By the time this article is published, more water will have passed under
the bridge and there will most likely be new events on the table, suchas to provide further food for thought. Trump's election, the avalanche
of decisions taken immediately by the tycoon, the mania to hurry and to
appear as the Lord's anointed could bring us new 'surprises'. Having
said that, let's try to understand what is moving on the war front in
the Middle East, without forgetting what these months of war have
entailed in terms of suffering, deaths, destruction, attacks on health
workers and journalists killed by the hundreds to hide what was
happening in the Strip.
There is no doubt that a first piece of data that is offered to us by
the truce signed last Sunday - and implemented by the first exchange of
prisoners - is the will of the state of Israel to move the conflict, to
expand its control, to the West Bank. Operation 'Iron Wall', the events
in Jenin, the bombing of refugee camps, the green light given to settler
gangs in the destruction of Palestinian villages, are signs that the
policy of building Greater Israel on biblical territories intends to
develop in a short time to the integration of the territories occupied
in the 1967 war and beyond, even surpassing the old plans for the
partition of the Middle East.
If until the Hamas attack on October 7 - which, let us remember,
resulted in the death of 1,143 Israeli victims (767 civilians and 376
soldiers) and over 1,600 Palestinian militiamen - the government's
policy had been oriented towards slow expansionism, based on the
increase of settlements, the removal of nomads, the strengthening of the
dividing walls, the expropriation of land and houses, especially in East
Jerusalem, in favor of the settlers - so as not to offend too much the
susceptibility, entirely verbose, of international organizations,
including most of the Arab countries - from then on everything has
changed. Israel has openly and forcefully gone on the offensive
according to the principle that it is better to prevent threats rather
than limit oneself to defending oneself. Going beyond the Golan Heights,
which was also occupied during the 1967 war - and where there are
colonial settlements - the army has pushed to within a few dozen
kilometers of Damascus, taking control of some areas of strategic
importance on Mount Hermon. Not only that. Tel Aviv's air force is
systematically destroying military infrastructure and the armaments
production industries in Syria to prevent the possibility that a radical
Islamic government, certainly not a friend of Israel, could constitute a
future threat. This action will become increasingly pressing if Trump
follows through on what he stated before taking power in Washington,
namely that the US is not interested in what happens in Syria after
Assad's ouster. In this context, it will be necessary to understand the
consequences of the cancellation of the investment agreement on the
management of the port of Tartus on the Mediterranean signed with the
Russians in 2019 and which would have been valid for 49 years.
Israel's gaze is also turned to Jordan, where the Hashemite kingdom, a
faithful ally of the West and home to more than two million Palestinian
refugees, is experiencing growing internal opposition. Strengthening the
border on the Jordan River is therefore essential for Tel Aviv, as is
total control over the Jordan Valley and especially its waters which,
coincidentally, originate from Mount Hermon. As for Lebanon, invaded
three times since 1948, after having hit Hezbollah hard, Netanyahu's
commitment is to prevent it from rebuilding its strength even if the
election as president of the Christian-Maronite general Aoun, commander
in chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces, with the favor of all contenders,
should represent a guarantee for Israel which in any case keeps its
boots on the territory. But Tel Aviv's real adversary is Iran and the
Islamic regime of the ayatollahs, against which all its attention is
directed. Targeted bombings to hit the production capabilities of
surface-to-air missiles, destroy the anti-air defense system, eliminate
military leaders, conducted with the help and support of the USA and
with the acquiescence of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have so far been the
tools used to contain Tehran's expansionist desire in the area. With
the regime of the faithful ally Assad in Syria dissolved, Hezbollah
downsized in Lebanon, the ayatollahs - perpetually grappling with an
internal resistance of a karst type, but no less worrying for that -
have no choice but to concentrate on strengthening relations with Moscow
and accelerating nuclear projects, precisely those projects that are in
the sights of Israel and the USA and that could be the next target, if
Trump believes that the military option is the winning one. What is
certain is that Israel, alone, does not have the strength to defeat Iran
and that the support of the USA is absolutely essential, as it has been
in all the situations in which Tel Aviv has resorted to weapons. It is
therefore a question of understanding well what the objectives are for
the area of the current American presidency. Trump - who, let us
remember, immediately removed the moderate restrictions on the supply of
weapons to the Israeli army along with sanctions on settlers guilty of
crimes - will probably insist on the expansion of the Abraham Accords,
promoted under his first term, involving Saudi Arabia first and foremost
with a view to an economic and military partnership with Israel in an
anti-Iranian function. But how this can happen without a solution to the
Palestinian question is very hard to imagine, especially now, after the
systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip and the indiscriminate
massacres of the Gazans. And this is what Netanyahu and his people fear;
this is why they are rushing to commit as many crimes as possible, also
relying, as in Jenin, on the support of the Palestinian National
Authority which collaborates with its police and its spies to identify
armed resistance fighters to the Zionist military occupation, hoping to
gain some form of reward in terms of power in the project of
restructuring Gaza and the territories of the West Bank.
It seems that the latter do not realize that the phase being experienced
in Palestine is the attempt to complete the work begun in 1948, based on
the sovereignty of as much territory as possible and the expulsion of as
many Palestinians as possible, accompanied by the now obvious plan to
build Greater Israel even outside the biblical borders. This is the
mature phase of Zionism as it has historically given itself, and which,
together with the genocidal massacre of the population and the
systematic bombing of infrastructure in Gaza (schools, universities,
hospitals, roads, more than 80% of homes demolished, the uprooting of
trees, the destruction of water wells, the pollution of aquifers, the
deliberate slaughter of animals), in East Jerusalem has come to develop
the project of forced integration of young Palestinian students achieved
thanks to the rewriting of school programs in a Zionist key and the
censorship of local Arab history and culture, both Muslim and Christian.
This also includes the policies of assistance to the Palestinian
population which, again in East Jerusalem, include the dismantling and
outlawing of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency)
structures and their replacement with Israeli organizations. In this
case, ten schools, a vocational training center and three health centers
managed by UNRWA and involving 63,000 registered refugees would change
hands; not to mention the Agency's headquarters in the Sheikh Jarrah
neighborhood of Jerusalem, already the target of arson attacks, whose
existence is put in doubt in the face of plans for expropriation and
transformation into apartments for Israeli settlers. Questioning the
existence of the Agency in Gaza and the occupied territories means
severely hitting the possibilities of aid to the population; according
to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "only UNRWA has the infrastructure to
distribute aid on the necessary scale"; and if 2/3 of the trucks that
bring basic necessities to Gaza are under the Agency's jurisdiction,
Haaretz recalls that during the war it guaranteed 2/3 of all primary
health care, food for almost two million people, sanitation and water
services, paying a high price with the death of 266 workers. Hitting
UNRWA means not only worsening the material situation of the
Palestinians, but also depriving the refugees and displaced persons of
any international protection. This plan is accompanied by the measures
taken against humanitarian NGOs subjected to increasing restrictive
measures and expulsions. Another step towards the attempt to liquidate
the Palestinian problem, the result of a settler colonialism as the
Israeli historian Ilan Pappè has defined the original Zionist project.
An attempt that is unlikely to succeed.
Despite Netanyahu's arrogance in affirming the strategic success of the
war against Gaza, Israel has not brought home the results it wanted. The
resignations of high ranking members of the army, the criticisms
developed against the government, the internal lacerations in the
country following the management of the hostage issue, put in second
place compared to the enemy's desire for destruction, the refusal of
Orthodox Jews - the Haredim - to enlist, the image of an army defined as
ethical that is stained with war crimes, weigh and will weigh more and
more, triggering conflicts. Even the attempt to accommodate the settlers
in the West Bank by giving territorial continuity to the Israeli
settlements and thus reducing the Palestinian localities to many small
Gazas surrounded by walls, suppliers of low-cost labor, will hardly
succeed if not at the cost of enormous massacres, considering the
resistance, violent and non-violent, of the population.
Meanwhile, Hamas proclaims victory in Gaza and incites the West Bank to
revolt. For Israel, the killing of 20 thousand militiamen of Hamas and
other fighting groups fully justifies the murder of at least another 30
thousand people and the wounding of 110 thousand, mostly boys and girls,
women, men. For Hamas it is a price to pay to call into question Tel
Aviv's annexation plans and its expansionist will to the detriment of
the Palestinians.
The current truce is only a pause in a conflict that will not end until
its deepest motivations are called into question, which are rooted first
in the settler colonialism of the Zionists and then in the manipulation
of the Arab proletariat by the religious powers and the national
bourgeoisies. The story of Lebanon is illuminating in this regard: 400
thousand Palestinian refugees are locked up in 12 camps, without rights
and without Hezbollah, despite its influence in the country, having done
anything significant for their social advancement.
The Iranian action itself in the area - arming and supporting the
fighting forces in Gaza and Lebanon - has never had the intention of
triggering a direct conflict with Tel Aviv, but only to exert pressure
on Israel and, through it, on the USA to obtain some negotiations on
sanctions. For every government, for every propertied class, the real
enemy is always the proletariat that must be divided in every possible
way, on an ethnic rather than religious basis, fueling nationalism. If
the hope is always that of the unity of the proletariat in the struggle
for political and social liberation from all class power, we must be
very clear about the difficulties we encounter in making this
perspective practicable. In Israel, a very restrictive Zionist-style
education system indoctrinates the population from childhood, inducing
fanatically racist and extremist mentalities, the long military service
does the rest and the dehumanization of the Palestinian is now part of
the Israeli DNA. The opposition to this state of affairs, to the
apartheid in force against the Palestinians, to the genocide is
unfortunately still very limited and is based on individuals who
encounter increasing difficulties in operating. But if we cannot build a
pole capable of breaking this situation and building relationships
between the small Israeli proletariat and the much more numerous Arab
proletarians, the situation will not be able to change. On the other
side, this situation means that the just demands for political and
social freedoms are directed against the Israeli people as a whole to
prevent any possible union between the exploited and the exploited. And
this is why it is essential that movements on an international scale
continue and develop that are able to reveal the reality of this
conflict and its possible resolutions, starting with a ceasefire, the
withdrawal of troops from every occupied territory, solidarity with the
murdered and starving population, and the destruction of every system of
apartheid and ethnic-religious differentiation.
Massimo Varengo
https://umanitanova.org/cessare-il-fuoco-le-occupazioni-lapartheid/
_________________________________________
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