Sue Bull: Stop Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza

Sue Bull says Stop Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza

For there to be a just political settlement, we need to help build a powerful global solidarity movement with the Palestinian people and against Israeli apartheid.

Effective solidarity means building alliances with those who support justice for Palestine such as the union movement, churches, community groups and Palestinian refugees.

The Anthony Albanese Labor government should call on Israel to stop its genocidal war on Gaza and lift the blockade. It should impose and support a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel. It should oppose ongoing Israeli land grabbing and ethnic cleansing support. And, it should support the right of Palestinian refugees to resettle in their traditional homelands with full rights.

Most Palestinians no longer believe that a “two-state solution” is viable. Palestine must become an integrated non-racialised, democratic state, where every citizen has equal rights.

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Israel needs to be subsumed into a secular Palestine. The religious apartheid needs to end. No religion has primacy in the new Palestine. The dual citizenship of Israel needs to end: residents need to choose whether they are Palestinians or not.

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Juan Cole: Israel’s Colonial Revenge Genocide in Gaza is only the latest in a Long History of such Massacres

Juan Cole discusses Israel’s Colonial Revenge Genocide in Gaza is only the latest in a Long History of such Massacres

Such vendettas against civilian populations have been routinely pursued by colonial militaries in the wake of a forceful challenge to their control. We must be clear-eyed and recognize that such revolts have sometimes been characterized by the deployment of the most horrific terrorism against the settler population by the indigenous resistance. The main characteristic of the phenomenon, however, is the disproportionate response by the settlers and their colonial military, so that the number of indigenous people killed is orders of magnitude higher than the casualties among the settlers. Another frequent trope is the patriarchal justification of subsequent massacres by pointing to settler women and children killed. This rhetoric drove London’s repression of the first Indian Great Rebellion against British rule in 1857-1858.

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As Cole points out, this disproportionate response is a feature of a settler-colonial society. One example from List of massacres of Indigenous Australians is:

March 1797. After Aboriginal Australians killed two British settlers, a large punitive expedition was organised which surprised and dispersed a native camp of about 100 people, killing an unknown number. The armed group then returned to Parramatta to rest. Pemulwuy, a noted Aboriginal resistance leader of the early frontier, followed them into the town, demanding vengeance for the dispersal. A skirmish (known as the Battle of Parramatta) then occurred between Pemulwuy's group and a collection of British soldiers and settlers. One of the settlers was injured, but at least five Aboriginal Australians were shot dead with many more wounded, including Pemulwuy.

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This example does not explain why the two (2) settlers were killed as part of Battle of Parramatta. This is the standard history of a settler-colonial society in which all atrocities start with the actions of the colonised, never in the context in which the actions occurred. One is left with the impression that the colonised are just blood-thirsty barbarism who act without reason. Consequently, the settlers believe that they are left with no other option than genocide. For to admit a rational basis for the actions of the colonised is to undermine the settler-colonial project.

In his book, "The Battle of Parramatta: 21 to 22 March 1797", Jonathan Lim argues the settlers killed were a soldier and his common-law wife (pp.20-21). These murders occurred during raids by Aboriginals to destroy the economic basis for settler encroachment on Aboriginal lands by destroying the grains just before harvest (p.17). These raids have been going for a couple of years. The increasing levels of reprisals by settlers, and the presence of a military garrison on the frontier points to the success of economic warfare.

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Farooq Sulehria and Harris Qadeer: Kashmir: Anti-neoliberal intifada convulses the Himalayas

Farooq Sulehria and Harris Qadeer discusses "Kashmir: Anti-neoliberal intifada convulses the Himalayas".

By October, the boycott extended, with more and more consumers joining in. In response, more than 50 key activists were arrested, while the authorities threatened to register anti-terrorism charges against electricity consumers not paying their bills.

These heavy-handed state measures were responded to, on the one hand, by observing a general strike on October 5, and on the other, by extending the agitation. In the next phase, the Peoples Action Committees have announced a mobilization of women on October 10 and students on October 17.

Unsurprisingly, at the time of writing, the government spokespersons have promised talks, while police continue chasing Peoples Action Committee leaders, who have gone underground. Co-author Harris Qadeer is also in hiding to evade arrest. The police, simultaneously, are hesitant to detain activists because police stations where activists are detained are besieged by unarmed agitators. Besides being sympathetic to the demands, the cops don’t want “picket lines” outside their stations. In one case, police were forced to release arrested activists just hours after they were detained.

Meanwhile, the mainstream Pakistani media are avoiding any coverage of the movement. Despite this, Pakistan has also been infected. In certain towns, Peoples Action Committees have been set up, while traders associations in Karachi, the metropolitan hub of the country’s trade, have threatened not to pay their electricity bills. The situation in Pakistan is already explosive. An intifada against years of neoliberal “reforms” is the only option left to roll back the International Monetary Fund-dictated agenda that has pushed millions of lives into misery.

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Here we have non-violent protests going on for over five (5) months with very little media coverage. Even these protests are threatened as being treated as terrorism—this term has lost all substational meaning as states use it to denote anyone who opposes them. The importance of expanding grassroot networks, like the Peoples Action Committees, is essential for the non-violent protests to continue.

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Yves Smith: Is Israel Weaker Than Widely Seen in Hamas/Palestine “War”?

Yves Smith discusses Is Israel Weaker Than Widely Seen in Hamas/Palestine “War”?

Let us also remember the elephants in the room. Israel, even more so as it has become more right wing and ultra-Orthodox continue to increase as a percentage of its citizenry, has no end game for the Palestinians other than continued oppression and the hope that the current resident population leaves and/or otherwise shrinks. They have relied on policing and when the Palestinians have attacked Israel, the use of the IDF to contain the eruptions.

On the other side, there are militant forces in the Middle East that want Israelis expelled from Muslim holy areas, and potentially all of Israel. These desires have not gotten much of anywhere due to Israel having nukes and being perceived to be too formidable, particularly with US backing, for a hot conflict to have had good odds of success. However, Israel’s opponents have noted that Israel did not fare very well when it attacked Lebanon in 2006 to try to root out Hezbollah and instead failed abjectly. However, an offensive operation is also much more demanding and risky than defense.

In other words, the Israeli government has maximalist aims but has been implementing them slowly, and a meaningful contingent in the neighborhood also has maximalist aims.

Also keep in mind, given the need for Israel to project that it is undefeatable, both to deter attack and to maintain confidence at home, that just as in the Yom Kippur War, a battlefield win can still be a strategic loss. …

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Israel is implementing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the influence of the right-wingers. The illusion of Israeli invincibility is meant to deter any Western interference in that aim.

Marwan Bishara argues in "An Israeli civil war?" that:

From then on, American complicity in the form of economic and military support has provided the radical Israeli Right with much-needed momentum. And lately, Arab and Palestinian appeasement of fanatical Israel further hardened its racism. The Palestinian Authority has been repressing its own people in order to provide protection to Israel’s entrenching apartheid, rendering its survival an Israeli necessity.

Likewise, the willingness of autocratic Arab regimes to ditch the “land for peace” formula, and to sign up for unconditional peace and normalisation with colonial Israel, has provided Netanyahu and his fanatical allies with the legitimacy and the rationale to double down on their fanatical expansionist policies.

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This article was published before the current crisis. But Israel could collapse from within as the IDF refuses to fight in Gaza. The main problem for the Israeli religious fanatis is that they are exempt from military service, and so no voice within the IDF.

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Ted Rall: Clueless on Gaza

Ted Rall discusses how Americans are Clueless on Gaza

Gazans faced a choice.

They could obey Israel and its supporters. They could suffer, chafe under occupation, dodge bombs and bullets, starve, watch their friends and neighbors die, with no end in sight as the world keeps ignoring them.

They could stage protest marches that no important media outlet would cover, write firm-but-polite letters to the editor no one would publish and post to social media accounts no one would read. As they engaged in peaceful protest, they would keep starving and dying.

Or they could confront the Israelis with violence.

You can argue that violence is never the answer. You can claim that you’d be docile, that you’d live under blockade and occupation, never taking up arms or cheering those who do.

Go on, judge the Gazans. We both know you’d do the same exact thing if you were them.

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Back in 1943, there was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising:

The uprising started on 19 April when the ghetto refused to surrender to the police commander SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who ordered the destruction of the ghetto, block by block, ending on 16 May. A total of 13,000 Jews were killed, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated.

Stroop reported 110 German casualties, including 17 killed.

The uprising was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. The Jews knew that victory was impossible and survival unlikely. Marek Edelman, the only surviving ŻOB commander, said their inspiration to fight was "not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths". According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the uprising was "one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people".

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One ghetto uprising is celebrated, while the other ongoing one is condemned.

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