THE US has approved another tranche of military aid to Israel just as the Israeli “Defence” Forces rained bombs on children playing in the al-Maghazi refugee camp.
Nothing could make more clear the truth that there cannot be a lasting peace in the eastern Mediterranean short of a thoroughgoing strategic defeat for imperialism.
It is an illusion to think that this can be brought about solely through military means. The IDF has discovered that, despite overwhelming military superiority, eliminating the resistance in Gaza has eluded them.
Israel’s war of attrition against the people of Gaza has inflicted collateral damage on the armed resistance, yet it remains able to mount offensive operations.
Everyone knows — including those in the Israeli military and intelligence who still retain the capacity for rational thought — that the Gaza genocide has created the future cadres of the political and armed resistance to the occupation.
For the US and no less for the imperial British state, the political price paid for their full support for the Netanyahu administration is proving unexpectedly costly. The people of Jordan and Saudi Arabia — whose military shot down Israel-bound missiles — are yet to exact the price for what is widely seen as a betrayal.
The so-called “international community” is almost completely confined to Nato states plus its Antipodean outriders and Japan. But in each of the developed capitalist countries, the popular opposition to complicity in the genocide is persistent and growing.
US President Joe Biden faces a growing problem that may just compromise his chances of defeating Donald Trump. Opposition to his support for Benjamin Netanyahu threatens to erode the Democratic Party’s electoral appeal in key states. And for particular Democratic demographics, the problem is intensifying, especially among young people in general and young US Jews in particular.
This and the brave stand of opposition forces in Israel itself contradicts that peculiar strain of anti-semitism that accepts the reactionary conflation of the terms “Jew” and “zionist.”
The loss of moral authority that hitherto allowed the transgression of Israel’s UN-mandated borders represents a profound political defeat for the zionist project.
With the complicity of the imperial powers and their hangers-on, Israel has been able to illegally occupy Palestinian land, ramp up the destruction and theft of Palestinian property, displace many thousands of Palestinians with settlers while conducting a racist and discriminatory policy of coercion, and the denial of basic human rights, including the imprisonment without trial, of Palestinian hostages.
To a very large extent, the key to changing the political geometry of the region can be found on Arab streets and the streets of the metropolitan imperial states.
In taking Israel — and thus by association its imperial sponsors — to the international justice system, South Africa has set in motion one feature of what must become a global campaign for the restoration of Palestinian national rights in the form they themselves favour.
It is precisely because of the apartheid realities of the Israeli state that South Africa — whose emancipation from apartheid was contingent on a changed global balance of power — has pointed us in the direction of a comprehensive strategy that can change the foreign policies of Israel’s sponsoring states and Israel’s domestic policies.
Mass demonstrations increasingly reflect the changing balance of opinion. Direct action against Israeli enterprises and imports, particularly from its archipelago of military production is a vital part of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement.
For us, the immediate priority is to stop British participation in Israeli military operations, build the movement for a ceasefire and then for an end to the Israeli occupation. And not the least important component of this strategy lies in mobilising the forces that can change Labour’s position.
