John McAnulty

2 January 2008

There’s a very strong reason for Israel’s blitzkrieg on Gaza. In fact in between the torrent of lies they spell out elements of their reasoning. The Zionists believe that if they obliterate Hamas and demoralise the continuing resistance of the Palestinian workers they can establish peace in the region.

Mind you, it’s a ‘peace’ that most people would flee from retching.  The peace would look just like the current state of war, only the Palestinians would agree to no longer resist.  They would agree to support the indefinite rule of the colonial settler state that dominates their lives. They would agree to live in large open prisons, constantly at the mercy of the Israeli military.  They would agree that the Palestinian refugees, forced from their homes by ethnic cleansing, could never return to the land of their birth. The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, has even suggested that it could solve the ‘Arab question’ in Israel, with Israeli Arabs shipped to the camps to join the rest of the underpeople, the victims of Zionist aggression. All the government faction cheerfully admit that their ‘peace’ in Gaza and the west bank would only be a stage.  They plan to go on to revisit the Lebanon with the bloody carnage they brought before and to take military action against Iran. 

Given that these bloodthirsty lunatics hold nuclear weapons, the consequences for us all of an Israeli victory would be fearful.

Why are they so confident that they can impose such a scheme?  The answer is they have the open support of the vast majority of Arab regimes and the capitulationist regime of Palestinian President Abbas. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have already signed up – Egypt has the back door to Gaza sealed with banks of machine guns while Israel massacres from the front.  Both have collaborated to starve the population of Gaza. 

What ties them together is quite simple.  All are client regimes of the United States of America. The US wants Israel to be the regional gendarmerie, suppressing revolution and protecting their oil interests. The Arab regimes are detested by Arab workers, rule through coercion and torture and rely on the US for survival.

Any protest that limits itself to Israel is too narrow. This is the US’s killing ground.  Israel received $300 billion in economic aid this year and a greater amount in military aid.  The current massacre was preceded by the delivery of a totally new ‘bunker buster’ bomb to the Israelis – even before it was deployed to the US forces! Both Bush and Obama are fanatical supporters of the Israeli strategy.  The US government openly justifies the slaughter and their allies in the other major capitalist powers manoeuvre to buy the Israelis time and defuse opposition.  Gordon Brown even called a situation where 100 Palestinians are killed for each Israeli ‘tit for tat’ and the call goes out for both sides to ceasefire, ignoring the Israeli aggression that set it off and trying to pin the blame for war on the victims. The latest plan from the Western powers is to bring in foreign troops to occupy Gaza without risk to Israeli troops and ensure the Palestinians are disarmed and unable to stage any resistance in future!

As with imperialist goons down the years, the Israelis hope to use overwhelming military force to achieve political victory.  In the process they are forced to risk political resources. A solidarity movement in Ireland can do nothing about the military situation.  We can do our best to inflict political damage on the imperialist side.

Our demand must be that Israel be made to pay for the genocide – boycott should not simply be the pinpricks of individual moral outrage but taken collectively by the institutions that claim to represent us.  The boycott of Israeli goods must be a demand we make of the Irish state and of the trade unions, civic institutions and political parties – calls must be matched by active campaigning to enforce the boycott.  The government should halt goods at the ports, break existing contracts and oppose European collaboration with Israel.  The ambassador should be immediately expelled.  It’s not so long ago that the great and the good were tut-tutting an academic boycott of Israel – contrast that to the absolute silence which greeted the destruction of the Islamic university in Gaza!

We should have nothing to do with calls for a return to the peace process or for a two-state solution or blather about the good offices of the UN, a tool of American foreign policy.  This is the peace process – the open prisons are the ‘second state’ The solution to the carnage is a secular state called Palestine where all have equal rights ruled by a working class able to expel the imperialist warmongers.

Peace in Palestine is a long way off.  Even if Hamas survive there is no possibility of an Islamacist movement uniting Palestinian workers or even be able to deal politically with the open treachery of the Arab ruling classes.  The only reason that Hamas are in the leadership of resistance is that the Palestinian left capitulated utterly and bought into alliances with the Arab bourgeoisie and sponsorship by the US.

A successful resistance that builds peace in the Middle East will be a working class movement with global solidarity.  By calling for working class resistance in Ireland we will be help to move towards that future movement while in the here and now maximising the cost of massacre to the Israeli state and reducing their ability to launch future bloodbaths.