Israel, Palestine, Gaza and the idiocies of ‘antis-‘
Support for Palestinians (August 2011) in Sanna, most westerly village of mainland Britain
That Israel has a right to self-defence is, in my view, a given. Its’ right to self-defence is that which inheres in any people as well as confirmed in international law. To that extent its’ right to self-defence is no greater and no less than that of Palestinians.
(Let’s face it, there are basically two positions from which those who are critical of Israel can start : there are those who I’ll label rejectionists, or exterminists, who refuse the right of Israel to exist at all; and there are those who, for principled or pragmatic reasons, recognise a state approximating in some way the 1967 borders whatever differences there may be on the rights of return (aliyah and Palestinian). For me the first position is indefensible in principle and would be genocidal in effect. I start instead with an open mind to a two state or one state democratic solution).
In this Gazan war Israel is wrong in principle and wrong in the way that it is prosecuting this war. Far from Israel strengthening its position and shoring up its’ security through this war, its’ insecurity will further deepen. The lessons for the Israeli government of the 2007 Lebanon war have not been learnt and the errors are set to be repeated.
Exercise of the right to self-defence is also subject to some kind of proportionality test, and the low rate of casualties within Israel, does not warrant an all-out war. It merits a response, to be sure, but not this. Not collective and indiscriminate punishment. The jus ad bellum is weak morally, legally and politically.
If the jus ad bellum is weak, the Israeli government’s jus in bello is criminally absent. Many have rightly commented on the (dis) proportionality question. We have been foolishly deluded into thinking that modern war is precise, as if it is fought through sophisticated discriminating technologies with one hand whilst the other hand holds a copy of the Geneva Conventions. It is not. Those who justify the Israeli way of war as necessary in the peculiar spatial and social composition of Gaza have surely lost all moral compass. Having recently read Mark Mazower’s brilliant account of the administration of Nazi rule across Europe (Hitler’s Empire : Nazi rule in occupied Europe. Allen Lane, London. 2008) I can’t help but identify the very close parallels in policy in the isolation and treatment of ‘untermenschen’. That Hamas militants have used a school as a platform from which to fire missiles is not grounds to disregard the lives of unfortunate school children and condemn them to death for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That injured Hamas militants and their families may be taken by ambulance and treated in hospital is not licence to fire upon the hospital. That people, warned by text message or air-dropped leaflet, are instructed to leave buildings for open spaces otherwise they’ll be regarded as legitimate concealed and hiding targets is no choice for those innocents frozen in fear to their familiar rooms and homes.
It is a false hope that so many hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around the world this weekend to protest the Israeli war on Gaza. Those anti-imperialists, anti-Zionists, anti-racists and socialists of different kinds who protest Israel’s war are right to do so.
Condemning Israel’s policy and the barbarism of its war is the easy bit. But we must stop and reflect on the sometimes fine distinction between protest and support. When supporting the Palestinian right of self-determination – a right at least that of Israel – we are not obliged to lend support to any and all movements. Hamas has a right to organise for self-determination of the Palestinian people for sure, but they have no claim on virtually every other right that socialists or democrats would hold dear, such as human rights, women’s rights, freedom of expression and conscience, workers’ rights, and so on. Hamas is no bringer of liberation : it is a movement which would lock up and suppress if not directly shoot 90% of those people who protested Israel’s war. Hamas is a deeply reactionary intolerant and fundamentally anti-democratic movement which would have no truck with socialists or atheists of any kind. Opposition to the Israeli war machine, itself determined and timed in my view by domestic Israeli politics (and not by the alleged frequency of Hamas missile attacks) – must not entail the support of Hamas. To do so would be simply to follow the Israeli government’s long-standing irrational and ultimately self-defeating policy of ‘my friend is my enemy’s enemy.’ Democratic socialism has been defeated in the Middle East and worldwide in large part because metropolitan ‘antis’ have been seduced by this ‘enemy’s enemy’ nonsense. The history of the region is one in which the ‘democrats’ of the metropolis singularly failed to support democratic forces in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, the gulf states, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, leaving democrats and socialists to be annihilated in their hundreds of thousands rather than upset the brutal rule of reaction or disturb strategic alignments. Professing democracy is no guarantee against supporting barbarism.
Far better for socialists to engage in democratic solidarity with the currently somewhat meagre voices of opposition within Israel. That another war could have been launched by Israel so soon after the carnage of Lebanon is a function of the collapse of any serious opposition within Israel and the corresponding right-ward leap-frogging of the Israeli political establishment and its indulgence of populist ‘solutions’. Apart from the exterminists of the Hamas ilk, the war against Palestine will remain a permanent war so long as there is no effective democratic opposition within Israel. (The exterminists who refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist in any form are not bothered by the absence of democratic opposition and democratic alternatives : Hamas and the Israeli right are deserving twins; Palestinians and Israelis are their undeserving victims.
See the following for just a few of the varied initiatives in Israel against the war and against Israel’s prevailing policy towards Palestine and the Palestinians ..
Bat Shalom : women for justice and peace
B’tselem – the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Sabbah Report : because silence is complicity
[This piece was written on 11th January 2009]
Morfoubey 