Daily Times

“If some things do not let you lose your sense of reason,” G E Lessing says, “then you have none to lose”. The same holds with the West, its reason, in the wake of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is at best labelled as a stylized barbarity. Leaving the Western media in the service of metropolitan capital aside which dances on the snapping fingers of the White House, one is awestruck by the complete indifference of the entire Muslim world to the phenomenon of genocide.

Most of the countries of the Arab world ruled by tinpot dictators and handpicked kings have their reasons. The first and foremost is the primitive Darwinian urge of the rulers to survive, maintaining the status quo, even if it means surviving at a vegetative level. On October 6, Saudia, whose stooges, Bahrain, and UAE had already signed the Abraham Accord, was almost on the verge of formally recognizing the Israelian entity. Both Jack (Jacob Jeremiah) Sullivan, Biden’s security advisor, and Netanyahu were patting themselves on dealing a death blow to the Palestinian cause, interring it into the graveyard of history.

In their euphoria and self-indulgence, they forgot that behind-the-scenes Palestinians were making history under the existing inhuman conditions, given, and transmitted by the past. “The material transformation in the economic conditions of production can be measured with mathematical precision by natural science,” Marx says, but how people fight their battles by understanding the ideological conflicts cannot be predicted.

If Houthis decide to attack the Saudi-UAE petroleum installations, it will be inimical for the world economy.

For the Palestinians, the desertion of the Muslim World especially the Abraham Accord was the turning point when their half-a-century-old war-of-position necessitated a sudden transformation into a war-of-manoeuver. The inhuman living conditions compelled them to give up their passive struggle for an active one. On October 7, Hamas as an elected governing body of occupied Gaza sensing the loss of hegemony and under pressure from its citizens for failing to provide not only the necessities of life but to raise the Palestinian question to the slumbering world, finally broke the siege by demolishing the wall of apartheid surrounding Gaza. A historical incident bigger than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its fighters stepped into their annexed homeland.

Killing the ordinary citizens was not part of the agenda. The freedom fighters were aiming to attack the army barracks to catch the Israeli soldiers unguarded, and to make them hostages to force Israel to release thousands of innocent Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons without any trial. The raid was successful. For nearly five hours, the Israeli army remained in a state of shock and awe. Once it came into action, sheer chaos followed. In a panic, the clueless reservists killed many Israeli hostages. They even did not spare the civilians on either side; their Apache helicopters charred them alive.

The war has now entered a siege state, which is reciprocal. “The mere fact that the ruler has to muster all resources,” Gramsci says, “demonstrates how seriously he takes his adversary”. “A too-long resistance in a besieged camp is demoralizing in itself”, Marx adds, “it implies suffering, fatigue, loss of rest, illness, and the continual presence not of the acute danger which tempers but of its chronic danger which destroys”.

In Gaza, the table has turned. The resistance in the besieged camp hasn’t hurt Hamas and its allied organizations, instead, it has enhanced the casualties and anxieties of the oppressor, bent upon ethnically cleansing the entire population. In this process, the oppressor is not only suffering massive economic losses but its Holocaust-manufactured victimized face as well. The Israeli society cannot live in a prolonged state of war. Akin to any Western society, Max Blumenthal says, the people of Israel want to enjoy their evenings with their girlfriends. A prolonged state of war/siege is bound to destroy the fabric of its entire society.

It looks as if Hamas has learnt quite a few lessons not only from Che Guevara’s diary but also from the Vietnamese guerillas’ struggle against France and the US. The present offensive of Hamas may have similarities with the Tet Offensive launched by the communist fighters of Vietnam. On January 31, 1968, the communist freedom fighters attacked the US & the South Vietnam army. The attack was much larger in scale than the one expected by the US intelligence. The communist fighters took over a major chunk of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), the capital of South Vietnam by storm.

Both sides suffered innumerable casualties. Although the communist fighters had to retreat from their positions, not before inflicting deep scars on the oppressors’ psyche and soma. The assault weakened the morale of the US army. The massive destruction of South Vietnam’s infrastructure and loss of US soldiers compelled the US army to seek numerical support of more than two hundred thousand soldiers from Washington DC. It also highlighted the futility of the US’s invasion of Southeast Asia. For the people of the US, the unpopular war became abhorrent, for it was inflicting senseless brutality upon a country situated thousands of miles away from the US borders.

Privy to the destructive instinct of the US army, the communist guerrillas took their entire infrastructure, e.g., ammunition, and hospitals, and in certain cases built entire cities underground in multiple tunnels. A lesson Hamas needs to learn to fight for another day. The fight between Palestinians and their oppressor is not a struggle between Israel and Palestine but a struggle, as Ilan Pappe says, between global Palestine and global Israel, between labour and capital. For now, the future of humanity appears to rest on the outcome of this conflict.

For Ilan Pappa, the current scenario has sealed the fate of Zionism for good. The dying Zionism he states in one of his recent interviews can last for a decade or two, but the global South averse to the ideology is eager to see its decimation sooner than later. The success of a free Palestine, he adds, will not be born from the barrel of a gun but by the mass mobilization of people of the world who have already taken to the streets. However, every factor, including the armed struggle, will strengthen to build a one-state solution, since the idea of a two-state solution has long become a part of the morgue.

To involve the US directly in the battlefield, Israel is desperately trying to expand the frontiers of its genocidal conflict beyond Gaza. It’s provoking Hezbollah in Lebanon, but Hassan Nasrullah-revered by Finkelstein– is playing his cards close to his chest. While describing Bertrand Russell’s esteem for Lenin for his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith in Marxism, Finkelstein, in a recent interview, identified Hassan Nasrullah with Lenin. “His [Lenin’s] mind,” Russell wrote, “was orderly and creative: he was a philosophic system-maker in the sphere of practice.… Statesmen of his calibre do not appear in the world more than about once in a century, and few of us are likely to live to see his equal”, Russel wrote.

For Finkelstein Hassan Nasrullah is a Muslim Lenin, the most thoughtful, tactical, and upright person; it’s the greatest tribute showered on Nasrullah by any notable academic. His strength is not only in building an advanced army laced with the latest armament but having a special knack for playing with the Israeli’s collective psyche. Being a pragmatist, he has no intentions of jeopardizing Lebanon’s ailing economy by attacking Israel, yet he is maintaining continuous pressure on the north of Israel engaging its main army on that front, leaving Israeli inexperienced reservists to fight an unwilling battle with Hamas.

Houthis in Yemen have already closed the Bab-Al-Mandeb, leading to a spike in the cost of insurance premiums for the ships carrying material to Israel. Following its traditional bellicosity against resistance forces, the US and its stooges are sending warships to the Red Sea to counter Houthis’ attacks. The Syrian and Iraqi armed groups have intensified their assaults on the US army deployed in their respective countries. Lest the West forget, Houthis, akin to the Palestinians, have nothing to lose. Yemen has already been destroyed by the Saudi-US nexus. However, if Houthis decide to attack the Saudi-UAE petroleum installations, it will be inimical for the world economy.

“No matter what political reasons are given for war”, AJP Taylor says, “the underlying reason is always economics”. And if economics begins to hurt, the wars are replaced with uneasy peace imposed by the dominant power. This genocidal war will also end, but the status quo is going to be horrifying. How could it be possible for the Palestinians to live beside their butchers in peace? A rootless Israel is shaken to the core. The final war between Global Palestine (labour), and Global Israel (capital) will be decisive, it will be fought if not now, sometimes shortly.

The writer is an Australian-based academic and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com