TODAY’S world, as was yesterday’s, is a threatening place. Death, injury, hunger and destruction are being inflicted on huge numbers of people in the Middle East.

We are witnessing a still more inhuman and gruesome version of the Nakba dispossession and expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948.
 
If we focus our minds painfully on the mass killing that is currently taking place in Gaza and added to on the West Bank, our understanding may be helped by resorting to the formidable writings of Robert Fisk for some historical background.

Fisk, whose Middle East reportage over many years was remarkable, and who made graphic sense of much of the prolonged nightmare run-up to today’s horrors, died in late 2020.
 
John Pilger, sadly also no longer now with us, and equally missed, edited a major collection of articles just 20 years ago (updated a year later) into the book Tell Me No Lies. One piece was by David Armstrong, Washington bureau head of the National Security News Service. Armstrong’s article had first appeared a couple of years earlier in Harper’s magazine under the title “Drafting a plan for global dominance.”
 
Armstrong examined the plans of the US Establishment as developed over the previous decade. Early in 1992, he wrote, general Colin Powell, then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, had told the House armed services committee that the US required “sufficient power” to “deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.”
 
Playing the character of the US in the role of street hoodlum, Powell emphasised: “I want to be the bully on the block.” This ambition has been fulfilled, but without cause to congratulate the bully.

Such an objective had been made easier to proclaim in consequence of the break-up and disintegration into disaster-capitalism of the Soviet Union, which at its core had been socialist, however over-centralised its direction, however over-privileged its ruling bureaucracy, however depoliticised its population, and despite its misguided military intervention in Afghanistan from 1979.
 
In this more comfortable international context, boldness became the dear friend of US aggression in the destructive adventures that were to put their stamp on the decades that followed.

The first lengthy episode was the imposition of the severest economic sanctions against Iraq — officially directed against its dictator Saddam Hussein but actually inflicted on the mass of Iraqi people.
 
Between 1991 and 1998 the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) was to report, 500,000 Iraqi children died through chronic malnutrition, polluted water and lack of medical care. Denis Halliday, then UN assistant secretary-general, added not much later: “If you include adults, the figure is now almost a million.”
 
David Armstrong’s article soberly reflected on the bullying plan: “The Bush administration and its loyal opposition seem not to grasp that the quests for dominance generate backlash. Those threatened with pre-emption may themselves launch pre-emptive strikes. And even those who are successfully ‘pre-empted’ or dominated may object and find means to strike back.”
 
Evidencing this conclusion are the failures amid destruction and death of the US-led assaults on Afghanistan begun in 2001 and that on Iraq began in 2003. Each ended with the bully’s tail-between-legs withdrawal — from Iraq in 2011 and from Afghanistan in 2021.
 
One Fisk article in Tell Me No Lies was taken from his powerful book Pity the Nation, centred on Israel’s US-supported invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Conducted with the help of Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias, the aim had been to eliminate the Palestine Liberation Organisation. An estimated 14,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed during the first fortnight and many more were injured.
 
Phosphorous shells and US-supplied cluster bombs were rained on Beirut. Following the forced evacuation of Palestinian and Syrian fighters from the city, Israeli forces occupied west Beirut, and their commander, general Ariel Sharon, sent the Phalangist militias into the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where around 1,700 young and old people were systematically massacred, with Israeli troops watching from not far away.
 
A year later, the Israeli Kahan Commission of Inquiry found that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for the massacre.
 
Many Jewish people, in Israel and across the world, of course, were horrified both by the US-backed invasion and the massacre.
 
Fisk’s massive 2005 book The Great War for Civilisation described with disgust the first savage US response to the September 11 al-Qaida attacks — indisputably by “terrorists” (though not neatly separable from past US provocations) — on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The assault on Afghanistan was both a (failed) attempt to kill the al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden and the punishment of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan for giving him hospitality.
 
Wrote Fisk: “We abandoned everything we claimed to stand for. We bombed Afghan villages into rubble, along with their inhabitants…and then we allowed our ruthless militia allies (the Northern Alliance) to execute their prisoners.” These air strikes, New Hampshire professor Marc Herold publicised in March 2002, killed more innocent Afghans than the victims of the September 11 atrocity.
 
But by the autumn of 2007, the Taliban in Afghanistan controlled most of the country outside its capital Kabul. Backlash.
 
The US-British (but mainly US) invasion and occupation of Iraq begun in March 2003 was to cost by late summer 2005, Pilger noted, at least 55,000 Iraqi lives, including almost 10,000 civilians.
 
The Morning Star’s editorial on March 28 2003 had declared “meaningless” the promise of Labour prime minister Tony Blair to Iraqi people (as if he on Britain’s behalf, rather than the US president and the Pentagon, was in charge): “We will liberate you. The day of your freedom draws near.”
 
A more prescient promise would have been: “We will occupy you and in so doing will kill many of you. The day when you launch resistance to our occupation draws near, and you will kill some of our soldiers and will eventually compel our withdrawal.”
 
Backlash was not in Blair’s mind, any more than it was in that of president George W Bush. The last remaining British troops were withdrawn from Iraq in May 2011 and the last US troops in December that year. The few US bases in Iraq reanimated since have lately been subjected to another round of backlash action.
 
In January 2006, Palestinian elections gave 76 out of 132 seats to the Islamist party Hamas. Fisk wrote in the Independent that month that Palestinians “were supposed to give their support to the friendly, pro-Western, corrupt, absolutely pro-US Fatah, which had promised to ‘control’ them, rather than to Hamas, which said they would represent them.”
 
Five years earlier, in 2001, Fisk had written in the same paper about the language games played in Western and Israeli media about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He noted that Palestinian “collaborators” with the Israelis were termed “co-operators,” that Israeli-occupied land had become “disputed,” and that Israeli’s extrajudicial murders were characterised as “targeted killings.”
 
As for the term “terrorist,” we are reminded by the BBC’s news daily and unfailingly, that Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by Britain, although its non-designation as such by most UN member states goes unmentioned. So the mass killings of civilians by Israeli forces in the area administered by Hamas can be excused.
 
Had Victor Klemperer, the extraordinary German Jewish professor, anti-fascist and diarist who lived and suffered in Dresden throughout the Nazi period, yet miraculously survived, been living today (to judge from his diary of early November 1933), he would have sympathised primarily with the Palestinians.
 
At that moment, and understandably, some of his Jewish acquaintances were escaping Nazi Germany to settle in Palestine, but to the disadvantage of the indigenous Arab population.
 
Today’s terrifying events represent the latest attempt to destroy Palestinian hopes for an independent state and to reinforce US control over the Middle East. But as David Armstrong pointed out more than two decades ago, the ever-present prospect of backlash is brashly ignored.
 
Such self-delusion, accompanied by the most brutal aims and brutal methods, only adds to the risk of more war, even of world war. The case for a “peace backlash” against this genocide is unanswerable.