Feature Page: Carnage in Gaza

by Gerry Foley

The war of Israel against the Palestinians becomes ever more brutal and provocative. On Sept. 28, the Zionist military launched a large-scale operation aimed at occupying a buffer zone in the Gaza strip to prevent Palestinian guerrillas from firing homemade rockets across the Israeli border.

The invasion was allegedly prompted by the killing of two small Israeli children in the town of Sderot by the explosion of such a missile. All but a few of the rockets aimed at Israel since the start of the latest Intifada have exploded harmlessly.

The Zionist assault swept into the crowded refugee camp of Jabaliya, causing massive damage and many civilian deaths. Up until this writing, at least 80 Palestinians have been killed, including a number of youngsters, and the Israeli premier, Ariel Sharon, has proclaimed that it will continue until the rocket attacks are stopped. That appears to mean that the offensive will be continued indefinitely, since it is next to impossible to prevent the firing of these small crude missiles.

This operation is already the bloodiest assault on the Palestinian population of Gaza in the last four years. The leaders of the Palestinian Authority have appealed to the world to stop the slaughter.

The Zionist state had already escalated the level of the conflict on Sept. 26 by assassinating a leader of the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Ezzedine al-Sheikh Khalil was killed when a bomb in his car went off after he answered a cell phone call.

The British Independent reported: “Another neighbour said, ‘He [Mr Khalil] said good morning to us like he does every day and then walked to his car. He got into the car and then the phone rang. When he took the call we heard the explosion. We rushed towards his car and found him in pieces in the back seat.’”

In the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz, a commentator noted that this assassination was the most provocative action that the Israeli secret services had carried in a neighboring Arab state since the 1950s.

In response to the bombing, Hamas made its inevitable ritual pledge of “revenge,” although by now it has so many Zionist blows to “avenge” that the concept has no meaning. This time, however, some statements by Hamas officials suggested that the Islamist organization might extend its attacks to Israeli citizens outside Israel. That is obviously a temptation to embittered Hamas activists.

However, the organization’s top leadership denied that it had any intention of widening its guerrilla war against Zionism outside of Palestine itself. In the past, Hamas leaders have consistently said that they do not “want to fight the whole world.”

Certainly, the extension of attacks on Israeli citizens and representatives abroad would heighten the atmosphere of international insecurity, giving the U.S. imperialists pretexts for whipping up their “war on terror.” This wavering on the question by some Hamas spokesmen is an indication of how embittered the war of attrition in Palestine is becoming and how much it threatens to poison world society.

At the same time, Israel continues its “targeted” assassinations on Palestinian resistance leaders by firing missiles at vehicles in which they are traveling without concern for any innocent bystanders who may be too close to the explosions.

On Sept. 27, the BBC web page reported that Israeli missiles hit a car in central Gaza, apparently targeting a leader of the Popular Resistance Committee. At least one person was killed, but their identity was not clear, or whether there were more deaths. On the same day, about a half dozen Palestinians were shot down by Israeli soldiers, two of them reportedly hit when the troops fired on stone-throwers.

The internal tensions in the Palestinian community itself are growing under this pressure. It is obvious that the Israeli military is getting information about the movements of Palestinian resistance leaders. It could hardly be so successful in its targeted assassinations without that. And such information can come only from Palestinian informers. This realization is creating fears that threaten to foment social paranoia.

New suspicions of Arab traitors were raised in the case of the assassination of Khalil. Haaretz noted Sept. 27 that the London Arabic daily Al Hayat had reported that the intelligence agency of “an Arab country” had been giving Israel information on the movements of Hamas leaders living abroad.

The Israeli daily quoted the Hamas leader in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, as saying that his organization had originally doubted the report but “now, because of what happened yesterday or through other information, there are indications that this may be case.”

Despite the nationalist pretensions of the Arab states, it is in the nature of these neocolonial regimes to play a double game, to try to ingratiate themselves to the best of their ability with their imperialist overlords. That creates the conditions for a poisonous web of intrigue throughout the region.

These problems are fostered by the Palestinian movement’s lack of a clear political program for uniting the peoples of the Middle East against the imperialists, including Israel. Demoralization among the Palestinian people, who cannot see any inspiring prospect of victory, and misplaced hopes in the Arab neocolonial regimes open up the way for betrayals of the struggle.

The poisons secreted by the Zionist campaign to crush the Palestinian people also affect the Israeli Jews themselves, obviously by the brutalization of young Israeli soldiers sent to repress civilians and a popular insurgency but also by more subtle means.

There is fanaticism among the Zionist settlers that is at least as deadly as that of the most violent Islamic fundamentalists. It is now exploding in the face even of Israel’s notoriously ruthless and right-wing premier, Ariel Sharon.

At its root, the movement of Jewish religious groups to colonize the areas conquered by Israel in the 1967 war was a reaction to the demoralization among Zionists created by the mixed results of the 1973 war, in which the Israel army suffered its first defeats at the hands of Arab armies.

This experience created doubts about the future of the Zionist project that tended to foster a fundamentalist religious response, the ideas that God had given all of Palestine to the Jews, so that no Palestinian territory could be ceded to the Palestinians, and that Palestinians were, in the divine order, inferior to Jews and had no rights that Jews need respect.

Today Sharon finds this fanaticism an obstacle in his attempts to carry out a tactical retreat from Gaza, which has no value for Israel, in order to strengthen the Zionist grip on parts of the Left Bank that do.

Rabbis linked to the settlers have called for invoking a ritual curse against him that would authorize Jews to kill a Jew. This ceremony in fact prepared the way for the assassination of Yitzak Rabbin, the Israeli prime minister who accepted the Oslo Accords.

Sharon lost a referendum in his own Likud party on his proposed retreat from Gaza. When he tried to speak about his “disengagement” plan at a Likud party congress on Sept. 21, boos drowned him out, and it took the security service “many minutes,” according to Haaretz, to get the delegates sufficiently under control for the premier to resume his speech.

Under pressure from his imperialist overlord, the United States, and by the relationship of forces on the ground, Sharon really has no practical alternative to withdrawal from Gaza. But given the fanaticism fostered by religious Zionism in particular, it is going to be a wrenching process for the Zionist state.

Moreover, the tensions created by this dilemma will incite the Zionist rulers to step up their attacks against the Palestinians in order to try to prove that they are really not retreating. And this can be expected to further envenom the situation.

There is no way to heal the growing cancer on international society represented by the war in Palestine without the Palestinians getting equal rights with the Jews in all of historic Palestine, so that the two peoples can live together on the basis on the basic of their common material interests as inhabitants of the same country.

This article first appeared in the October 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.