Daily Times

Israel identifies Hamas as its major enemy, hence its real target of belligerence. The latter is a religious organisation that many consider the brainchild of Israel itself. Author Robert Dreyfuss states, “Beginning in 1967 through the late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Brotherhood, in creating Hamas, betting that its Islamist character would weaken the PLO.” Charles Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, is of the same opinion. He says, “Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet [Israel’s intelligence agency], which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO.” In the same vein, New York Times reporter David Shipler endorses the same point of view by stating, “Politically speaking, Islamic fundamentalists were sometimes regarded as useful to Israel because they had conflicts with the secular supporters of the PLO…Israeli military governor of the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, once told me how he had financed the Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the Communists. The Israeli government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques.”
Over the years, the secular wing of the Palestinian Authority al Fatah (PLO) has lost its credibility. In the elections held in 2006, a sizeable majority in Gaza instead of al Fatah, notorious for its inept, impotent and corrupt rule, voted Hamas into power. Instead of giving credence to the wishes of Palestinians, the US, an ardent disciple of democracy and an overt supporter of various Afghan jihadi organisations, on the contrary, declared Hamas a terrorist organisation. Elections do not change the master-slave relations. Hence, they never brought any relief to the dispossessed people. Akin to al Fatah, Hamas turned out to be an equally corrupt, anti-people and pro-capitalist organisation. Barring the name of religion, it has nothing new in its armoury. It is content to work in the same rotten system based on objectified alienated labour.
For the first time in the recent past, both al Fatah and Hamas — the ruling factions of Palestinian capitalism — while finding common grounds in their class interests finally agreed to resolve their differences. The ruling Israeli bourgeoisie did not like it. The reason is quite obvious. The ‘unity government’ is likely to share massive gas reserves imbedded in the Gaza coast. According to the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, “The market value of the gas is estimated at $ 4 billion. Therefore, sale of the gas to Israel would mean a billion-dollar windfall…for the Palestinian people” [Lt Gen (retd) Moshe Yaalon, Oct 19. 2007]. Any unity government will oversee the realisation of this dream worth $ 1 billion to its coffers. Though this will only end up enhancing the domination and hegemony of the Palestinian capitalist class, some of the trickle down effect is likely to reduce the perdition of the people too. But what is meat for Palestine is poison for Israel, which solely wants to annex this gold rush. This is one of the major invisible underlying factors of this latest onslaught unleashed by Israel. The idea of a unitary government has already been undone and dusted. The expropriation and absolute devastation of Palestine is hence accomplished.
On the other side of the fence stands the Israeli ruling class, which too is losing its conventional hegemony of ruling through consent. Capitalism is a global phenomenon, hence its crisis has universal repercussions. Israel is no exception. According to the Israeli National Insurance Report, one in four Israelis, in other words over 1.6 million people, are forced to live below the poverty line. Every third child is afflicted by penury. It is a staggering rise in poverty. A study conducted by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reveals that more than half a million people in Israel are having severe financial difficulties. Among the Jewish population, 19 percent children have to starve at least once a week. Economic hardships have cleaved the people into right, ultra right and left wing segments. It is ironic to see an upsurge of Nazi-style fascism among the people who once were one of its main victims, probably an allurement of the Stockholm syndrome.
According to Freud, a love-hate relationship invariably results in the “return of the repressed”. Despite being slain, the father figure returns and dominates. In this case, the return of the repressed has taken the form of fascism that has returned to possess the already totalitarian regime of Israel. The democratic abolition of thought of its own people is carried out by the same repression that “makes the established system into an insuperable framework for conceptual thought”.
No matter it is Gaza, Syria or eastern Ukraine, the deluge of capitalism is democratically dispensing death. Headless, limbless torsos are a common sight. The recently found oil resources in and around Syria and Donetsk are fuelling this war of expropriation. A Mexican geopolitical expert, Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, candidly confirms the aforementioned proposition. He says, “In each of these war theatres, the fighting revolves around the control of hydrocarbons.” Unless one understands the nature of capitalism, the senseless mass murder of civilians, especially children, becomes unexplainable. Herbert Marcuse was succinct in stating: “Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilisation…In a repressive civilisation, death itself becomes an instrument of repression…Theology and philosophy today compete with each other in celebrating death as an existential category: perverting a biological fact into an ontological essence, they bestow transcendental blessing on the guilt of mankind which they help to perpetuate — they betray the promise of Utopia.” He concludes, “The world of the concentration camps…was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society into which we are plunged every day.”
The ruling capitalist classes of both Palestine (including the Arab world) and Israel have their hands soaked in the blood of the working class of either side. Both are equally corrupt, callous and power hungry. Either of them is busy in satisfying its ends, one through its meekness while the other through its military might. Their nefarious designs are inimical to the interests of the people. Its time that workers realise what Rosa Luxemburg stated a century ago. This great leader of the proletariat warned the workers that “to be locked in the embrace of death and tumbling in a common grave will be a fiendish jest of history…Where is there a nation in which the people have had the right to determine the form and conditions of their national, political and social development?”
No nation is free that has its freedom based on the domination of another nation. But as Horkheimer suggests, under capitalism, “rational persuasion can never be as effective because it is not congenial to the repressed primitive urges of superficially civilised people”. The rationalised irrationality of civilisation, which augments these primitive urges akin to Freudian aggression, can only be confronted and conquered by a joint struggle of the working class, since it has nothing to lose but its chains. Till then, Gaza, the city of woes, will keep drenching in blood and tears, and the only question worth considering will be “how to guard the [bourgeois] nations and the free world”.

(Concluded)

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com. He blogs at saulatnagi.com