WeeklyWorker

07.12.2023
Al-Qassam brigades: armed wing of Hamas

Far from pacified

There can be no possibility of a military solution in Gaza. October 7 was a death trip, argues Daniel Lazare

Like it or not, guns, bombs and artillery can be highly useful in politics. But there are times when their use value runs out, and today’s Middle East is one of them.

This is true for all three of the key players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the United States, Israel itself and Hamas, the so-called Islamic Resistance Movement, which, despite its name, is doing more to facilitate Gaza’s destruction than stopping it. The result is ‘MAD’, which is to say ‘mutually assured destruction’ - to the nth degree. Yet none of the parties can extricate themselves from the downward spiral.

The US, for example, is desperate to maintain control of a region that has been a top priority for more than four decades. As Jimmy Carter announced in January 1980,

Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

The Carter Doctrine, as it came to be known, thus laid down the law that the gulf was henceforth to be regarded as an American lake. The text, written by national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, was a response to the Soviet Union’s incursion into Afghanistan a few weeks earlier. Washington interpreted Soviet intervention as a bid to gain control of the region’s unparalleled energy resources, which, if successful, would have given the USSR a lock on the global economy, at a time when oil prices were shooting through the roof. America’s goal over the next decade was therefore to topple the Moscow-backed government in Kabul and to rein in the new Islamic regime in Tehran as well.

Three major conflicts ensued - the Iran-Iraq war in 1980-88, the Gulf War in 1990-91, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 - not to mention US proxy wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. In their 2007 bestseller, The Israel lobby, the foreign-policy ‘realists’, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, argued that the Jewish state was a drag on US efforts to achieve regional dominance, since it merely saddled America with another client to protect at a time when its hands were full.

But the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis ran into a solid wall of opposition in Congress, the press and Washington’s innumerable foreign-policy think tanks - all united in the belief that a close alliance with the region’s strongest military power provided Washington with the comprehensive firepower needed to overawe the Middle East as a whole. Joe Biden summed up the neocon gospel in 1986: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel.” Or, as he put it in 2007,

Israel is the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East ... Imagine our circumstance in the world, were there no Israel. How many battleships would there be? How many troops would be stationed? ... When I was a young senator, I’d say, ‘If I were a Jew, I’d be a Zionist.’ I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.1

Yet the White House now finds that same dominance unravelling, as the horror in Gaza intensifies. Prior to October 7, the White House had put all its energy into the Abraham Accords - a grand scheme for a Saudi-Israeli alliance that would rein in Iran and bury the Palestinian problem in an unbreakable security structure, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea. Earlier in the year, China had unnerved the Biden administration by negotiating a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement that established the people’s republic as a major diplomatic player in what the US had regarded as its exclusive preserve. The purpose of the accords was to force China to back off, return Saudi Arabia to the American fold, and reinforce Zionist hegemony too.

Explosives

But, with Israel dropping an estimated 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza to date2 - two-thirds more than the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 - the Abraham Accords are effectively dead. Israel is so toxic as far as public opinion in the Middle East is concerned that the ever-shaky Saudi regime would not touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Hence the paradox: the more firepower the US pours in, the greater its loss of control. Yet, with border wars raging in Gaza and the Ukraine, the empire fears that it has no choice, since the slightest sign of weakness will cause more wars to erupt in the eastern Pacific, in the Bab el-Mandeb choke point, where Yemen’s Houthis are threatening to cut off Israeli shipping, and so on. So it does not dare stop.

Then there is Israel. Last week, two closely linked Israeli news outlets, +972 Magazine and Local Call, reported that the Israeli military was using artificial intelligence to generate targets “at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible”. The result, the exposé said, is a “mass assassination factory” that allows Israel to zero in on the homes of even junior Hamas operatives and blow them to smithereens, along with everyone inside.

“We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” one source explained. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office or a point where operatives meet.” Indeed, under the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ - so called after a Shi’ite district in Beirut that the Israeli airforce razed during the 2006 Lebanon war - Israel has taken to bombing high rises, universities, banks and government offices merely to terrorise and demoralise and so bring ‘civil pressure’ to bear on Hamas.3 Killing 15,000 Gazans is good, because it tells Palestinians that Hamas must be overthrown. If they do not get the message, Israel will kill 15,000 more and then 15,000 after that.

But what can the result be, other than more hatred and defiance? The Palestinian-American scholar, Tareq Baconi, points out that “Gaza’s defiant spirit ... did not begin with Hamas.” Since 1948, in fact,

Israel has waged more than 12 wars on Gaza, reoccupied the territory, isolated its inhabitants, placed the enclave under siege, and unilaterally disengaged in attempts to rid itself of the challenge it presents. In the 1950s, decades before Hamas’s creation, Israel designated Gaza a ‘Fedayeen’s nest’ - a territory that merited constant isolation and military bombardment to break the resistance. In the late 1980s, with the eruptions of the First Intifada, Israel began restricting the mobility of Palestinians from Gaza into Israel through the use of a complex permit system.4

Yet Gaza has remained unpacified throughout. Why should this time be different?

Although some anti-Zionists may object to putting them in the same boat, there is not only the effect on Palestinians to consider, but on Israel as well. With Benjamin Netanyahu also egging on anti-Palestinian violence on the West Bank, how long can such methodologies continue before Israel lurches even further to the right? After fleeing the Nazis in the 1940s, Israeli Jews may well end up discovering that they have merely exchanged one fascist regime for another.

Finally, there is Hamas. Jihad is not merely a tactic as far as the organization is concerned, but a way of life. To quote Baconi:

Waging jihad was understood as a way of being, as existing in a state of war or espousing a belligerent relationship with the enemy. Jihad was not limited to armed struggle, although this did comprise a central element of Hamas’s mission. Even in the absence of military operations, evoking jihad conjured a sense of identity and purpose that reaffirmed the Palestinian rejection of Israeli control.5

More than the health of the state, war is the state, as far as Hamas is concerned. The fact that armed struggle had gotten the Palestine Liberation Organisation nowhere over the years is meanwhile deemed inapplicable, because the PLO is secular, whereas Hamas is Islamic. Baconi says:

For Hamas success was thought to be predestined. The movement’s leaders believe that Hamas’s Islamic character would offer a robust ideological framework through which to offset the worldly pressures that had hamstrung the PLO before it.6

The fact that 75% of the population has been displaced thanks to Hamas’s provocations is immaterial, because god will prevail in the end.

Critics who label the results a death trip are not exaggerating. “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life,” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told a mass rally in Gaza in 2014. “We are called a nation of martyrs, and are proud to sacrifice martyrs,” Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad said in October.7

Given Hamas’s arch-reactionary politics, words like these cannot help but summon up memories of the Francoist battle cry, Viva la muerte (‘Long live death!’), or Hitler ranting in his bunker that “Germans deserve to perish” because they had betrayed him by losing the war (an incident brought out nicely in the 2004 movie Downfall).

But it is martyrdom for thee and not for me. Haniyeh, who reportedly made millions by taxing tunnel traffic at Gaza’s Rafah crossing, now lives in comfort in Qatar, while Hamad applauds mass death from the relative security of Beirut.

The discrepancy is not lost on the Gazan rank and file. A video shot by Hamas’s own TV’s station captured dozens of civilians cursing the organisation, as they emerged from the rubble during the recent four-day ceasefire. Following an Israeli air strike, a BBC clip showed a grieving Palestinian mother screaming in agony: “This is all because of Hamas’s dogs.” Another news clip showed a Palestinian man interrupting a Hamas press conference in order to blame the group, while an Al Jazeera reporter got an earful when he interviewed a civilian in the Al-Shifa hospital. “What’s happening is criminal,” the bystander said. “Why is the resistance hiding among us? Why don’t they go to hell and hide there? They are not resistance!” Immediately following the October 7 attack, dozens of Gazans took to social media to express fear and horror over what Hamas had unleashed.

“Hundreds condemned Hamas’s ‘adventures’ and reckless disregard for the wellbeing of its people in the coastal enclave,” wrote Palestinian-American political analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. “They considered the attack a suicide mission that would inevitably result in the total and utter destruction of the strip.”8

Consequences

An incident last week in which two Hamas fighters opened fire on an Israeli bus stop, killing three and wounding seven, was typical. Considering the tidal wave of deaths on the other side of the border, the murder of a few Israelis may seem insignificant. But what did Hamas hope to gain from such a criminal act, which it promptly endorsed,9 other than an end to the ceasefire and the death of thousands of Gazans more? War is its answer to all problems regardless of the consequences:

Jews and Arabs are drowned in a sea of chauvinist enthusiasm. Triumph on the one hand, rage and exasperation on the other. Communists are being murdered. Pogroms among Jews instigated. A tit for tat of murder and provocation. The ‘strafing expeditions’ of the Haganah are oil for the propaganda machine of the Arab patriots in their campaign to enlist the masses for more bloodshed. The military conflict and the smashing to bits of the workers’ movements are a boon to the chauvinist extremists in either camp.10

So wrote the Revolutionary Communist League, the Palestinian section of the Fourth International, in 1948. Except for the size of the bombs and the number of deaths, the situation 75 years later is unchanged. A workers’ state of Israel-Palestine in the context of a socialist Middle East will undoubtedly strike many as farfetched at the moment. But it is the only way out of the imperialist impasse - and the faux opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood that goes along with it.

  1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Nrv5izaTs.↩︎

  2. www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/9/israel-attacks-on-gaza-weapons-and-scale-of-destruction.↩︎

  3. www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza.↩︎

  4. T Baconi Hamas contained Stanford 2018, p225.↩︎

  5. Ibid p24.↩︎

  6. Ibid p28.↩︎

  7. Ibid pxix; see also twitter.com/GreenblattJD/status/1730634781111603242.↩︎

  8. forward.com/opinion/571232/hamas-unpopular-in-gaza-before-2023-israel-war.↩︎

  9. www.cnn.com/2023/11/30/middleeast/hamas-jerusalem-bus-stop-shooting-intl/index.html.↩︎

  10. www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol09/no03/kolhamaad.htm.↩︎