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| From: Irish Political Review: Editorials |
| Date: March, 0001 |
| By: Editorial |
Israel: The Sheen Of Power! |
| Israel: The Sheen Of Power! Israel, guided by the United States, has been exercising its right of self-defence in Gaza for five months, at the rate of killing about one and a half thousand Palestinians a week without response. The only Jewish casualties suffered during these five months of systematic Israeli killing have been of the Army that entered Gaza behind the bombing and followed it all the way to the Rafah border. The number of those military casualties has not been revealed, but it is certainly a small fraction of the Palestinian non-combatants that have been killed—even if only the children are counted as non-combatants. One thing that has been clarified during these months, in practice if not in principle, is that the right of self-defence possessed by nation-states extends to the defence of their conquests. Another thing that has been clarified is that the conquered do not have a right to resist. Right lies with the conqueror. Acts of resistance by the conquered are acts of terrorist aggression. That was explained five months ago by Secretary of State Blinken. He explained that military action by a body that is not a State is terrorism. Hamas somehow assembled a small military force under close Israeli supervision and conducted a Commando raid into Israel for the purpose of seizing hostages, whose return would be bargained for the release of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, many of whom are held without charge. The raid was successful because Israel left its border with Gaza undefended just then, even though it was deliberately provoking Palestinian resistance by its manoeuvres around the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. About twelve hundred people were killed during the raid, many of them at a music festival which was associated with the Israeli moves against the Al Aqsa Mosque. And it seems that some of this killing was done by random action of the Israeli Army when it was eventually alerted to the raid. That commando raid is freely described as genocide, even though its purpose was clearly not to exterminate the Jews, but to take some Jewish hostages for barter. The immediate response to the raid by the Israeli Government was to set in motion the systematic bombing of Gaza, and to declare that the bombing would continue until the Gaza from which the raid was launched would no longer exist. Cabinet Ministers said that the purpose was to make certain that nothing like the raid of October 7th could ever again be attempted. And the precedents they cited for what they intended to do to Gaza was not any flimsy "international law". What they cited was the precedent set by the utter destruction of Dresden by the Royal Air Force, along with the US Air Force, in four raids, conducted by 1,299 bombers, between 13th and 15th February 1945, carried out after Russia had ensured that the German Army would be defeated in battle; as well as the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—done to speed up the surrender of the Japanese Army by exterminating the civilian populations of undefended cities. Israel ignores as make-believe the law of the International Court of Justice, which it sees as an anti-Semitic cabal, and rests its case on the real-world conduct of the actual democratic states on which the Western system of life depends. And if Dresden and Hiroshima were not war-crimes, how can Gaza be a war crime? The question, from the viewpoint of Western civilisation, is not whether the prolonged destruction of Gaza is wrong. The question is whether it is advisable to carry it through to the end, taking account of the disillusioning influence it seems to be having on the large part of the world which does not belong to Western civilisation, but which has been impressed by Western pretensions and power in recent times. Israel acts as it does out of its own world view, but not by means of its own power. It was accorded the exceptional position of being a kind of world nation by the British Empire, when it was the Super-Power at the end of the Great War, and b y the USA when it took over from Britain after 1945. It was empowered by the British Empire at first, and now it is empowered by the United States. Judaism could not by its own resources have conquered Palestine and colonised it. And it could not be doing what it is now doing in Gaza without American permission and assistance. Britain was wholeheartedly supportive of the systematic destruction of Gaza for four months, as the population was driven South and bottled up against the frontier for a final assault. Then it became uneasy, and it looked for a way of dissociating itself from the fall-out of the final solution without doing anything effective to prevent it. On BBC's Newsnight on February 21st it was pointed out that America controlled what Israel was capable of doing, and that a strong word from the President was enough to moderate Israeli action. Three years ago Biden himself had done this. But now he was enabling Israel to do exactly as it pleased. A former State Department analyst, Laura Blumenfield, was asked for an explanation. And she gave it: "The magic word is security. In 2021 Israel's security was not t risk. October 7th changed everything. I think that today Israelis feel, and Americans feel, like Israel has a right and duty to defend itself. The question is, and Secretary of State at the very beginning. He said: How you do this matters. The United States has been pushing all along for Israel, yes, to prosecute the war, but to do so in a way that's morally defensible. BBC: So is it because it's election year? LB: Well it's election year everywhere… and there's a certain March madness to it. But I think that Biden has a real commitment to Israel's security, and they feel like the safe haven for Jews has turned into a slaughterhouse, and that real peace will come when Israel re-achieves deterrence. Everything that Israel has accomplished through the years has been a kind of sheen of power. If they lose that—remembering before October 7th the USA was shooting for a regional alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia isn't going to want to have any kind of security pact with Israel if they prove themselves to be weak. So in the long run they see this as an opportunity to create greater peace and greater regional restoration…" The "sheen of power" was lost by Israel on October 7th, and therefore the safe haven had become a slaughter-house. It is not Jews who are being slaughtered. The raid of October 7th was a one-off event. Its purpose was not to kill but to take prisoners. It was successful because Israeli defences were inactive. It was not a repeatable event. And ever since then the slaughtering has been the slaughtering of Palestinians in Gaza by Jews—with a few hundred Palestinians in the West Bank thrown in for good measure. And yet the statement that October 7th rubbed off the sheen of power projected by the safe haven, and made it feel like a slaughter-house, is not absurd. The British diplomats of Jewish nationalism—which went into alliance with the British Empire to provide a Jewish colony for the Palestinian state of the Empire which Britain decided to establish—engaged in the pretence that Palestine was effectively a land without people, ready to receive a people without land. The actual Jewish colonists knew otherwise. And Jabotinsky insisted on blurting out the truth that the Jewish return to Israel after 2,000 years would require the suppression of the inhabitants. The safe-haven was never safe. Some British socialists argued that Britain should have done the dirty work of driving the Arabs out of Palestine so that the Jews would not need to do it. That large-scale ethnic cleansing was necessary was recognised. But Britain had fostered Arab nationalism against Turkey at the same time as it offered Palestine to Jewish nationalism. And the first action of the Jewish State was a terrorism campaign which cleared out three-quarters of a million Palestinians, many of whose descendants are now under bombardment in Gaza. The safe-haven was never safe. It was always a base of operations against the Middle East in general. Ben Gurion, the founder of the State, knew that as well as Netanyahu does. Israel remains a conquering force, surrounded by natives, and its security relies on "the sheen of power". Absolute military dominance over all its neighbours is an existential necessity for it. And it is in the nature of things that absolute military dominance over others must be reinforced continuously, or else it will decay. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. It is also the only nuclear power. The two somehow go together these days. It is reported that the use of nuclear weapons has been discussed by the Cabinet. No doubt a humanitarian case could be made for them, relative to what is being done. The people of Hiroshima did not have time to suffer. They were snuffed out on the instant. Israel is the only unbalanced nuclear power in the world. Its great concern, and that of the United States, is that it should remain unbalanced. For all others the principle of mutually assured destruction applies. But there is no balance in the Middle East—a fact which is never discussed when nuclear proliferation is discussed. But, despite the fact that it has the power to destroy all neighbouring states, Israel is unsettled at source by the small commando raid carried out against it on October 7th. And, the more it kills in retaliation, the more vulnerable it feels. Orly Goldsmith, who speaks to the media for Netanyahu, explains very sincerely that what Israel seems to be doing to the people of Gaza is really being done to them by Hamas, which is the oppressor of the people of Gaza, from which Israel wants to liberate them. And then, with equal sincerity, she describes Hamas as being so thoroughly embedded in the people of Gaza that one wonders how she could possibly think that Hamas could possibly be destroyed in any other way than by destroying the people. |