The war in Israel/Palestine

Stop the siege of Gaza: ceasefire now!

Thousands of people, overwhelmingly civilians, have now been killed in the war between the Israeli state and Hamas.

1,300 Israelis were killed in Hamas’s attacks and 126, including many children, have been taken hostage. Over 2,500 Palestinians, including many children, have been killed in retaliatory air strikes, with many more sure to die as Israel tightens its siege and prepares a ground invasion. Palestinians, including children, have also been killed by settlers in the West Bank. The civilian population of Gaza is suffering under a brutal siege, with access to basic utilities cut off by Israel. Israel has told 1.1 million Gazans to evacuate - an impossible task. Israel's siege of Gaza represents a crime against humanity. It is an act of vengeance that will devastate Gaza and will bring neither peace nor security to Israelis.

Palestinians and Israelis have a right to security and to life. In the face of attacks on its civilian population, Israel has a right to self-defence. Some on the left oppose this, believing all Israeli civilians are legitimate targets. This “leftism” is a grotesquely distorted caricature of the principles on which our politics should be based.

But Israel’s response - cutting off utilities to Gaza, devastating air assaults, a potential ground invasion, and further intensification of its military dictatorship over the West Bank - goes way beyond “self-defence”. Israeli leaders talk of reducing Gaza to “a city of rubble.” Much of what Israel does in the name of “self-defence” is unjustifiable collective punishment. Even if it is successful in immediately undermining Hamas's military capacity, the humanitarian crisis Israel is creating will kill thousands, displace hundreds of thousands, and will encourage Palestinians to see Israel only as a hated oppressor.

The slaughter and brutality must end: hostages must be freed, there must be an immediate ceasefire. Basic utilities must be restored to Gaza, and humanitarian aid urgently increased. Longer term, peace and justice requires a framework that guarantees equal rights to both Palestinians and Israeli Jews, including an equal right to self-determination: an end to the occupation, and the establishment of a genuinely independent Palestinian state, alongside and with equal rights to Israel.

The Palestinians are a colonised people. They have a right to resist and to defend themselves against military attack, although Gaza's pummeled civilian population has little means of doing so. They need international support, via diplomatic pressure on Israel; governments like the US and UK must end their public carte-blanche attitude to Israel's actions and demand it ends the siege.

However, it does not follow from the principle of supporting Palestinians' right to resist that we must support any action undertaken in the name of “resistance”. Hamas's attacks on Israeli civilians - indiscriminate rocket firing at civilian targets, and gunning people down in their homes - cannot possibly serve emancipatory and democratic ends. One video circulating on social media appears to show fighters parading the mangled corpse of an Israeli child, stripped almost naked, through the streets on a truck, whilst chanting “god is great”. These are actions carried out by partisans of a violently reactionary ideology, hostile not only to the Israeli military or state but to Israelis as such, and specifically to Jews. Socialists who cannot see this worldview has nothing in common with our own — egalitarian, democratic, humanist — perspective have lost their bearings.

Hamas is, in any case, not merely an abstract expression of “resistance”. It has a developed political programme and social project, and is allied to several of Israel’s regional-imperialist rivals, including the clerical-fascist regime of Iran. Hamas uses brutal means because its ends, the imposition of a theocratic state, are brutal. Other Palestinians, women, LGBT+ people, atheists and others, have also been victims of that brutality. Some leftist commentators initially celebrated Hamas’s actions as an advance for “democracy and human rights”. But democracy and human rights cannot be advanced by a political force that explicitly opposes both.

Some have argued those who support Ukraine’s right to militarily resist Russian invasion should support all Palestinian resistance on the same basis. Politics by analogy is always limited, but the relevant parallel here would be to a hypothetical scenario in which a far-right Ukrainian militia was attacking Russian towns, indiscriminately shooting at civilians, and taking Russian civilian hostages, all on the basis of a political programme that advocated the wholesale destruction of Russia. There is no such situation in Ukraine, but if there was, there would be no socialist or anti-imperialist principle that could justify any support for that.

Hamas's attacks were not merely reactive, but a proactive pursuit of their reactionary political aims. Nevertheless, the situation cannot be understood outside of its context. The current Israeli regime is the most far-right government in the country’s history, with an explicitly Jewish-supremacist policy. Leading figures use quasi-genocidal language about Palestinians. Settler violence is at an all-time high, with settler gangs carrying out pogroms against Palestinians. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has intensified its repression. The residents of Gaza continue to live in abject conditions, with widespread poverty. All of this cannot but have deepened a sense of desperation amongst the Palestinian people, which will have bolstered support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

While Hamas can inflict significant damage, they cannot militarily overwhelm Israel by themselves. They could only hope to do that as part of a regional, possibly global, conflict, in which Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, and other states also intervene against Israel. Such a conflict would be a bloodbath out of which no democratic outcome could emerge, and in which any prospect for distinct Palestinian self-determination would almost certainly be squeezed out by the regional-imperialist aspirations of competing states.

Hamas’s incursion was launched a week after a Qatar-brokered deal saw Israel reopen border crossings from Gaza to allow residents who work in Israel to cross. The deal itself followed demonstrations at the border, to which Israel responded violently. In launching its incursion, Hamas has evidently decided to risk its own relations with Qatar — which may, in any case, have soured recently for other reasons. According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Hamas has also claimed that Qatar has also unilaterally reduced the amount it pays to Gaza in aid. Although, according to a deal with Israel, it is meant to pay $10 million per month, for the last several it has, Hamas says, paid just $3 million.

It may also be the case that part of Hamas’s aim is to snuff out prospects for a “normalisation” deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Any such deal will be for the benefit of the Saudi and Israeli ruling classes rather than the Palestinian people. But if Hamas’s alternative is to spark an all-out war, that will harm, not help, the Palestinians. Recognition by surrounding states of Israel's right to exist will be a necessary part of any future peace settlement.

That Israel, one of the most militarised states in the world, and possessing the most developed security apparatus in the region, was caught unawares by attacks that were clearly meticulously planned, and must have taken weeks of preparation, is extraordinary and, for now, inexplicable. Israel tells its people that militarisation, the occupation, and its periodic raids on Gaza are all necessary in order to protect Israeli Jews. That claim has been spectacularly undermined.

The risk of a wider war is now acute. If Hezbollah, or Iran itself, intervenes, it will be in pursuit of Iran’s own regional-imperialist and ideological aspirations, not in pursuit of democracy and equality for Palestinians. Civilians on all sides will pay the price. Whatever happens in the immediate term will set back, rather than advance, prospects for social transformation that improves life for the Palestinians.

The activity of the sizeable Palestinian minority inside Israel will be an important factor in the developing situation. Although they face intensifying racism and discrimination, they have substantially more freedom to act than the occupied and blockaded Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. Significant mobilisation, including strikes, by Palestinians in Israel for democratic demands could check the warmongering of the Israeli government, especially if such activity is able to unite in any way with continuing mobilisation by the anti-occupation wing of Israel's democracy movement.

Activists in that movement must resist the nationalist drive for "unity" behind Israel's war. Several survivors of Hamas's massacres, and relatives of the kidnapped and killed, have already made inspiring statements condemning Netanyahu's response. The son of Vivian Silver, an activist in Women Wage Peace who has been taken hostage, has said "vengeance is not a strategy." There is a burgeoning campaign in Israel society demanding more effective government action to ensure the release of hostages. Protests were held in Tel Aviv on 14 October. Standing Together is forming community self-defence organisations to resist attempts by far-right politicians such as Itamar Ben-Gvir to stoke racism against Palestinian communities in Israel.

There has never been a “military solution” to the political crisis in Israel/Palestine - neither for Israel, whose military occupation will never extirpate Palestinians’ aspiration for a national future in their historic homeland, nor for the Palestinians themselves. Progress is only possible on the basis of a framework that guarantees equal rights to both peoples, Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab, including an equal right to national self-determination via two independent states. However remote the prospect of such a framework is, and it is surely remote, it remains the only possible platform for moves towards the future unity and confederation that internationalists advocate.

In a frightening and tragic context, fighters for real democracy and equality in Israel/Palestine, such as the Standing Together movement, will have to redouble their efforts of advocacy and mobilisation. The best role we can play is to support them.

Some organisations doing important work on the ground: