorist” label: legitimate national resistance
The first source of the “terrorist” labeling was the US itself rather than Israel. Following the end of Israel’s horrific 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when it killed 20-30,000 Lebanese and Palestinians in an unprovoked 3-month Blitzkrieg, the entire time with the full support of the US government of Ronald Reagan, an agreement was signed for a Multi-National Force (MNF) consisting of US, French and Italian troops to move in and supervise the forced withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the goal of Israel’s war.
Given the total US support for Israel, much of Lebanon’s Muslim population viewed the “peace-keeping force” as occupiers. As soon as the PLO withdrew, Israel facilitated the slaughter of 2-3000 defenceless Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by the right-wing Lebanese Christian Phalange/Lebanese Forces militia. In such conditions, the election, in an unfair sectarian system, of Phalangist leaders Bashir, then Amin, Gemayel to the presidency was rejected by Sunni, Shiite and Druze communities. Yet as civil war soon re-erupted around Beirut, the supposedly neutral US forces bombed Muslim and Druze forces in the nearby Shouf mountains. It was in these conditions that Iranian-inspired Shiite suicide bombers bombed the barracks of the MNF in October 1983, killing 241 U.S. and 58 French military personnel.
This killing of so many US troops is the origin of the particular US hatred of Hezbollah and its “terrorist” labelling. However, even if we exclude all the context above, there are two problems. First, regardless of one’s view of such an action as a method of struggle, “terrorism” refers to the targeting of civilians, not of military personnel, however one views their mission. Secondly, Hezbollah was not officially formed until 1985, and it is little more than conjecture that the shadowy pro-Iranian ‘Islamic Jihad’ (not to be confused with today’s Palestinian Islamic Jihad) group which claimed responsibility was a precursor of Hezbollah. Even according to Reagan’s Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, speaking in 2001, “we still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn’t then.”
The second source of the “terrorist” labeling is even more dishonest, stemming merely from Hezbollah’s leadership of the Lebanese national resistance against the Israeli military occupation of southern Lebanon, an entirely legitimate struggle. Following its 1982, Israel remained in occupation of southern Lebanon all the way up to Beirut, and so a national resistance movement began fighting to drive them out. By 1985, they had been driven from Beirut and much of the south, but remained in a significant swathe of territory closer to the Israeli border. While the resistance included a range of political forces, including leftists, nationalists and Islamists, from both Sunni and Shiite communities, ultimately the south is largely Shiite populated, and the Iran-backed Shiite Hezbollah became the dominant force. There were no Israel civilians in southern Lebanon; and Hezbollah never bombed Israeli civilians across the border. Israel merely regards legitimate resistance against its brutal military occupation to be “terrorism” in Lebanon just as it does in occupied Palestine.
Israel was driven from Lebanon by the resistance in 2000. However, it remained in a 25-square kilometre piece of land called the Shebaa Farms, which Lebanon claims but Israel says is part of the illegally-occupied Syrian Golan (as if that justifies the Israeli position!), and this is part of its justification for remaining a “resistance” militia separate to the Lebanese Armed Forces after 2000. When Hezbollah kidnapped some Israeli troops on the border in 2006 aimed at freeing several Lebanese prisoners in Israeli prisons and liberating this final piece of land, Israel unleashed massive bombing against Lebanon, killing 1500 people and devastating the country again. Nasrallah admitted its actions had been an error, and Hezbollah’s position looked very weak politically; then Israeli arrogance trumped common sense when it attempted a ground invasion, allowing Hezbollah to route the invaders as an on-the-ground resistance again, not only saving but boosting Hezbollah’s resistance credentials.
More generally, since the 1990s, Hezbollah has engaged in parliamentary elections and been part of coalition governments with parties representing other sectarian interests. That’s why even some countries that call the military wing of Hezbollah “terrorist” do not classify the political organisation as such. Far from challenging the sectarian system, Hezbollah has largely bought into it, and despite rhetoric about “the dispossessed,” has emerged as a key party of the Shiite bourgeoisie. Soon after its 2006 triumph, Hezbollah showed itself to be little different to any of the other sectarian militias in Lebanon, when it invaded mainly Sunni-populated West Beirut in 2008 and seized control from the Sunni Future Movement. And in 2019, when Lebanese from all backgrounds rose up against the sectarian system as a whole, targeting all historic sectarian leaders and warlords, Hezbollah came to the defence of the system by helping violently crush the movement.
Hezbollah becomes a state-terrorist partner of the Assad regime
Despite its close relationship to the Iranian dictatorship, Hezbollah had its own origins as a legitimate national resistance movement in a Lebanese context and cannot be viewed as a mere proxy. However, ultimately, Iran is its paymaster, and this side of the organisation came upfront following the outbreak of the April Spring uprisings in 2011. Its opposite views on Libya and Syria is instructive.
When the Libyan revolution began, both Iran and Hezbollah hailed the revolt against Gaddafi’s oppressive rule; despite the image of Iran and Libya being both anti-Israel “rejectionist” states (in both cases reflecting safe geographic distance from Israel, allowing lots of loud rhetoric from afar), there is a dispute going back decades, when Musa al-Sadr, the leader of the Lebanese Shiite movement Amal, disappeared while on a trip to Libya. Lebanon in 2011 was on the UN Security Council, and its vote in support of the UN resolution to dispatch a NATO operation against Gaddafi was decisive, a vote that Hezbollah had to give its support to. Following the 6-month NATO intervention, the rebellion triumphed, and when Gaddafi was killed, celebrations were organised in Iran and in Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese communities.
In contrast, when the people’s uprising began against the tyrannical Assad dictatorship in Syria, Iran sent forces in to support the regime, both its own ‘Revolutionary’ Guard forces, and Iranian-backed Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani Shiite sectarian militia. This was necessitated by the defection of a large part of the Syrian army to the uprising, forming the Free Syrian Army (FSA). While the Assad regime’s own sectarian ‘Shabia’ death squads were the most notoriously bloody militia taking part in Assad’s sensationally brutal and bloody repression of the Syrian people, the Iranian-backed militia were not far behind.
There seems some evidence that Hezbollah was initially hesitant about Iran’s demand that it enter Syria. During the 2006 war, Syrians took in thousands of Hezbollah supporters and Lebanese Shiite refugees, seeing them as heroes. One of the places this occurred was in the town of Qaysar near the border, which was now in rebel hands. When Hezbollah decided to enter the war as an Iranian proxy, the first place it helped the regime smash the rebellion was in Qaysar.
The irony of supporting the uprising against Gaddafi, despite it being backed by a direct US and NATO armed intervention, while taking part in crushing the anti-Assad uprising, where there was never any US intervention against Assad (indeed the US actively blocked the rebels from receiving essential anti-aircraft weaponry from neighbouring states), is surely too great, when Hezbollah and Iran and their western “anti-imperialist” flunkeys justify their support for Assad’s perennially anti-Palestinian regime on the basis of … “anti-imperialism.”
If Hezbollah had merely taken a back-seat role out of necessity due to its Iranian paymaster, it would have been bad enough, but perhaps understandable. However, once in, it went in with a vengeance. Particularly in southwestern Syria, Hezbollah played a prominent role in the Assad regime’s starvation sieges of various rebel-held towns, especially in Madaya and Zabadani, as well in Aleppo in the north. According to al-Jazeera, “Zabadani and Madaya, both located near the capital Damascus, are besieged by the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and allied fighters from Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group.” They even took part in the regime’s siege of the Palestinian Yarmouk camp south of Damascus. The largely Sunni and anti-Assad populations of these towns were eventually forced out and dispatched to a region of northern Syria still under rebel control.
According to an Amnesty report: “The Syrian government and allied militias destroyed local food supplies by burning agricultural fields in Daraya and Madaya. Amnesty International’s analysis of satellite imagery shows the massive decrease in agriculture over the years and an obvious dead zone around Daraya. ‘The government and Hezbollah forces burned the agricultural fields, just as a form of punishment, even though we couldn’t access them’, a former teacher in Madaya told Amnesty International.”
Therefore, while Hezbollah is no “terrorist” organisation in the manner meant by hypocritical western governments, it certainly was responsible for large-scale killing and starving of civilians in Syria (along with its Iranian paymaster). However, it did so in the service of the Syrian state machine; in other words, like Israel, and the Assad regime itself, Hezbollah engaged in state terrorism. But that is not what the West and Israel care about. Indeed, when Biden congratulated Netanyahu for killing Nasrallah, he claimed it was justice for Hezbollah’s “many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians,” whatever that may even mean (mostly US and Israeli occupation troops). He managed to not mention any victims from Syria, the country with the vast majority of its civilian victims!
The Assad regime is the most similar to Israel in the region in the degree of mass murder and devastation it uses against its population, with some 700,000 killed in the conflict, including at least 300,000 civilians, overwhelmingly victims of the regime, most cities destroyed by regime and Russian bombing, and an industrial-scale torture gulag. Hezbollah and Iran are so widely hated for their role in backing the regime that, despite Syrians in rebel-held zones demonstrating against Israel in support of Gaza for the entire year since October, there were expressions of joy when their former killers were killed. They did not thank Israel, but they viewed it as a conflict between two of their enemies, two occupiers of Syria, wishing ‘good luck’ to both. For Syrians, Hezbollah and Iran acted as the IDF in their towns.
One does not have to share this perspective to understand it. For Lebanese living under Israel’s terror bombing and massive devastation now, their reality is that, whether or not they love Hezbollah, at this moment most Lebanese are united against the Zionist killing machine. Moreover, for southern Shia, Hezbollah is the organisation that led the 18-year struggle for freedom from brutal Israeli occupation. From afar, we need to be able to understand both perspectives.
So, where is the “terrorism”? On the border?
Returning to now, the point is that “terrorism” is a meaningless label in the case of Hezbollah to justify massive Israeli state terrorism and the support to it given by our government. When asked if Lebanon had the same right to “defend itself” as he claimed Israel does, prime minister Anthony Albanese immediately responded “of course we regard Hezbollah to be a terrorist organisation.” This sleight of hand allows him and other leaders to simply avoid the issue of Israel’s massacres and its blatant violation of Lebanese sovereignty. “Terrorism” justifies all. It has extraordinarily sweeping use. “What else can Israel do?” when confronted by a “terrorist organisation” on its border?
Yet the border itself belies this labeling. In sharp contrast to its massacre of civilians in Syria when engaged in the regime’s state terror, Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks since October 8 have been meticulously aimed at Israeli military facilities. No-one can seriously deny that, and the data speaks for itself. In contrast, Israel’s attacks over Lebanon’s border (ie, before the flare-up in the last 2 weeks) have not only been vastly disproportionate in terms of sheer number, but also far more targeted at civilians; until September, Israel had launched 8313 attacks on Lebanon, to Hezbollah’s 1901 attacks on Israel; Israeli attacks had killed 752 Lebanese, including hundreds of civilians, to only 33 Israeli deaths, overwhelmingly military.
Think what you want of Hezbollah politically – but right now it is resisting Israel’s new invasion of southern Lebanon in its own country, while Israeli state terror has killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians; some 2000 Lebanese have been killed by Israeli attacks over the last year, 60 percent of them over the last two weeks, and this includes 127 children, and, for good measure, by the beginning of October, Israel had already killed 96 Syrian refugees (including 36 children) who are only in Lebanon in the first place to escape the atrocities of the Assad regime, which was aided by Hezbollah! Over 100,000 refugees have fled into Syria, both Lebanese and Syrian refugees – and the Syrian regime has already begun arrests. Christian and Sunni towns in the south have been bombed alongside the Shiite civilian population; mostly Sunni regions of Beirut are being devastated alongside the Shiite regions which are Hezbollah’s base. Israel did want to decapitate the Hezbollah leadership, to re-establish its “deterrent” power, but it is also waging a war on Lebanon and the Lebanese people.
To cite Syrian writer Robin Yassin-Kassab: “I oppose Hizbullah absolutely when it is murdering and expelling Syrians on Iran’s orders. And I support absolutely its legitimate resistance to genocidal Zionist fascism.”
In horrible news on July 27, 12 young Druze, mostly children, in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights were killed by rocket fire, while playing football in a sports ground. The first thing to say of course is, regardless of who turns out to be responsible, that this is horrific, and our thoughts are first with the children and their families and community. Children like these, and like the 15,000 children that Israel has massacred in Gaza over the last 10 months, should not have to be killed in wars.
Second, while Israel has blamed Hezbollah firing from southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah has categorically denied this, and instead blamed Israeli interceptor fire gone wrong, at this stage we just don’t know for sure. But whichever it turns out to be, one thing is certain: either way it was a mistake. The occupied Golan has not been a theatre in the conflict between Israel and a number of Lebanese and Palestinian groups in southern Lebanon, led by Hezbollah, over the last 10 months. That conflict has been restricted to the southern Lebanese border with northern Israel. The Israeli-occupied Golan is nearby, to the east of this area, but has not been part of the hostilities.
Therefore, given Hezbollah’s emphatic denials, and Israel’s well-known penchant for lying, Israel’s accusation that it was Hezbollah has to be taken with bucket-loads of salt until we get better information; and even if it does turn out to have been a misfired Hezbollah rocket, Israeli leaders’ current use of such a tragic mistake to threaten a far bigger tragedy by launching full-scale war on Lebanon and turning it “into Gaza” as these leaders so charmingly offer, has to be fought against tooth and nail.
All wings of the Israeli regime – from open neo-Nazis Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, through Netanyahu’s genocidal clique to alleged “centrist” but equally war-crazed Benny Gantz, have called for war on Lebanon. Israel has already attacked a number of towns throughout southern Lebanon as of July 28, but so far nothing out of the ordinary. Of course there has been a border conflict for 10 months now, but it has been largely well-contained on both sides, restricted to a small border region – though it must be said that while some 21 Israelis, mostly troops, have been killed in 1258 attacks on Israel, over 25 times that number, some 543 Lebanese, including about 100 civilians, have been killed in 6142 Israeli attacks on Lebanon, so it is rather obvious who is trying to escalate.
The Druze, a religiously defined community that are neither Muslim, Christian or Jewish, are the majority in the occupied Golan, and a minority population in Israel, Syria and Lebanon. It is important to first note what they are saying. The overwhelming message appears to be for everyone to leave them alone to their grief; according to Suweida24, a voice from the Syrian Druze community, “The families of the victims in Majdal Shams, in a frank position during the funeral ceremonies, rejected any political exploitation of their tragedy.”
Ghalib Saif, head of the Druze Initiative for Al-Risala, blamed Israel, claiming that “the missiles that fall on the Druze villages in the Golan and Galilee are Israeli interceptor missiles, and they always cause great damage to places and lives. We see every day the Iron Dome missiles miss their target and fall on us.” Lebanese Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, condemned the targeting of civilians as unacceptable, whether in occupied Palestine, the occupied Golan Heights, or southern Lebanon; though an opponent of Hezbollah in Lebanese politics, in light of Hezbollah’s denials, he warned people in Lebanon and occupied Golan to be vigilant against “any slippage or incitement within the enemy’s [Israel’s] destructive project, calling for support to “the resistance and all resistance fighters” against any resurfacing “Israeli project,” ie, any attempt by Israel to re-occupy southern Lebanon. Notably, when Israeli government ministers, including the fascist-extremist Finance minister Smotrich, defied the community’s express requests that they keep away from the funeral and showed up anyway, they were jeered and sworn at, and Smotrich told frankly “Get out of here, you criminal. We don’t want you in the Golan.” Yasser Gadban, chairman of the Forum of Druze and Circassian Authorities, when demanding in writing they do not turn up, also requested “that you not turn a massacre event into a political event.” The following day Netanyahu also turned up uninvited, and was greeted with signs saying “War criminal” and “Down with the killing of children” and chants of “Killer! Killer!” and “You’re not welcome here!”
This total rejection of Israeli authorities should not be misconstrued as indicating support for Hezbollah. Sheikh Hikmat Salman Al-Hijri, of the United Druze Muslims sect in Syria, strongly condemned “the heinous crime perpetrated against the innocents and children in the peaceful village of Majdal Shams,” demanding “the prosecution of the criminal party” through international law, whoever it is found to be. Implicitly taking aim at both sides, he stated that “our children are neither training sites nor testing sites, our skies are not battlefields for anyone, nor the fulfillment of anyone’s goals through the blood of our children.” According to Suweida24, the position of the victims’ families and community is “is one of sadness, mourning and reverence, and we condemn the targeting of civilians everywhere, at all times and from any side.” Another resident they spoke to stated that “The two sides [Hezbollah and Israel] are in a war that has been raging since last year, and its rules and regulations are drawn in the blood of innocents in this wretched Middle East; the strong message regarding the threat to escalate the war in their name is “Leave us to grieve for our children, and we do not want the death of other children anywhere in this world.”
The Israel-Lebanon border conflict
While I certainly hold no brief for Hezbollah, at all, whose intervention in Syria as a tool of the Iranian theocracy’s support for Assad’s genocide regime in Syria was outrageous, where despite acting largely an Iranian tool, they played quite a generous role of their own in some of the regime-led slaughter of Syrian civilians as agents of this counterrevolution, and who also played a decisive role in saving all the sectarian Lebanese elites by using violence against Lebanon’s own anti-sectarian uprising in 2019, nevertheless, the conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border has its own dynamic which is very distinct from these two events.
Firstly, southern Lebanon was under direct Israeli occupation from 1978 to 2000, and though Israel withdrew then, the border has not been finally demarcated; Lebanon disputes certain areas, particularly the Shebaa Farms region. The fact that Israel and Lebanon (under a government including Hezbollah) just recently demarcated their sea borders (and hence borders of gas fields), in an agreement backed by Iran, demonstrates that there are potential ‘national’ issues involved here. Secondly, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in southern Lebanon – refugees from 1948 Palestine (Israel) who cannot return – are a permanent factor in southern Lebanese politics, who would have taken action even if Hezbollah hadn’t (for example, in April 2023, Palestinian fighters in southern Lebanon had fired rockets at Israel in retaliation against Israel’s attack on the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, while Hezbollah remained quiet; Israel retaliated only against the Palestinians). In fact, southern Lebanon basically merges into northern Palestine. While the resistance to Israel’s long occupation in the south had involved an array of different parties and militias, it is not surprising that Hezbollah emerged as the leading party, given the overwhelmingly Shiite population of the region.
All these factors give the southern Lebanon-northern Israel region a specific character; thus while Hezbollah is the leading force in the current border skirmishes, this should not be seen as an essentially ‘Iranian-inspired’ conflict (if anything, Iran has tended to attempt to restrain Hezbollah). The battles against Israel have also involved the anti-Hezbollah al-Fajr Forces, of the Sunni organisation Jamaa al-Islamiya, which had supported the Syrian uprising, but sees the battle against Israel and in support of Gaza as primary, as well as Palestinian forces (including Hamas, who also fought against the Assad regime in Syria and thus were on the opposite side to Hezbollah there).
And in this conflict, as opposed to other, unrelated, conflicts, the Hezbollah-led side has not been targeting civilians, but rather Israeli military forces; this is a simple observation of the data. So there is no reason whatsoever for Hezbollah to suddenly decide to kill a dozen Syrian Druze children in a region that is not part of their conflict; in contrast to southern Lebanon, the Assad regime has kept the Golan ‘border’ dead silent (indeed, Israeli leaders’ and strategists’ continually-expressed preference for Assad to defeat the uprising was in part due to their trust in Assad keeping the ‘border’ that way; as Netanyahu stated as he, Trump and Putin connived to facilitate Assad’s reconquest of southern Syria in 2018, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights”).
There is even less reason for Hezbollah to want to kill Syrian Druze given that they are for the most part anti-Israel; indeed in June last year there were major anti-occupation disturbances involving thousands of Druze, with Israeli forces using tear gas, bullets and water cannon against them. Indeed the same Smotrich, who tried to turn up to the funeral, at the time released a statement welcoming the police attacks on the Druze, stressing there would be no “giving in to violence” by the occupation authorities.
Of course, none of this makes it impossible that the terrible mistake was made by Hezbollah rather than Israeli rocket fire.
Golan Heights: Sovereign Syrian land
Israeli leaders assertions that Hezbollah has just killed a dozen “Israeli” children are both incredibly hypocritical and bald-faced lies. Firstly, this occurred a day after Israel just killed another 30 civilians, mostly children, in an attack on a UN school in Gaza; this is the eighth time since 6 July that a school had been hit, leaving a total of more than 100 people dead. A genocidal regime which has killed 15,000 Palestinian children in Gaza – just one almost inconceivable fact within its Gaza holocaust – does not care about children’s lives, to state the obvious.
But just as importantly, these are not “Israeli” children. The Golan Heights is sovereign Syrian territory that was conquered in 1967 during Israel’s unprovoked aggression against all its neighbours, when it also conquered the Egyptian Sinai, and the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Some 130,000 people lived in the part of Golan conquered by Israel at the time, the vast majority Sunni Muslims, in 139 towns and villages; following Israeli conquest, nearly all were expelled or fled into Syria, and are still unable to return, leaving only 6396 people, mostly Druze, in four remaining villages. The now 20,000 Druze share the territory with some 25,000 Israeli colonists (“settlers”) in 30 illegal settlements. In 1981, Israel formally annexed the Golan (and East Jerusalem), ie, declared it simply part of Israel, in much the same way as Russia annexed Crimea, and later four eastern Ukrainian oblasts. Israeli rule in Golan is rejected by the UN and by every country in the world (and, for that matter, by the Syrian anti-Assad opposition as well as regime), with the sole exception of Donald Trump’s rogue US regime which recognised Israeli “sovereignty” while last in power (and the Biden regime has shamefully not reversed this).
The Golan Druze population have overwhelmingly remained loyal to their Syrian citizenship. While there has been incremental growth in recent years of some Druze accepting Israeli citizenship for very practical purposes (eg, otherwise they have no passports etc), still only 20 percent have done so; 80 percent still see themselves as Syrian citizens, as of 2022 data. This ratio is the same in this town, Majdam Shams, where this tragedy took place. And if some take Israeli citizenship for practical purposes, even this does not mean loyalty to Zionism or the Israeli occupation; for example, in local elections in Majdam Shams in 2018, of 12,000 residents, only 282 voted in local elections. Incidentally, loyalty to Syria has nothing to do with loyalty to the Syrian regime (the article linked in this paragraph seems to suggest this, though it may merely journalistic laziness); opinions among Golan Druze are divided between Syrian regime and opposition; indeed, during large-scale Druze-led protests against the Assad regime in 2020 in southern Syrian province Suweida, there were demonstrations among Golan Druze in support of their brothers and sisters on the other side of the Israeli-occupation boundary, and this occurred again during the Druze-led uprising against Assad in Suweida in mid-2023.
Finally there is the question of whether this was an Israeli “false flag” operation to justify war on Lebanon. This is probably unlikely; the fact is that convenient errors can occur. But it is awfully convenient. For months, Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have been threatening to escalate the border conflict with Hezbollah into a full-scale war. While it may seem mad that they would want a two-front war (when to date Hezbollah’s actions have been largely symbolic and had no effect on Israel’s ability to carry out genocide in Gaza whatsoever) – and indeed it is quite likely that even this time it will once again blow over after some harsh rhetoric and mild escalation – there are other factors at play.
One is simply Netanyahu’s own stake in ongoing war – he knows that if the Gaza war winds down due to pressure for a ceasefire and hostage exchange, he is finished, and the high-level corruption charges against him may land him in jail, so ongoing war is a temporary saviour. More broadly, Israel’s already escalatory actions in Lebanon are widely seen as aiming to create a larger regional conflagration, to bring in both Iran and the US, so that the US, it hopes, could do its job for it keeping Lebanon, and perhaps Iran, busy, and Israel could then get on with and perhaps complete the genocide in Gaza under the cover of this much larger regional apocalypse; in other words, it is not that Israel wants to fight Hezbollah (and still less Iran), rather it wants the US to do that as a sideshow – Israel’s actual war remains the extermination of Palestine. To date, the Biden administration has shown no interest in being involved in this game, and has been working feverishly to bring about a new Israel-Lebanon borer agreement in which both sides could save face; even after Majdal Shams, the first statements by Blinken have been calling for restraint.
But it seems no coincidence that this new wave of loud Israeli aggressiveness towards Lebanon is taking place just after Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump, and after his speech to Congress was received with rapturous applause from US leaders on both sides, but especially from the fanatical Republican side. While some have mistakenly seen Trump’s ‘muscular realism’ as ‘isolationism’, this is both an error in general, but above all total myopia with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict, where Trumpism and traditional ‘Reaganite’ or ‘neoconservative’ Republicanism are in total agreement in support of Israeli extremism. Consider Trump’s record in office: recognition of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and Golan, moving the US embassy to East Jerusalem, declaring that the US no longer sees the occupied Palestinian territories as occupied, the ‘deal of the century’ which proposed to bring ‘peace’ to the region by giving Israel everything and Palestine nothing, cutting off funding for UNWRA etc.
Trump and co almost certainly gave Netanyahu to go-ahead for an invasion of, or at least a bigger attack on, of Lebanon. Of course, they are not in power, but creating a crisis for Biden-Harris before the US elections would be an added bonus, for Trump, and for Netanyahu who wants another Trump regime. While false flags and conspiracies are generally the least likely possibilities, this tragedy in the Golan has come at an incredibly fortuitous time for Netanyahu’s thugs.
“HUWARA, West Bank, Oct 6 (Reuters) – A Jewish settler killed a 19-year-old Palestinian during a settler attack on the occupied West Bank town of Huwara on Friday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Residents said a group of settlers had erected a tent in Huwara, held prayers and later marched through the town. Some of them were carrying arms and began vandalising shops and cars, they said. One of the settlers shot university student Labib Dumaidi, who later died of his wounds in hospital, the residents said.”
As this settler murder was a rather run-of-the mill event in occupied Palestine, clearly there was no “ceasefire” for Palestinians on October 6.
What they mean is that there was a ceasefire for Israelis on October 6, and before. Of course there has been no ceasefire for Palestinians since 1948, when they were ethnically cleansed from their homes and land to create a Jewish state on their land, at a cost of 15,000 Palestinians killed by Zionist terror gangs, something, understandably enough, they have never accepted; the process then continued after 1967 in complete international illegality (despite the lack of any international sanctions) in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza; and has been ongoing ever since. And since these territories conquered in 1967 are recognised by international law to be under illegal occupation, then resistance, including armed resistance, of the occupied Palestinian people is recognised as their legal right; clearly, if another country is illegally occupying yours, there is by definition no “ceasefire.”
But since that begins a long way back, and is such a sweeping picture that many simply refuse to accept the reality that dispossession, occupation, ongoing land theft, apartheid and complete Israeli impunity over Palestinian life is no “ceasefire” and leads naturally to armed and civil resistance, let’s begin a little closer to the date, the last 20 years for example.
In the last 20 years, the number of Palestinian civilians killed (4331) is over 22 times the number of Israeli civilians (195) within this just war of resistance against occupation (much the same for total casualties, 6936 Palestinians versus 330 Israelis or 21 times); thus even if we make the caveat that the right of armed resistance does not give that resistance the right to target civilians, then Israel is 22 times more guilty than the Palestinian resistance of such violations, and needless to say killing thousands of Palestinian civilians does not make the period a “ceasefire” for them. Even during the Hamas suicide attacks in the early 2000s, the numbers of Palestinians killed was double, triple or quadruple the numbers of Israelis; and starting from 2004 when these attacks declined then ended completely in 2005, and thereafter, as the number of Israeli casualties reduced to close to zero, the number of Palestinians killed increased dramatically, as the first chart below shows:
These killings include such major Israeli atrocities in Gaza as Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, when Israel killed some 1400 Palestinians, 82 percent of whom were civilians, and as usual massively attacked human infrastructure, with egregious crimes including the killing of entire families, attacks on schools, use of white phosphorous, and killing of civilians carrying white flags; Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, which killed 167 Palestinians, “including at least 87 who did not take part in the hostilities, 32 of whom were minors;” Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when Israel killed 2250 Palestinians, two-thirds civilians, including 551 children, and injured 11,231, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children, mostly civilians, while in addition “118 UNRWA installations were damaged, including 83 schools and 10 health centres,” and “over 12,600 housing units were totally destroyed and almost 6,500 sustained severe damage,” while another 150,000 were rendered inhabitable, and 500,000 were internally displaced; Israel also massively attacked Gaza’s water and power infrastructure, with long-term consequences as the blockade made repairs almost impossible; the Great March of Return in 2018-19, when thousands of Palestinians daily rallied peacefully next to the Israel-Gaza fence and Israel’s response was to shoot to kill and maim, with 266 Palestinians massacred, including 50 children, while over 30,000 were wounded, including 3000 children, with special focus on the knees leading to a spike in amputations; 2021, which killed 261 people, including 67 children, wounded over 2,200, destroyed or damaged over 1770 housing units, while 290 water infrastructure “objects” were damaged, leading to “untreated sewage flowed into the streets, lakes, and sea.” And this is all in the context of the Israeli air-land-sea blockade of Gaza, the impact of which on Palestinians’ access to food, water, medical care and the ability to have any kind of economy has been widely documented, the UN describing Gaza under its impact as “unliveable.”
None of this suggests any “ceasefire” in the last 20 years before October 7. But once again, some may still find this too large a sweep to accept that the reality for Palestinians was anything but ceasefire. So, once again, let’s narrow the picture further, to just 2023.
Before October 7, 2023, 234 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the beginning of that year, and another none were killed by “settlers,” including 41 children. By the end of 2023, this figure had doubled to 507, including 81 children, making it “the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005.” This was up from 155 killed in 2022, already the highest figure since 2005. By August, the number of Palestinians injured with live ammunition in the West Bank stood at 683, more than double the 2012 figure of 307. There were an average of 95 monthly settler attacks on Palestinians in 2023, up from 71 in 2022.
Let’s look at some major cases of non-ceasefire from 2023.
On January 15, the IOF shot 14-year old Omar Khaled Lutfi Khmour in the head, killing him, in a pre-dawn raid on Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, the fourth child, and 14th Palestinian, to be killed already in the first two weeks of the year.
On January 26, the IOF invaded Jenin refugee camp, killing 10 Palestinians, including a 61-year old woman, and wounding another 20. Bottom of Form
An ambulance driver attempting to get to the wounded was shot at and prevented from approaching.
Ceasefire? Israeli forces raided the Jenin camp, January 2023 [Zain Jaafar/AFP]
On February 23, the IOF raided an apartment block in Nablus, killing 11 people, including a 72-year old, and wounding over one hundred civilians with gunshots, the IOF claiming to be hunting three resistance fighters. Video shows IOF killers shooting an unarmed man running away, and an Israeli military vehicle plowing into a crowd.
On March 16, the IOF killed 2 men and a 16-year old boy in Jenin by firing on their car; the three had been prisoners in occupation jails who were recently released, while another 14-year old boy who had been shot days earlier also died.
Ceasefire? Palestinian children inspect the rubble of their demolished school in Jib al-Dib.
On May 7, the IOF demolished the Palestinian primary school in Jib al-Dib, an “unrecognized village” near illegal Israeli “settlements” in Area C of the occupied West Bank. The school was attended by 40 children aged 6-10. Before the school was built, children in Jib al-Dib had to walk an hour each way to school. The school was constructed by the Palestinian Authority without the permission of the illegal occupation authorities, who reject around 99 percent of such requests in Area C. The EU, which had funded the project, condemned the demolition and said it was “appalled,” empty words Palestinians are used to hearing.
On May 9, the IOF attacked Gaza in a firefight with Palestinian resistance fighters; of the 33 killed, 13 were civilians, including “four girls, three boys, four women and two men,” according to the UN, while 6 were known to be fighters, the status of the remainder unconfirmed. Al Mezan, a Gaza-based human rights organisation, said the IOF had Israel “destroyed nearly 60 residential units, displacing almost 375 people, around a third of them children.” Israel also banned fuel for Gaza’s powerplant, forcing the closure of water treatment plants which caused 120,000 cubic meters of untreated wastewater to be discharged into the sea, while medical facilities and schools were also damaged by the strikes.
On May 22, extreme right-wing Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem with dozens of Israeli settlers, guarded by Israeli cops, who also restricted entry to Palestinians. In early June Ben-Gvir called on illegal settlers to take over the territory and kill dozens, hundreds or thousands of Palestinians, as necessary.
On June 19, Israel again invaded the Jenin refugee camp, backed by air strikes from helicopter gunships for the first time in 20 years in the West Bank, killing 5 and injuring 91 Palestinians. Once again ambulances were attacked as they came to the rescue.
On July 3, the IDF again invaded the Jenin camp, with over 1,000 troops “backed up by Shin Bet intelligence agents, Magav border police, armed drones, helicopter gunships, armoured personnel carriers and armoured bulldozers,” killing 13 Palestinians and wounding over 100.
On August 4, these near-daily Israeli atrocities were becoming so blatant that even the US State Department used the terms “terror attack” and “violent extremism” to describe the murder of 19-year old Palestinian Qusai Jamal Maatan, near Ramallah, by settler fanatics who stormed his village.
According to the UN, “On 10 August, an Israeli undercover unit raided Nablus city, where an exchange of fire with Palestinians ensued, killing a 23-year-old Palestinian man. On 11 August, Israeli forces raided the Tulkarm Refugee Camp and shot and killed a 25-year-old Palestinian. At least three others were also injured, including two by live ammunition. According to a human rights organization, the man killed was not involved in the exchange of fire between Israeli forces and Palestinians. On 15 August, Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinians including one 16-year-old child, during a search-and-arrest operation in Aqabet Jaber Camp Refugee Camp (Jericho).”
In the same report, the UN reported that “on 21 August, Palestinians demonstrated along Israel’s perimeter fence marking the 54th anniversary of burning Al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinians burnt tires and threw stones and explosive devices towards the Israeli fence. Israeli forces shot live ammunition, rubber bullets and teargas canisters, injuring 19 Palestinians, including 12 children.”
On September 24, two Palestinians were killed when the IOF attacked Nour Shams Refugee Camp near Tulkarem in the northern West Bank.
And so on. These are just the killings – it would be difficult to document all the land seizures, destruction of housing and infrastructure, arbitrary arrests, home raids, endless harassment at checkpoints that have all been part of Palestinians’ daily lives for decades but which have increased sharply in 2023. In August 2023, the Norwegian Refugee Council produced a report on the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land which stated that “entire Palestinian communities [are] being wiped off the map.”
Obviously, none of this sounds much like “ceasefire.” And if even this picture of the whole of 2023 is still not convincing, let’s return to the beginning, to October 6:
“HUWARA, West Bank, Oct 6 (Reuters) – A Jewish settler killed a 19-year-old Palestinian during a settler attack on the occupied West Bank town of Huwara on Friday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Residents said a group of settlers had erected a tent in Huwara, held prayers and later marched through the town. Some of them were carrying arms and began vandalising shops and cars, they said. One of the settlers shot university student Labib Dumaidi, who later died of his wounds in hospital, the residents said.”
Obviously, both armed and civil resistance are justified against violent occupation, and when the occupier is killing you every day to facilitate ongoing land theft, you have every right to fire back. Far from October 7 breaking a “ceasefire,” it is clear from this brief summary that it was merely a continuation.
One might say that the right to armed resistance against a brutal, murderous occupation regime does not justify the likewise brutal large-scale slaughter of Israeli civilians as occurred on October 7, and most would agree [and it is a secondary question whether that was the intent of the al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7, which goes against the evidence I am aware of, or rather was an unintended consequence as hundreds of brutalised-from-birth Palestinians broke out of the cage they were locked in all their lives and turned brutaliser]. But if we agree that civilians should not be killed in military operations, surely that applies over 20 times as much to the Israeli occupation regime for the two decades (at least) prior to October 7, given the data above? And given that Israel’s so-called “response” has killed 40-50 times as many Palestinians since October as Israelis who were killed on that day, let alone the deliberate destruction of everything necessary for human life in Gaza and Israel’s policy of deliberate starvation, then it should also apply dozens of times more to Israel?
October 7 was not the end of a ceasefire, it was a continuation of decades of anything other.
It is well-known that Israel’s Gaza genocide is principally enabled by the constant supply of tens of billions of dollars of killing equipment by the United States, making it the principle accomplice in the genocide, with Germany coming in a close second.
An important secondary question, however, is that of who continues to supply most of the state’s oil and coal (Israel has its own Mediterranean gas supplies) that keep the Israeli economy and war machine running. It may surprise some that the main culprits have been publicly critical of Israel’s actions, including BRICS members Russia, Brazil, Egypt and China, as well as some who have condemned Israel most furiously, such as BRICS member South Africa and, indirectly, Turkey.
According to S&P Global in late October 2023:
“With almost no domestic crude or condensate production, Israel has been importing around 300,000 b/d of crude this year to process at its two refineries in Haifa and Ashdod. Israel’s biggest source of oil is the Kazakh-sourced CPC Blend crude exported via Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiisk and Azeri Light which is shipped from Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. Together they accounted for over half of Israel’s crude imports this year” [emphasis added].
Map showing the routes of the BTC pipeline (red), through which Azeri oil reaches Israel via the Turkish port of Ceyhan, and the CPC pipeline (green), through which Kazak and Russian oil reaches Israel via the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk
It is worth breaking this down a little more. First, even with regards to fuel, the US is also a supplier, mainly of refined JP-8 Jet Fuel for Israel’s killer jets, as part of US military aid to Israel; three tankers of jet fuel have arrived since October. Before the war, the only other form of refined fuel Israel imported was from BRICS member and rabid Israel-ally India, which supplied diesel, but this has fallen off, not due to good intentions, but rather due to the Red Sea blockade by AnsarAllah authorities in north Yemen. Regarding India, it is worth adding that an Indian-Israeli joint-venture has been producing Hermes 900 UAV attack drones and providing them to Israel; India has also been providing large numbers of rockets and explosives to Israel. Indian leader Modi is, of course, a close ally of his “dear friend” Vladimir Putin as he described him in his recent trip to Moscow.
Besides refined fuel, “Israel’s military requires significant quantities of diesel and gasoline for tanks and other military vehicles” which “is supplied by Israel’s refineries” in Ashdod and Haifa, which rely on imported crude oil. This is where Azeri, Russian-Kazak, Brazilian and Egyptian crude comes in, alongside growing supplies from Gabon/Nigeria.
Azerbaijan has been a major supplier of oil to Israel for many years, as part of a two-way arrangement in which Israel supplies Azerbaijan with guns. The basis of this cozy arrangement is Azerbaijan’s fraught relationship with neighbouring Iran; Azerbaijan’s three-decade autocrat Aliev runs a secular dictatorship, but as Azerbaijanis are largely Shiite, he fears the influence of Iran’s fundamentalist Shiism; while Iran itself includes a very large Azeri minority, and Iran in turn fears Azerbaijan’s potential influence there. Though this has not prevented some growing Iran-Azerbaijan cooperation, particularly on the International North-South Transport Corridor running from Russia, via Azerbaijan into Iran and out into the Indian Ocean to the Indian city Mumbai, nevertheless this arms for oil Israel-Azerbaijan arrangement has stood the test of time.
Israeli arms played a decisive role in facilitating Azerbaijan’s reconquest of the Armenian-populated Ngorno-Karabakh region in 2023, which led to the flight of 90 percent of the population.
The problem is that for landlocked Azerbaijan to get its oil to the Mediterranean Sea, it must go through Turkey via the BTC (Baku-Tsibilisi-Ceyhan) pipeline; while long ago a reliable ally of Israel under the Kemalist military, Erdogan’s Islamist AKP regime turned markedly anti-Israel and pro-Palestine since coming to power in 2003. But this did not prevent long-established, large-scale Turkish-Israeli trade from flourishing, indeed Turkey had been Israel’s fifth largest trading partner; and above all Azerbaijani oil has continued to flow through Turkey to Israel.
Erdogan’s regime finally put its money where its mouth is in May 2024, cutting off all Turkish trade with Israel. However, given the international agreements involved with Azeri oil and the BTC pipeline (BP is the major shareholder along with Equinor, Eni, Total, Exxon and the Azeri oil company, while the Turkish oil company TPAO only holds a 6.5 percent stake), Turkey would find it very difficult to prevent Azeri oil going through to Israel, without forcing a legal showdown and by all accounts this oil continues to flow to Israel.
As such, while Erdogan tells a gigantic state-organised march that Hamas is a “national liberation movement”, calls for a genocide trial for Netanyahu and claims there is “no difference between Netanyahu and Hitler,” while Turkey was the first country to formally join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and while finally ending trade relations, Azeri oil traversing Turkey still accounts for some 40 percent of Israel’s crude imports.
Kazakhistan, Russia and the CPC pipeline
The other major source of Israel’s crude imports has been from Kazakhistan, which, like Azerbaijan, is landlocked; in this case Russia takes the place of Turkey, with Kazakh oil entering the Black Sea at Russia’s port of Novorossiysk via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC). Israel also exports drones, precision rockets, radar systems and communications equipment to Kazakhistan, as well as the spyware technology of the NSO Group, with which the autocratic Kazakh regime infects the phones of dissidents. Kazakhistan is a close Russian ally and a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
Notably, in contrast to Turkey, Russia is not merely a transit territory but the major investor and minor supplier itself. Some 44 percent of CPC shares are owned by Russian companies, above all the state-controlled, joint-stock company Transneft, the largest oil company in the world which alone owns a quarter of CPC, alongside Lukoil (12.5 percent) and Rosneft (7.5 percent); other shareholders include Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Eni and Kazakh oil companies (20 percent). Likewise, “CPC oil is a blend made up of oil from major fields in and around both the Kazakh and the Russian sections of the Caspian Sea, as well as smaller onshore fields in southern Russia. The majority is Kazakh, and cargoes are given either a Kazakh or a Russian certificate of origin in overall proportion to the amounts of oil that are shipped through the system from each country.”
As we see in the chart above, in July-September 2023, CPC supplied some 40 percent of Israel’s oil imports; while it has fluctuated since, in January 2024 it still accounted for some 40 percent of the total. The data shows that at least 600kt of Kazakh/Russian crude has been shipped to Israel since October via the CPC. This later chart based on data from Oil Change International, shows this has continued through 2024, the CPC supplying some 40 percent of Israel’s oil in March and 100 percent in June:
Despite Russia’s verbal criticism of Israel’s actions, the only unlikely danger to the CPC supply would be not Russian government policy but western sanctions on Russia over Ukraine (sanctions which Israel does not take part in), but “the importance of Caspian Sea oil and gas to US firms ExxonMobil and Chevron — and the lack of viable alternative export routes — has so far saved the CPC system from Western sanctions, and there is no reason to suspect that this will change in the near future.”
In addition, Russia also exports ‘dirty’ petroleum products to Israel, notably VGO fuel oil, which is upgraded into jet fuel (!) and diesel, and “this flow does not seem to have been affected by recent events, with four cargoes having reportedly arrived since 13 October 2023,” carrying 120 kt. Russian VGO has been impacted by EU sanctions, probably making the Israeli market for VGO even more important today.
Russia and the US have also been the main suppliers of processed oil products to Israel over the last year, on some months Russia ahead of the US, though both were surpassed by BRICS member Brazil in April:
Finally, Russia is also an important supplier of coal to Israel, exporting 247,500 mt to Israel in the first half of 2014, second only to Colombia, which in June banned coal exports; more on this below.
Interestingly, both Turkish and Russian trade with Israel was jointly highlighted on June 9 when the Turkish cargo vessel Yaf Horizon caught on fire in Haifa harbour. It was somewhat embarrassing because this was after Turkey’s trade ban, indicating that some Turkish companies have attempted to get around the ban (indeed some circumvent it by re-routing through Greece, which is currently strongly allied to Israel on an anti-Turkey platform). The vessel had first docked at Russia’s Novorossiysk port, where it picked up Russian iron or steel for export to Israel.
Where does Israel-Russia collaboration stand at present?
Of course, there ought to be nothing surprising about Russia supplying, and facilitating the supply of, oil to Israel, given the long-term close relationship between the two countries. During Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ Gaza blitzkrieg in 2014, which killed 2500 Palestinians, Putin declared “I support the struggle of Israel,” while Israel refused to join its western allies in condemning the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, abstaining in the UN and rejecting sanctions.
It was hardly surprising that Netanyahu’s equally ultra-rightist successor, and former ally, then prime minister Naftali Bennett, was the first ‘world leader’ to make a high level visit to Moscow to meet Putin after his invasion of Ukraine. Bennett’s first statement following Russia’s invasion merely affirmed Ukraine’s right to sovereignty, but made no mention of Russia. Following US pressure, foreign minister and ‘moderate’ Zionist Yair Lapid issued the official, half-hearted condemnation. Bennett then issued a demand that his ministers say nothing; rejected Ukraine’s calls for arms, blocked any attempt by third parties to send Israeli-made arms to Ukraine, and blocked the US from providing Israeli ‘iron dome’ missile shield technology to Ukraine. Despite two and a half years of pressure from Israel’s main ally, the US, Israel has still not sent a gun to Ukraine. Even in January 2024, Israel rejected US requests for it to supply some very old (supplied to Israel in the 1960s) anti-aircraft weaponry to the US for it to give to Ukraine. Not long before October 7, Russia announced the opening of its consular offices in West Jerusalem, which it had recognised as Israel’s capital several years earlier, despite that city’s illegal incorporation of East Jerusalem.
Following the onset of the Gaza genocide in October 2023 however, these powerful Russian-Israeli relations began to fray. The above demonstrates that this was not because of any problem with Israel as such, but rather was related to Russian-American rivalry. For nearly two years, the US, for its own imperial reasons, had led support for Ukraine’s legitimate struggle for self-determination against Russia’s illegal and barbaric war of aggression. Now it was Russia’s chance to turn the tables, criticising the US for its 100 percent support for Israel’s absolutely apocalyptic actions, showcasing Russia’s more “balanced” view of the Mideast crisis, blaming the US for not having brought about the ‘two-state solution’. While Putin’s target is the US rather than Israel as such, this discourse by definition means criticism of Israel, resulting in damage to Israeli-Russian relations.
While much analysis suggests this is due to the growing relationship between Russia and Iran (eg with Iranian provision of killer-drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine), in reality Russia (and China) merely place themselves in the exact ‘Arab mainstream’ on these issues alongside their BRICS allies Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE etc – recognition of Israel, calls for ‘two-state solution’, supporting UN ceasefire resolutions, condemnation of the October 7 attack as an “absolutely unacceptable terrorist attack against Israel,” demanding the unconditional release of all Israeli hostages, strong support for the collaborationist Palestinian Authority, refusal to join South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel and so on. Russia’s mild change of stance has not led to even one Israeli warplane being shot down by Russian-controlled air defence while attacking pro-Iran targets in Syria. Meanwhile, in contrast to the active Israel-Lebanon border, the Syria-Israel Golan demarcation line “remains conspicuously calm,” the Syrian regime having instructed its forces in the Golan “not to engage in any hostilities, including firing bullets or shells toward Israel.” To keep it that way, Russia has beefed up its forces along the Golan occupation line to ensure no stray Palestinian or Iran-backed forces cause any trouble.
Of course, the shallowness of Russia’s public criticism of Israel can be gleaned from some of the more serious Russian commentary, such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s December 28 interview, in which he directly compared Russia’s and Israel’s campaigns in Ukraine and Gaza by using Russia’s Orwellian terms to describe its own invasion: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Hamas must be destroyed as a whole and as a military force. It sounds like demilitarisation. He also said that extremism must be eliminated in Gaza. It sounds like denazification.” He then went on to commend Netanyahu for not criticising Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In this light, Russia’s provision and facilitation of a major part of Israel’s oil and coal supplies should not be any surprise, but in case anyone were taken in by its newly critical position towards Israel, these material facts are a reminder of reality.
Iraq, Egypt and Brazil
Until April 2023, Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government was also an important oil exporter to Israel, again traversing Turkish territory to Ceyhan, but a legal dispute between the KRG and the Iraqi government halted this flow. The main sources making up for this loss have been Gabon and Nigeria, Brazil and Egypt.
BRICS member Brazil is another important supplier of crude to Israel, with two shipments totalling 260 kilotonnes delivered to Israel in December 2023, and February 2024. This crude was supplied from oil fields owned by Shell, TotalEnergies and Brazil’s Petrobras. This is despite the Lula government’s sharp criticism of Israeli actions, leading to the withdrawal of Brazil’s ambassador to Israel in late May and expression of support to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), at one point Lula even calling the Israeli military campaign ‘genocide’.
Finally, Israel imports a small but regular amount of oil from its BRICS neighbour Egypt, via Sidi Kerir, near Alexandria, the terminus of the SUMED pipeline. Oil from BRICS members United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as Iraq, also feeds into this pipeline. Many might say, this is no surprise, Egypt being the first Arab state to recognise Israel, the irony being that many ‘anti-imperialist’ critics believe BRICS to be the answer to US imperialism – yet BRICS members Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia, like Egypt, all have long-term relations with Israel; only Saudi Arabia and Iran do not. Words are good, but oil profits are another thing.
Of course, it is certainly true that the al-Sisi dictatorship has collaborated with the Israeli blockade of Gaza for years, and now blocks Palestinians fleeing from Gaza not to prevent the new Nakbah, but because the regime hates Palestinians as much as Israel does. But alarmed by the impact Israel’s genocide on its borders was having on its own population, Egypt announced in May it was formally joining South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ, alongside Turkey and Colombia. But of course, like the others, Egypt still draws the line at actually taking any concrete action.
Coal: Russia, China, South Africa to the rescue
On June 8, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro announced that his country would suspend coal exports to Israel – Colombia had on average supplied about 50-60 percent of Israel’s coal. Israel had imported 1.4 million metric tons (mt) of thermal coal in 2024 to date, of which Colombia supplied 855,700 mt, or 60 percent of Israel’s coal imports.
But according to S&P Global Global Commodities at Sea data, Russia was next, exporting 247,500 mt to Israel in that period, fellow BRICS member South Africa next at 169,200 mt, then the US at 86,100 mt and BRICS member China with 53,000 mt. LSEG Data and Analytics shows slightly different but similarly revealing data, showing that Russia had exported nearly double that amount, some 512,000 mt, to Israel since October 7, South Africa 496,000 mt, while not revealing any Chinese coal exports:
This data from LSEG Data and Analytics, showing coal shipments to Israel in 2024, reveals the large role of Russian coal in sustaining Israel’s regime; unfortunately seems to show that Colombia’s boycott has not been put into practice as of July; does not show Chinese shipments as claimed by S&P Global, Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rKdD_nWe5o4YQ3YYXUGkSsXQT4JO0DQ5cAxJ5OYyzeU/edit
As discussed above, there is nothing out of the ordinary in Russia’s case, but an intriguing incident may cast some light on what more may be happening below the surface. On June 12, the Houthis launched a small watercraft, drone and missile attack on the Greek-owned, Liberian-flagged vessel M.V Tutor, sinking it. The Tutor was, or had been, carrying 80,000 mt of Russian coal, loaded at Ust-Luga, near Saint Petersburg; it was on its way to India after traversing the Suez Canal. While the Houthis have not exactly been precise in their choice of attacks – they claim to only attack vessels trading with Israel, yet hits have included ships carrying grain to their ally, Iran, twice, and a Chinese ship carrying Russian oil to India – it is likely that even such hits are based on erroneous assumptions. What may have caused an attack on such a large shipment of Russian coal?
On this, Patrick Bond from the University of Johannesburg speculates that “This may be because MV Tutor had apparently stopped at Jordan’s Aqaba New Port, where it seems that coal can be quickly unloaded and transported, either up the Jordanian highway seven hours distant to cement factories where it serves as a fuel, OR perhaps across the nearby Israeli border at the Rabin Crossing, from where around four hours away by truck, the coal can be sent to storage depots next to the Rutenberg coal-fired power plant, which normally served by ships unloading directly at Ashdod. Next door, Ashkelon’s port has been closed because it’s just 4km from Jabalia in Gaza.”
South Africa, however, was widely commended for its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, but till now has also had extensive trade relations with Israel, exporting $350.9 million to Israel in 2022, of which 40 percent was coal, and as shown below, nearly 500,000 mt of coal since October:
To date there are no indications of steps being taken to end these coal supplies to Israel, and with the new governing coalition between the ANC and the pro-Zionist Democratic Alliance, this seems even less likely to change. This urgent appeal to South Africa to halt all coal exports to Israel issued by the Global Energy Embargo Coalitionprovides a great deal more information on this trading relationship with South Africa and Israel.
Thus despite its ICJ case, for South Africa, along with fellow applicants Egypt and Turkey (led by alleged anti-Israel zealot Erdogan), and more lukewarm critics of Israel’s current actions in Russia, China and Brazil (and of course pro-Israel India), the logic of capitalist commerce and profit-making speaks much louder than words – it is BRICS, after all, that we’re talking about.
US the primary facilitator of genocide, but what of BDS?
Of course, none of the above reduces the absolutely central role of US imperialism in the arming of Israel with billions of dollars worth of weaponry as genocide unfolds, indeed without the continual re-supply of ammunition and a vast array of weaponry the Zionist regime would have had to stop by now. The US supplies $3.8 billion dollars in weaponry to Israel every year, but since the Gaza war began vastly greater quantities of tank and artillery ammunition, bombs, rockets, and small arms have been sent. In February, the Senate approved another $14.5 billion in weaponry to Israel, then in April, Congress approved a further $26 billion in general aid to Israel, and in June Congress approved another $18 billion arms transfer to Israel to purchase dozens of Boeing Co. F-15 aircraft. Meanwhile, in March it was revealed that the US had sent over 100 “secret” weapons shipments to Israel, consisting of “precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms (like firearms), and more,” which it could get away with as they fell just below the dollar value that requires Congressional approval. The head spins as all this US-supplied weaponry is used to slaughter tens of thousands of people and make Gaza unliveable by destroying everything necessary for human life.
The US, in other words, is as much involved in the genocide as Israel itself is; in the same way as it is Russia that is responsible for destroying Ukraine and for the Assad regime’s destruction of Syria, or again the US that was responsible for destroying Iraq, and so on.
That said, the Israeli economy is in crisis as a result of the war, and enormous pressure for it to stop could be exerted if major economies ended their trade relations with Israel, especially the trade that fuels its economy and war machine. Throughout much of the world, supporters of Palestine have pushed the campaign for Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel, not just because of the current apocalypse, but against the apartheid regime and the illegal occupation more generally. How ironic that among these western pro-Palestine activists are some who push illusions in rival imperialisms such as Russia and China or who see BRICS more generally as some kind of alternative to US imperialism, yet all these states continue to supply oil and coal, as well as an array of other products, to the regime as it commits genocide, alongside major western oil companies involved in the CPC and BTC like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Eni and TotalEnergies. If they all ended this trade, it could make a significant difference.
The fact that they have not, and show no signs of it, further accentuates the point that there are no geopolitical ‘camps’, ‘blocs’ or ‘axes’, as mainstream media and popular geopolitics writers, on both the right and left, are so fond of. Rather, all we have is global capitalism, the pigsty of global profit-making, where at times, all may be against all in their rivalry, with no relevance of any imaginary ‘camps’, and at other times, all are in it together.
Michael Karadjis explains how the recent interchange of missiles between Israel and Iran was an episode of theater distracting from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and leaving Israel more powerful.
How many Palestinians have Israel shot, bombed, and starved in the last week or so? Not a lot of it has been in the news, because we’ve been distractedby “bigger” theatre: a “regional” conflict may be brewing. Let’s observe and analyze this bigger picture, while remembering that the ongoing genocide in Gaza is the real issue here, not Israeli and Iranian fireworks.
At least 43 more Palestinians were killed and 62 others injured on April 13 in four Israeli massacres in Gaza. The next day another five Palestinians were killed “when the Israeli army shelled hundreds of displaced Palestinians trying to return to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip.” Meanwhile, as Al-Jazeera reported, in the West Bank in the same period, while drones flew overhead, mobs of Israeli settlers, backed by troops, spearheaded a large-scale attack on the village of al-Mughayyir, where they killed one Palestinian man and injured 25 others. Since then, settlers have attacked more towns and villages near Ramallah including Bukra, Deir Dubwan, and Kfar Malik.
This is the ongoing reality behind the theatrical scenes we have witnessed over the last week. While the world witnessed the performative deployment of great military hardware on both sides, as both proclaimed self-defense, there was no power to knock out Israeli planes bombing Palestinians; no discussion of Palestine’s right to defend itself.
The U.S. has been pleased that decades of Iranian-regime “anti-Zionist” bluster (aimed at internal and regional homogenization rather than at being taken seriously) amounted to nothing at all as Israel committed genocide in Gaza for six months. Despite Iranian leaders initially promising to back Palestinian resistance “until the liberation of Palestine and Al-Quds,” with one leader claiming an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza would “open that gates of hell,” in reality “the chasm between Iran’s bellicose rhetoric and relatively restrained action is even sharper in the current Gaza war” than in previous wars. Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei famously told Hamas chief Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran, that since Hamas “gave us no warning, we will not enter the war on your behalf,” allegedly demanding that Haniyeh silence Palestinian voices calling on Iran or Hezbollah to join the battle. In November, the U.S. allowed Iraq to transfer $10 billion it owed Iran in electricity payments in a sanctions waiver. According to The Economist, this was a reward to Iran for holding back its proxies after October 7.
However, Israeli leaders were less pleased. They were probably pleased in the first month or two, allowing them time to get on with the genocide. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, boasted that “no one has come to [Hamas’s] aid – neither the Iranians nor Hizbullah.” But after that, Israeli leaders, or at least Netanyahu’s gang, appeared to want to escalate. For example, while the attacks and counter-attacks between Israel and Hezbollah on the Lebanese border were initially well-calibrated on both sides, restricted to a few kilometers, Israel soon upped the ante: While some twenty troops and civilians have been killed on the Israeli side, about 240 Hezbollah and other fighting cadre and forty Lebanese civilians had been killed by increasingly violent and reckless Israeli bombing by March. By late in 2023, Israel was escalating with targeted killings of leading Hezbollah cadre and Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and Syria, which appeared to be aimed at getting a response.
For years, Israel has bombed Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, but mostly they targeted weapons shipments, warehouses, and the like where Iran was transferring missiles to Hezbollah. These Israeli bombings were carried out with the facilitation of Syria’s Russian-controlled air defenses, an arrangement made through countless high-level meetings between then-best-friends Putin and Netanyahu, who over a decade met together more than any other two world leaders. Israel supported the Assad regime remaining in power, but without Iranian backing, and therefore welcomed Russia’s intervention on Assad’s behalf as an alternative. Russia and Iran jointly saved Assad, but then became rivals over domination of the Assadist corpse.
Yet over all these years of attacks, none of them were ever carried out in response to any imaginary Iranian or Hezbollah attacks on “Israel” (i.e., the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan); the Israeli and Western propaganda that Israel attacks Iranian forces because they pose a “threat” to Israel was very theoretical indeed. In fact, only twice, in my close reading, was there even retaliation (once by Iran, in May 2018, once by Hezbollah, in January 2015), as against hundreds of Israeli attacks.
But only in the last six months has Israel progressed to these targeted killings of significant numbers of important Iranian or Hezbollah figures, but no matter how many were killed, even leading Revolutionary Guards, still there was zero retaliation from Iran. Following a series of suspiciously precise Israeli strikes killing around a dozen leading Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria in December and January, Iran’s response was to pull back the Guards from Syria to avoid getting pulled into the conflict.
How is Israel supposed to maintain a 30-year propaganda campaign, that it faces not just the brutally oppressed Palestinians, but behind them a large evil power bent on wiping out Israel and Jews (sometimes referred to as “the Fourth Reich”) allegedly dedicated to Israel’s destruction, when, for years, that power never does anything, not even as a response? And continues the same, no matter how much Israel has turned up the dial in recent months. Israel cultivates this propaganda not because it fears Iran – a laughable proposition for a nuclear-armed military and economic superpower – but because of its utility as a key ideological prop for the Zionist enterprise. In the same way, Iran plays the same propaganda game in relation to Israel. Just as Israel used this propaganda to justify the brutal oppression of Palestine, Iran used the same to mobilize supporters and death squads against opponents – mostly Sunni Muslims – in Iraq and Syria as it built its sub-imperial arc from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea.
While the world witnessed the performative deployment of great military hardware on both sides, as both proclaimed self-defense, there was no power to knock out Israeli planes bombing Palestinians; no discussion of Palestine’s right to defend itself.
But now in the context of its Gaza genocide and the mass global opposition that was confronting it, an Iranian response became especially important for Israel, because if Iran’s response were harsh enough, it may force the U.S. to enter the battle directly against Iran, and under the cover of such a region-wide conflagration, Israel could carry out its genocide in Gaza–and the West Bank–to completion. Israel’s crimes would become a mere sideshow compared to this “bigger picture,” and the world could be convinced that “poor little Israel” faces powerful enemies attacking it. So, it finally made the decision to hit the Iranian consulate in Syria, knowing Iran would now have no choice but to respond at some level or lose face completely.
At first, Iran said it held the U.S. responsible, a hint that the response might simply be that its Iraqi Shiite militia proxies go back to hitting U.S. bases in Iraq or Syria, something they stopped completely months ago (under Iranian regime pressure). Then the U.S. stressed that it was not “involved in any way whatsoever,” that it had received no advance warning from Israel (and was not happy about that), so Iran had better not hit U.S. forces. This was a hint that Iran should instead hit Israeli interests, somewhere. Then Iran hinted that its response would not be of an escalatory nature, and U.S. sources initially agreed that the response would be minor. But then we began to read in the media exactly what its response would be–a drone and missile attack on Israel from Iranian territory–somewhat more significant than initially expected. But the reason we could read about it was that Iran gave the U.S. 72 hours’ notice via various intermediaries–Oman, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Switzerland have all been mentioned–so that the U.S. and Israel would know exactly what was coming, giving them plenty of time to prepare. In real-time theatre, discussions were essentially going on in the media between the U.S. and Iran through these intermediaries over what was deemed to be within reasonable limits to avoid escalation and so on. The U.S. made it clear that if Iran hit Israel, U.S. support for Israel’s defense is “ironclad.”
Of course, this well-choreographed retaliation gave time for Israel, the U.S., the U.K., France, and even Jordan to be well-positioned to shoot down 99 percent of the 350 drones and missiles that Iran sent against Israel. Reportedly, some drones even had their lights on! Iran’s attack was aimed at an Israeli military base, not at civilians, as U.S. leaders confirmed. Iran then declared that the matter was “concluded”. Meanwhile, since the U.S.’s “ironclad” defense of Israel had indeed been successfully put into action, the U.S. therefore, did not need to do any more. Biden commended Israel on the success of its amazing air defense system–even though this may not have been the case if the U.S. and others had not helped–telling Israel, “You got a win. Take the win” and move on; Biden stressed that the U.S. would not support or participate in any offensive Israeli operations against Iran in retaliation.
Damage in Gaza, October 2023. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The U.K., France, Germany, and other Western countries all likewise called on Israel to avoid retaliating. Russia and China neither supported nor condemned Iran’s attack (just as the U.S., U.K., and France had refused to condemn Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in the UN) but expressed alarm about escalation and called for calm.
So, who won, lost, or came out even in this?
Iran and the U.S., for their own reasons, want to avoid escalation. Israel, for reasons explained above, wants to escalate, but not to fight Iran itself, but rather focus on smashing Gaza. For Israel, escalation means that the U.S. gets sucked into a war of non-choice with Iran while Israel gets on with killing the Palestinians, its real, not phantom, enemies. The U.S. has given Israel 100 percent of its support – despite occasional toothless hand-wringing – to Israel’s war of genocide in Gaza but has no interest in getting sucked into Netanyahu’s escalatory games. This reluctance is not out of pacifism; it’s just that it has much bigger issues with Russia in Ukraine and China in the South China Sea, and, as Obama’s Iran nuclear accord showed, the Democrats at least have a more rational understanding that Iranian capitalism merely wants a recognized place in the region and that the bluster, is, well, bluster.
From that perspective, Israel did gain a lot. Above all, the whole episode created a theatrical distraction from Gaza; it allowed Israel to get on with mass murder while the world’s attention was elsewhere; it covered Israel scuttling the latest negotiations of ceasefire and hostage release; and it demonstrated how efficient its defenses were. The fact that Iran chose a full frontal attack on Israel, rather than an equivalent act such as hitting an Israeli embassy somewhere, allows Israel to again play-act that it is up against a powerful “evil” regime that wants to destroy it. The episode assembled a collection of Western powers and even Jordan as a “defend Israel” coalition. The escalating criticisms of its monstrous war coming from various Western powers, even to some extent from Biden and the U.S. government, have now been blunted. Massive new arms deals with Israel and sanctions on Iran are the word from the U.S. and Western allies.
On the other hand, this is not quite enough for Netanyahu; it is not quite a regional conflagration. The limitations, and above all the choreography, of Iran’s harmless attack do nothing to bring in the U.S. to wage war on Iran; on the contrary, it allows the U.S. to preach restraint.
Iran also gained: It could say, we retaliated for the violation of our consulate, but we also acted responsibly. If Iran had not planned for all its drones and missiles to be shot down, then this would be a severe humiliation. But since that was precisely the plan, Iran simultaneously gained credibility and showed “responsibility.” It also demonstrated that it had had the potential to do damage if it had not given extensive warning, and clear notice to Israel that it no longer accepted the previous rules. It was also a useful exercise for Iran to “test out” Israeli air defense weaponry, though of course, Israel benefits in the same way.
Above all, the whole episode created a theatrical distraction from Gaza; it allowed Israel to get on with mass murder while the world’s attention was elsewhere; it covered Israel scuttling the latest negotiations of ceasefire and hostage release; and it demonstrated how efficient its defenses were.
But again, on the other hand, it can also be argued that Iran fell into Israel’s trap by retaliating, though it had little choice. While the planned results of its attack show restraint, just the fact that it chose a full-frontal attack from its territory as its method of retaliation has allowed the West to denounce “Iranian aggression” and step up support for Israel.
Arguably, the U.S. gained the most by being in a position to jointly choreograph, with Iran, the latter’s response through intermediaries and then play the decisive role in helping Israel shoot down all the Iranian hardware, it placed itself in a strong position. If its aim was to show it could defend Israel while avoiding escalation, it came out on top. While the U.S. tells Israel it should be happy to see how well its defenses performed, Israel knows its dependence on the U.S. has been displayed; this arguably puts the U.S. in a strong position to moderate Israel’s next steps.
Of course, the U.S. has continually criticized some aspects of Israel’s war while at every stage supplying Israel with the weapons to carry out its genocide, so no one should wager too much on the idea that the U.S. will not buckle if Israel were to choose a hard escalatory response. However, it appears that this has been avoided with yet another piece of elaborate theatre, this time by Israel.
Following Iran’s attack, Israel immediately announced that it had to respond and would “decide for itself” in a pointed snub to U.S. advice. As expected, the U.S. began to come around, U.S. leaders now claiming to understand that Israel “had to respond” in some way. So, the U.S. advised Israel to keep it non-escalatory. But if Israel’s response to Iran’s response was not proportionate or bigger, that would not be good for Israel’s credibility. Some Israeli leaders wanted to wage a massive attack on Iran. To prevent that, it appears that the U.S. came up with a deal to save Israel, Iran, and the region from escalation at the expense of the Palestinians.
According to Egyptian officials cited by The Times of Israel on Thursday, “The American administration showed acceptance of the plan previously presented by the occupation government regarding the military operation in Rafah, in exchange for not carrying out a large-scale attack against Iran” [emphasis added]. In other words, no retaliation has been replaced with no “large-scale” retaliation. This is all Israel has to promise in order for the U.S. to give its assent – thus far not clearly given – for Israel to launch its heralded attack on Rafah, where 1.5 million Palestinians have been driven, up against the border of Egypt, into which Israel would like to expel them.
On Friday, April 19, Israel launched its retaliation. Explosions were heard in the Iranian city of Isfahan. Israel did not explicitly report anything; Iran said the explosions were not missiles but the actions of its air defenses knocking out several drones; Iran said the event was so small that it is uncertain where the drones came from and speculated that it may have been an internal attack by “infiltrators” and indicated that it therefore had no plans to retaliate.
Before proclaiming this as a victory for Iran and a climb-down by Israel, by targeting Isfahan, where Iran has major sites of its nuclear program, without hitting them, Israel has shown that it can target them if it chooses to. Therefore, despite the small size of the action, it is an important implicit threat.
Iran wins; Israel wins; escalation is avoided (for now); the U.S. wins. But if the terms of the alleged deal are true, Palestine loses. Following Iran’s retaliatory attack, its UN mission declared it had been conducted “in response to the Zionist regime’s aggression against our diplomatic premises in Damascus” based on Article 51 of the UN Charter “pertaining to legitimate defense,” and therefore the matter can be deemed concluded.” This was not only a message to Israel, but also to Palestine; if, as expected, Israel now goes ahead with a savage attack on Rafah, backed by the U.S., Palestine is on its own.
Ruthlessly repressive capitalist dictatorships like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, the UAE, and so on have nothing to offer the Palestinian people and never have had – regardless of their rhetoric and whether they use hollow phrases like “resistance” in their titles or not. On one hand, none have ever done anything to aid Palestine; on the other, given their nature as active enemies of human emancipation, even if they did make bumbling attempts to live up to their rhetoric, it would tend to be counterproductive.
The entirely theatrical nature of the past week’s events merely highlights this fact graphically. Only the oppressed peoples of the region, when they next rise against their oppressors, can be real allies of Palestine. In the meantime, all solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in Rafah and throughout Gaza is essential to prevent Israel from using the past week’s events to further its genocidal project.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Indeed, due to this original sin, the Palestinians have no right to ever demand a return to this original partition or one closer to 50/50 (if the preferable one-state solution continues to evade them).
Logical right? Why don’t we try some other examples?
Russia has conquered and annexed about 20% of Ukraine. Not surprisingly, Ukraine does not agree and fights back, just like the Palestinians in 1948 rejected losing more than half of their country. So therefore, due to Ukraine’s rudeness in not accepting that might equals right, now Russia should annex 50% of Ukraine, and it will be Ukraine’s own fault.
In 1974, Turkey conquered 38% of Cyprus (ethnic Turkish Cypriots were 18% of the population, scattered throughout the island), and later declared this a ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Cyprus rejected this partition and continues to, so therefore Turkey has the right to annex about 60% of Cyprus as punishment for this affront.
After centuries of colonialism, Britain partitioned Ireland in 1922, generously allowing the Irish to have a full 5/6ths of their country, only keeping one sixth for the Empire. The Republic of Ireland never accepted this and in the 1960s through 1990s the nationalist population in the north fought to end the partition. Therefore, Britain certainly has the right to now conquer at least one third of Ireland as recompense for this rejection of British goodwill.
And if that is the correct punishment for merely rejecting the violent partition of one’s homeland, surely this principle should apply double or triple when a country outright invades or takes over another country? Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, so therefore Iran is surely entitled to about half of Iraq’s territory as compensation, right? France occupied Algeria, Italy occupied Libya and so on, therefore Algeria is entitled to half of France, and Libya is entitled to half of Italy, and so on and so forth, though we start getting confused about which side is the one that should get the compensation, maybe Algeria should be punished for rejecting the humane offer of French rule by having to pay France for independence; hang on, that’s exactly what happened to the people of Haiti after all.
Of course there is no point continuing with this absurdity; so why is it so commonly accepted that only the first case is not absurd?
The data and timeline are well-known. By 1947, about one third of the population of Palestine consisted of Jews, overwhelmingly those who had immigrated as part of the Zionist program in recent decades (but including a small number of Indigenous Jews), while two-thirds were Palestinian Arabs. What is wrong with a partition being imposed on the Indigenous Palestinians by foreign imperialist and other powers? One can easily think of three objections:
1.It was not the decision of the people who lived there; the principle of self-determination says that massive life-changing ‘solutions’ should not be imposed on people by outside powerful states;
2. It is normal for people to reject having their own country partitioned, no matter what the percentages, above all because the Palestinian people lived scattered all over Palestine, so a large part of their population would find themselves either ethnically cleansed or living under the rule of the proposed ‘Jewish state’; for the same reasons, partition was an unacceptable solution in countries like Cyprus and Bosnia, where the populations (Greek and Turkish Cypriots; Bosnian Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks [Muslims] and ‘Yugoslavs’ [mixed Bosnians]) lived scattered all over those lands.
3. Even if they had accepted the (bad) principle of partition, why would the Palestinians accept such an unfair partition, in which the one third Jewish population were awarded 56% of the land and the two thirds Palestinian population only 43% (with one percent the city of Jerusalem)? In which Palestinians would have been a majority of the population even in the ‘Jewish state’, ie a state they would have no rights in (much the same situation likewise existed for Greek Cypriots in the ‘Turkish’ Republic of Northern Cyprus and Bosnian Muslims in the ‘Serb’ Republic in Bosnia).
What is not widely known is that in 1946 the Arab governments had proposed an alternative plan to partition: a united democratic state where “all citizens would be represented in the guarantee of civil and political rights” where Jews would have a “permanent and secure position in the country with full participation in its political life on a footing of absolute equality with the Arabs.” The Zionist movement and its imperialist and Soviet backers rejected this in favour of a brutal and unequal partition, yet it is the Palestinians that should be punished by losing even more land.
The Nakbah that Israel launched following (and preceding) the Palestinian rejection of partition of their land involved massive ethnic cleansing, a string of some 70 horrific massacres and and the destruction of 530 towns and villages, killing 15,000 Palestinians; the 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed were never allowed to return, despite UN Resolution 194 of 1948 which demands it; they and their descendants now number nearly 10 times that figure.
In response to the Nakbah, a number of semi-feudal Arab states made a weak attempt to protect the ‘Arab state’ by sending in troops; the Zionist assertions that the Nakbah was ‘in response’ to this ‘Arab invasion’ are belied by simply chronology: take the most well-known event in the Nakbah, the Zionist massacre of Deir Yassin in Jerusalem (in which estimates from 107 to 254 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered) as a key example; the date was April 9, 1948; the state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, and only after that did the Arab armies enter to the UN-assigned ‘Arab state’. That is when Israel conquered half of that ‘Arab state’ and expanded its rule to 78 percent of Palestine (while of the remaining 22 percent, the West Bank – including East Jerusalem – went under Jordanian control and Gaza under Egyptian control, both conquered by Israel in 1967).
While the only logical solution is a democratic state for all who live there, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Israelis, Palestinians, one person one vote, together with right of return of Palestinian refugees, the PLO program since 1948, it is the ‘two-state’ solution, whereby Israel keeps its 78% and a state of Palestine is established on the 22% ‘occupied territories’, that has international support (except the US and Israel). Since there are around 7.1 million Israeli Jews and 7.4 million Palestinians now living between the river and the sea (not including the Palestinian refugees), this ‘two-state solution’ is manifestly unjust, yet despite this it is Israel that has always rejected it, and the Palestinian leadership which has accepted it (if combined with return of refugees to the 78% ‘Israel’ with equal rights there) since the late 1970s (as I have documented here).
But in reality, given the roughly equal population numbers, if there were to be a two-state rather than one-state solution (if the latter is impossible to achieve in the short-term), surely a roughly 50/50 split – something closer to the 1947 plan but improved – would be manifestly fairer. Yet the completely just and logical Palestinian rejection of partition in 1947 is today cited as a Palestinian ‘original sin’ that can never be returned to as Israel naturally had the ‘right’ to violate UN Resolution 181 by seizing 78% of Palestine with gruesome violence and terrorism. Think about – where is the logic?
Israel “withdrew” from 6% of internationally-recognised Palestine, or 1.2% of historic Palestine; so small it is hard to see on a map, yet are expected to not resist the occupation of the rest of their country?
There are a number of problems with this. The first is widely noted by pro-Palestine advocates: that Israeli “withdrawal” was accompanied by placing Gaza under a land, sea and air blockade which prevented most goods and people form getting in or out, while Israel regularly bombed the territory, every few years in major near-genocidal operations, bombed its water and power plants, left the people undernourished and with access to only unclean water, shot at Palestinian fishing boats and so on; when a country has no control over its borders because it is blockaded by its “former” occupier, it remains occupied according to international law, not to mention common sense. And of course the devastating impacts of this blockade have been widely reported, with the United Nations reporting that Gaza was “unliveable” – imagine, that is before this current holocaust.
But there is a more fundamental reason why this is a stupid argument: Gaza is not a nation, or country or state. The nation is Palestine; the state, as recognised by the UN General Assembly and the vast majority of nations on Earth since the 1970s, covers the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967, namely West Bank and Gaza with its capital in East Jerusalem, one fifth of historic Palestine (for argument’s sake let’s leave aside for now the definition of Palestine as, well, all of Palestine, and the fact that 75 percent of ‘Gazans’ are actually refugees ethnically cleansed from ‘Israel’).
Now, the West Bank is 5655 square kilometres; Gaza is 365 square kilometres, meaning the internationally recognised state of Palestine is 6020 square kilometres; Gaza is therefore only around 6 percent of the Palestinian state (even though there are almost 3 million living in the West Bank and 2.3 million squeezed into Gaza). Again, let’s leave aside for now that since Israel itself is 22,770 square kilometres, Gaza is therefore only 1.2 percent of historic Palestine.
In other words, even if we leave aside the blockade and accept the Zionist premise that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it therefore “withdrew” from only 6 percent of the occupied state of Palestine (or 1.2 percent of historic Palestine). So, what would we expect a people to do when the colonial occupier leaves only 6 percent of their country? Would they just say, OK, sweet, let’s just get on with it, or would they use this space to continue to resist the ongoing occupation of the rest of their country?
Let’s imagine – in the 1950s, France had withdrawn from the town of Oran on the north Algerian coastline, and a tiny area around it, but maintained its occupation of 94 percent of Algeria. So, would the Algerians in Oran set up an independent ‘Republic of Oran’ and say stuff the rest of Algeria? Or would it have been a base for the independence struggle of the rest of Algeria? The answer is obvious. The idea that the allegedly ‘free’ Gazans would have just sat pretty while Israel continued to occupy, colonise, steal land and murder in the West Bank and Jerusalem is absurd, and offensive.
Israel “withdrew” from Gaza, if we ignore the blockade that made life unliveable, it did not withdraw from Palestine.
Take Ukraine. Russia is currently occupying around 20 percent of Ukraine. That means it is not occupying 80 percent of Ukraine. Putin expects Ukraine to just cop that, to sign a peace treaty allowing Russia to annex 20 percent of its land. Most people see that as self-evidently absurd and unjust. So Ukraine continues to resist. Why is it considered normal for Ukraine, 80 percent of which is unoccupied, to continue to resist Russian occupation of the 20 percent, but it is not considered normal for Palestine, in the 6 percent that was theoretically ‘unoccupied’, to continue to resist Israeli occupation of the 94 percent of Palestine?
There is actually a third thing wrong with the statement, since it implies that Hamas simply “fired rockets” willy nilly at Israel as if Israel was doing nothing wrong; and for argument’s sake, let’s leave aside both the blockade, and the continuing occupation 94 percent of the Palestinian state, both of which mean Palestinians in Gaza have the internationally recognised right to armed resistance. What it ignores is that after “withdrawal,” Israel continued to bomb Gaza whenever it felt like it. Now, it might be a standard Zionist argument, repeated inevitably in western media, that Israel only launched such bombs “in response” to Hamas rockets, leaving aside the fact that these Israeli bombings always killed far greater numbers of Palestinian civilians than the little home-made Hamas ‘rockets’ did Israelis (they mostly killed no-one). But anyone who believes that is simply a starry-eyed victim of propaganda. Do the research – just as often it was the other way around – Israel launches some targeted assassination and kills a dozen civilian “collateral” victims, Hamas responds with rockets.
Or, reflecting the unity of all of Palestine as noted above, Israel carries out some atrocity in the West Bank, or for example invades the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, so Hamas exercises its right to resist by launching some rockets from Gaza. Were these rockets effective, or always a good idea – perhaps not, tactics can be discussed, but when you live in a sealed-off prison you have few other options – but the idea that it was mostly Israel “responding” rather than the other way around is bald fiction.
Their Anti-imperialism and Ours 
