The pause in the bombing of Gaza

November 25, 2023

League for the Fifth International, 25. November 2023

A four day truce in Israel’s land sea and air assault on the people of the Gaza Strip came into force on November 24, and is due to last for four days. But Israel’s premier Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that there will be no ceasefire or armistice until Hamas has been destroyed, no matter the cost to Gaza’s 2.3 million people. Already the death toll in Gaza has passed 14,000, more than ten times the number of 1200 Israelis killed in the Hamas attacks on October 7.

In return, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are to release 50 Israeli hostages and Israel is to release 150 Palestinian prisoners, most of them young people under 18 and women. Further extensions could take place in return for more hostage releases. Larger quantities of food, water, fuel, and medical supplies will be allowed through the Israeli blockade whilst the “pause” lasts.

Background

The immediate background has been the horrific attacks by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) on hospitals and UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) schools in which families had taken refuge. In particular, the Netanyahu cabinet of war criminals’ ordering of the IDF to invade the al-Shifa hospital and then expel all its patients, doctors and nurses as well as many hundreds who hoped they would be safe from IDF savagery there. Add to this the embarrassing failure to discover the “Hamas command centre” Netanyahu claimed existed below the site.

In the Western imperialist countries of North America and Europe, whose leaders have turned a blind eye to these genocidal actions, mass demonstrations have grown every week, despite threats by government ministers and police forces to ban these overwhelmingly peaceful protests, slandering them as supporters of terrorism and likely to lead to antisemitic outrages.

In Britain, both main parties have suspended or expelled MPs and councillors who dared speak up for Palestine and the US House of Representatives has condemned its one member of Palestinian background. In Germany and France, demonstrations have been banned and hundreds arrested. Palestinian organisations have been banned and activists criminalised. Despite these slanders, lies and repression, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in London and Washington and tens of thousands in Paris and Berlin. In the Arab countries and, generally, in the semi-colonial world, the large majority of the population has rejected the Israeli attacks from the beginning.

But Israel’s atrocities, seen nightly thanks to the courage of ordinary people in Gaza who have been able to get out videos of them, has begun to change “public opinion” in most Western countries as well and encouraged a mass movement demanding an end to the killing that cannot be silenced.

The call for an immediate, total, and permanent ceasefire has become a key demand of the mass demonstrations and global solidarity movement.

US pressure

As a result, the Biden administration and imperialist allies like Germany and Britain, which all declared their unconditional support for Israel from the beginning, have been obliged to urge it to reduce the scale of civilian casualties and to follow international law. Though for weeks these feebly expressed “concerns” fell on deaf ears, the US and the EU combined recycling their old “two state solution” for a post war Gaza and West Bank with the call for a “pause” in the IDF attacks in order to limit the humanitarian catastrophe.

The real reason behind US reflating its “peace” propaganda is the damage Israel’s relentless cruelty has done to their plans for a US-dominated Middle East with Israel on friendly terms with its allies like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, but ranged against its enemies Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas. Trump started this with the “Abraham Accords” and Biden was carrying this on. In late September, Jake Sullivan, his National Security Adviser, even claimed “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades”. Not only have events proved the folly of this prediction but his assertion that all was “quiet” reveals what that means for an imperialist satrap when it is put against Medical Aid for Palestine’s report in July that, “the death toll of Palestinians in the West Bank in 2023 has reached 153, already surpassing 2022 as the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the UN began recording in 2005”.

Biden has asserted that, “when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution”. Likewise, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has claimed that any post war plan for Gaza, “must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority”.

Obstacles

These solutions could only be struck over the disarmed and dismembered body of the entire Palestinian people and their homeland. Time and time again since the 1948 Nakba, the steadfastness and resilience of the people, despite the blunders and betrayals of their leaderships, and those of the corrupt monarchies and military dictatorships of the Arab world, have shown that they will never allow this to happen.

The other obstacle to Biden’s plans – to the extent that they are any more than a deception – is that Israel’s politicians, whether of the Zionist right or left, have made it quite clear that there is no chance of any sort of “land for peace deal” of the Oslo variety. Under Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, at the turn of the century, the Palestinian National Authority, under Yasser Arafat, was first humiliated (the siege of his HQ in Ramallah) and then, under Mahmoud Abbas, it was obliged to become an auxiliary police force for Israel.

In a post October 7 briefing, Israel’s security ministries outlined options for a post war solution. The “preferred” one was to “transfer” Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai Peninsula while the least desirable one would be to return it to the Palestine Authority. Undesirable because, they believe, it would give an, “unprecedented victory to the Palestinian national movement, a victory that would cost the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians and soldiers and not guarantee Israel’s security”.

Clearly, the present Likud-based coalition government, with its extreme right wing ministers, wants to see the completion of the Nakba, the driving out of the Palestinians, in other words, a political genocide. This is why even before October 7 they were attacking Jenin, arming the settlers, encouraging ethnic cleansing on the West Bank, demolishing Palestinian homes, launching provocations in Jerusalem and murdering a record number of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators.

In short, the solutions suggested by Israeli politicians, right or left, do not envisage anything approaching Blinken or Biden’s mirage of a Palestinian statelet.

But Israel’s solutions are not viable either. Egypt would never be able to accept 2.3 million Gazans, which could only be seen as yet another episode in the Nakba. El Sisi would not take over the job of ruling Gaza and Mahmoud Abbas (and the hapless PNA) would not be able to rule Gaza by acting as prison guards of behalf of Israel and imperialism. The PNA has already been deprived of cash by the wealthy imperialist countries, it is detested by Israeli politicians and hated by the Palestinian masses.

Where to from here?

The worldwide movement has been raising the call for a permanent ceasefire. Obviously, this would bring an immediate and welcome respite for the population, but it would not bring any lasting relief as long as the IDF occupation of northern Gaza continues. Indeed, as long as the land, sea and air blockade is in place, the suffering of the people will be a weapon in the hands of the Zionists. Even a formal agreement or armistice would only temporarily freeze the suffering as long as Israel could choose to block food, water, medical supplies and building materials to rebuild and repair the 40 per cent of buildings already reduced to rubble with winter coming on.

The movement around the world needs to mount the maximum pressure, via continued mass demonstrations, boycotts and blocking of both military and economic exports from Europe and the US. The supporters of Palestine need to exert maximum pressure on the pro-Zionist leaders of the reformist workers’ parties and of the trade unions to politically break with Israel and to take up these demands. They need to fight against the criminalisation of the Palestinian organisations and anti-Muslim racism. They need to expose the lie that anti-zionism is antisemitism, but make clear that the struggle against the very real rise of antisemitism by the right, needs to go hand in hand with support of the Palestinian people against their national oppression.

In the Arab and Muslim countries, we need a movement on the scale of the Arab Spring, aimed at the collaborators with the US to demand the breaking off not only of any relations with Israel but also with its North American and European sponsors until they compel Israel to cease its genocidal attack and withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank.

In the countries where a mass protest movement has developed, we must fight not just for a humanitarian ceasefire but a total cessation, the complete withdrawal of the IDF, its tanks, bulldozers, and drones from the whole of the territory, airspace and offshore waters of the Gaza Strip and an immediate end to its brutal ongoing repression on the West Bank and in Jerusalem. We must also demand the end of the blockade and the institution of free movement by land, sea and air across Gaza’s borders and between Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Since October 7, Israel has arrested 4,000 people from Gaza and more than 1,000 in the occupied West Bank, bringing the total number in prison to 10,000. We must demand the unconditional release of all the Palestinian “hostages”, both those sentenced by Israeli courts and the majority detained without trial.

Further, we must also oppose any “peace process” which does not include the right of return of all Palestinians expelled from their homeland since 1948, any settlement must have the free, uncoerced and democratic agreement of the Palestinians.

A single Palestinian state, ‘from the river to the sea’, can include people of both Palestinian and Israeli nationality, providing there is no question of privileges for either. Moreover, if Palestine were to become a socialist state, where the land and the workplaces are held in common, then this historic wrong may be overcome. It falls to the working class of both peoples, indeed of the whole surrounding region, to bring this about. This includes a struggle against the imperialist powers who have so long divided and exploited the region.