David Finkel
Posted September 6, 2024
BEFORE LAST OCTOBER 7, we were discussing in this webzine the “degenerative spiral” in the Occupied Palestine Territories and how it would feed straight back into Israel’s political crisis. Following the Hamas attack on that day, the Israeli response pointed immediately toward a full-fledged “death spiral.” (Death Spiral Delusions: Behind the New Israel/Palestine Disaster)
After eleven months, the genocide that continues with no end in sight has been absolutely shattering, even for those of us who thought we had no remaining illusions about where the “hundred-year war on Palestine”(the title of Rashid Khalidi’s essential book) could lead. Such a scenario, to be sure, was not beyond imagination — we did understand what could happen under catastrophic circumstances — but the full extent of the exterminationist destruction of Gaza, and now the massive expansion of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, was certainly beyond realistic expectation.
At the risk of stating the obvious, two observations are necessary. First, contrary to prime minister Netanyahu’s promise, Israel will never militarily “destroy” Hamas, a point now being made even by defense minister Yoav Gallant — who notoriously declared at the outset of the war that “we are dealing with human animals and we will act accordingly,” clearly signaling genocidal intent.
Second, the politics and strategy of Hamas will never liberate anything or anyone, let alone the Palestinian people. Although profoundly asymmetrical forces, Hamas and the Israeli state are symbiotic and mutually enabling actors in the death spiral. It will be for the Palestinian people, of course, to make the judgments on their leadership when they’re free to do so without occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Deadly U.S. Aid
But most important, the continuation of the massacre is entirely dependent, militarily and even more politically, on the enabling policy of the “Genocide Joe” Biden administration. Netanyahu has played Biden like a cheap fiddle, paying no attention to the now-outgoing president’s feeble pleas for “restraint.”
Not only has the flow of U.S. weapons continued unabated, but the Justice Department has performatively announced the indictment of Hamas leaders even after three of them are already dead — an innovation in American extraterritorial and apparently extraterrestrial jurisprudence, certainly.
Biden’s just-in-time exit from the presidential campaign is a partial victory for the Palestine solidarity movement and the “uncommitted” votes in the Democratic primaries. Yet at the Democratic convention, the Harris campaign refused the simple request for one single Palestinian delegate to speak — a show of cynicism, cowardice and racism that was both outrageous and entirely predictable. (One recalls the disgraceful treatment of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation way back in 1964.)
Meanwhile, there’s little point here in reviewing Israel’s daily bombings of homes, schools and everywhere Gazans are trying to shelter, every one of which is a world-class war crime in and of itself, the destruction of the medical system including mass execution sites at hospitals that Israel raided, starvation of civilians as a weapon of war, and the full roster of atrocities.
The “official” death toll of 41,000 at this writing is grotesquely understated, with estimates ranging anywhere up to 200,000 including unrecovered bodies and disease victims — the uncertainty in itself is an index of the horror — but you can follow all that even in the fragmentary coverage on U.S. media, to say nothing of more comprehensive reporting by sources like the Israeli online publication +972 or the Al-Jazeera website.
While the carnage in Gaza continues, the new element is the expanding military-and-settler Israeli onslaught in the West Bank, with cities and refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarem among others becoming near-replicas of Gaza City.
There are no signs that the U.S. administration, as Biden prepares for post-presidential winter hibernation, has the slightest inclination or ability to do anything to stop the expanding war. This despite the fact that a potential mass Palestinian expulsion from the West Bank would be a catastrophe for U.S. imperialism in the region.
(While popular support for Hamas may be waning in Gaza, it appears to be growing in the West Bank and the camps in Lebanon, for example. As for Arab solidarity, at the elite level it’s essentially nonexistent. Otherwise, at minimum, the Jordanian kingdom would have severed diplomatic relations with Israel months ago.)
Israel Unravelling?
The biggest new factor in the crisis is the polarization inside Israel, the outcome of which is not predictable. Among veterans of the military and “security” apparatus, voices are openly warning that Netanyahu’s pursuit of “total victory” and his own political survival, overriding any concern for the hostages’ lives or the precarious condition of the armed forces, threatens to unravel the country.
Most ominous, however, is the deep penetration of genocidal psychology into the heart of Israeli society, including the military and the youth. This is obvious from the gruesome torture and killing of Palestinian prisoners at the Sde Teiman detention facility, which was revealed by prisoner testimony and some horrified Israeli doctors, but not (as far as I’m aware) by reservists who served there.
Professor Omar Bartov, an Israeli historian and expert on the Nazi holocaust who teaches at Brown University, observed this at first hand during his recent trip to Israel: “This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history — and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree.”
Bartov’s lengthy and searching account is absolutely must reading (As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel).
Against this stands the outpouring of mass protest against Netanyahu’s refusal to accept a ceasefire and hostage release deal — which would have saved the lives of those most recently murdered by Hamas — as well as the resumption of his pre-October 7 drive to seize control of the judiciary.
Among some pro-Palestinian supporters, there’s an understandable but mistaken view that these protests are narrowly about the Israeli hostages alone, without concern for the massacres of the Palestinian people. In fact, the statements by the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, both in Israel and at the Democratic convention, demonstrated the opposite.
To be sure, the scope of the protests is limited, particularly by the absence of the “48 Palestinian” communities inside Israel who are living under a virtual reign of terror. Nevertheless, those Israelis denouncing Netanyahu in the streets are not oblivious to the fact that his utter disregard of their lives isn’t separate from what he’s prepared to do to those of the Palestinians.
None of this will move Netanyahu, because his governing coalition depends on its far-right full-speed-ahead-genocidal component. No matter how widely Netanyahu may be hated, his coalition can’t be seriously threatened so long as U.S. material and military support, and the permanent and unconditional American dispensation that immunizes the Israeli state and its officers from accountability for crimes against humanity, remain in place.
The death spiral in Palestine is made-in-America as much as in Israel. Because majority opinion in the United States, and for that matter among Jewish Americans, already supports the demand for a ceasefire, the Palestine solidarity movement needs to build and deepen that support — through education, through demonstrations, through boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) activism and through defending the rights of free speech and advocacy against the drive to suppress and criminalize it.
(See the Against the Current website for continuing coverage. In the new issue ATC 232, September-October 2024, Oscar Hernandez discusses the legacy of anti-apartheid campus organizing around South Africa and its relevance for today.)
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