Genocide is the New Misdemeanour

Well, maybe it is more than that, genocide is now the new black, and in fact it is mostly forbidden by our ruling classes to actively oppose it, or you will be jailed, or bombed. They have bent the stick in the other direction. Our dear bourgeoisie can now be called the class of Palestine Inaction, and they are very relaxed about war crimes. Not in relation to ‘Putin’ though. As far as ‘Putin’ is concerned he is evil beyond words, it is always ‘Putin’s War’ in Ukraine, but not ‘Netanyahu’s War’ in Palestine.

This, rather obvious flaw in their new logic does not raise much of an eyebrow for them though, - by ‘them’ I mean in their media. Their media carries on, business as usual. Oh, how they criticize those times when they were silent about the holocaust, about the genocide of Jews in Germany. Now, they are silent again, in another direction, making the same ‘mistake’.

But they cannot these days just be silent, can they? There is too much technology to make us aware of what is going on in every part of the world if you want to know. So, instead we get a strange stubborn forcing of the argument, something like, you must behave this way whatever the rationality of it, whatever the morality, because this is what we think, this is how we feel. They want their profits, this is what matters to them. It has all become exposed to the light of day.

They obviously do not give a fig anymore about international law, the rules-based order, universal values, humanitarian morality, - or perhaps we should say they no longer care about appearing to give a fig about these things. They will keep on prosecuting ordinary people for, say, shoplifting, though, very severely. But logically the whole edifice of law has collapsed, it cannot continue as if things have not changed, at least without fascism becoming prominent. And this is why we see the rise in nationalism and fascism, egged on by the media which is obsessed with it.

Now our leaders are almost all war criminals, in one way or another complicit in what is happening in Gaza, including people, children, being starved to death, it is such a new reality that many of us are just gobsmacked unable to do or say anything about it.

We are well beyond the stage when this slaughter has anything to do with Hamas and terrorism.

But the US are only using Israel as their policeman and agent provocateur in the Middle East, and for expansion into this vital global oil and sea trading territory.

What does this mean? It means at some point in the future, medium to long term, the Israeli ruling class will come into conflict with their current US overlords and seek true independence. At the moment, Israel is like another state of the US, where things military can be experimented upon. It is a frontier, a wild west. This is something that not every Israeli will want for their children. So, support the protests of Israelis against the Israeli state apparatus.

Meanwhile the Palestinian people, if they continue to be led by a resistance made up of mainly religious fervour, engaging in adventurist terrorism and doing exactly what their opponents want, are doomed to a slow and torturous death, fated by western imperialism, and its media.

Israel government votes to ban Unrwa and designate it a terrorist group

On 29 October 2024, the Israeli parliament voted by large majorities for two pieces of legislation: to ban Unrwa from working in Israel or those territories under its occupation, and to declare it a terrorist group and ban Israeli officials from any contact with it.

Unrwa is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. It provides humanitarian aid to thousands of Palestinian refugees. It was set up in 1950 just after the founding of the State of Israel in Palestine, an act which led to a regional war and the displacement of many Palestinians from their homes.

Unrwa is a United Nations agency, the UN is of course based in New York, in the US. The UN was instrumental in the founding of the state of Israel after WWII. The declaration of a Jewish religious state, in contrast to a secular state, after displaced Jews from WWII were generally not allowed to settle in western nations, including the US, has triggered years of conflict, involving extreme violence and massacres, chiefly between the Jewish state and Palestinian Arab Muslims, but also involving neighbouring countries and Iran and the US. The region is important strategically for its oil and as a trade route.

Potentially, by declaring that an agency of the UN is terrorist, this puts into question the whole of the UN and those who support it, thus the rest of the western world community represented in this body. It also makes UN staff in Palestine legitimate targets of the Israeli armed forces, in a situation where already over 200 have been killed in the current conflict since the attack from Gaza of October 7 2023 led by Hamas which killed many Israeli civilians. 

THEORY: Words against Genocide

Words, words, words; they seem weak, futile, in the face of the violence. What can words do? But even the words have failed to do what they normally do, what they are expected to do, today, they have failed to condemn the most heinous crimes, war crimes, genocide. We are in a new period, post Gaza. Hemingway said something somewhere about bourgeois liberals waking up surprised to find that they were Nazis. This happened recently. Many of our western leaders are now war criminals, complicit in genocide. We are supposed to vote for these people, as if nothing has happened, as if business as usual. Frankly, it is gobsmacking, flabbergasting, and exhausting in the way it causes our stupefaction.

But perhaps they have not yet had the surprise, they are too hypnotized to notice even this, so they have not really woken up. They are sleepwalking through this crisis, helped, instigated, defended, by their media. All of which support the imperialist strategies of the US, which sees Israel as one of its important appendages for policing the Middle East, near the oil fields and the Suez Canal.

And all those humanist humanitarian institutions, built up after WWII and the Holocaust are powerless, or even worse, enable these bourgeois classes to feign as if they care, along with their press, who employ every trick in the book to ensure that the killing of Palestinian children, for instance, can pass by as registered, but not identified with as truly human suffering.

How is it that we can see all this, amongst all this sleight of hand and evasion? It all happened too suddenly, they did not prepare us enough, only now are the forces of the far right being gathered in the land of politics, a bit late to the party, but that is how it goes, unevenly, chaotically.  

Do we have to say that genocide is wrong? Yes! Today it is necessary! - The worst genocide in history was against the Jews in Germany in the middle of Europe. Today’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza is not at that scale, but proportionally it is just as atrocious.  If we look at it historically, we see a similar evasion from the western powers about what the German fascists were doing to the Jews, a similar fudging of the morals, a kind of tactical selective blindness to the horrors which left millions of Jews dead, abandoned.

What is happening today is a consequence of those events. Today is essentially a continuation of the friction that caused it, of the antisemitism and racism and the economic crisis that begat these horrors, - we have rampant inflation yet again. It might seem strange, ironic, perverse even, that it is Israel, the Jewish State, that is perpetrating this genocide, or at least which is the vehicle for it, in the hands of US imperialists. But it makes an awful logic.

When the western nations who had won their victory in WWII against the Nazis did not want to accept displaced Jews, when their antisemitism continued, and they pushed Jews towards Palestine, this was just the same war continuing in a different way. The ruling classes saw the Jews as a useful future tool for white western imperialism in the Middle East, and so Palestinians would now be the new victims of European economic contradictions.

The original meaning of the term antisemitism referred to racism against people from that region, Arabs or Jews or Bedouin etc, not specifically Jewish people, this is a modern inflection. The original meaning is far more useful and correct.  So called Islamophobia, and anti-Judaism, are both antisemitism, and nobody is immune to being an antisemite, or a racist, just by virtue of their skin, nationality, or history.

It remains sadly true that to kill people en masse, in a conflict, it helps if your soldiers regard the enemy as less than human. The enemy of imperialist conquest today is the Palestinian people. Israel needs to expand because its capital needs to expand, and its capital needs to expand because western capital seeks to expand, and this seeks to expand because US capital seeks expansion.

The legitimate resistance of the Palestinians to Israeli colonialism exists, but has it assisted the imperialist project by being terrorist? In the west we have our own ideas of legitimate freedom fighters, these ideas have universal aspects but are also different depending on the context. The Middle East has been deliberately fought over in a brutal way, in a way that rarely holds back from the most heinous massacres. This was started by British colonialism in the Mandate period, supporting Zionism for its own interests, and is being continued by western colonialism today. Why this extreme brutality? Because it diminishes the political maturity of the entire region, leaving its ruling classes susceptible to interference, to bribes and corruption, weakening their states. So, on this altar is to be sacrificed Palestinian children. Tomorrow it will be other peoples’ children.