Determination and Desperation in Gaza and Israel

So, the Israelis are determined to continue their ‘reduction’ (military planners prefer that to ‘destruction’ or ‘annihilation’) of the Gaza Strip despite the UN Resolution. Hamas, with absolutely nothing to lose, not even life, since now so much of that has been lost anyway, are determined to continue whatever resistance or attacks they can put together.

The determination of Hamas, of course, is born of desperation, of fear that at some stage they will be exhausted both of men and arms, and wiped out in Gaza and possibly anywhere else in future. And the desperation of the whole populace, who have been driven to shiver and starve as the Israelis have finally almost entirely have deprived them of homes, power, fuel and food.

Eighty per cent of Gazans now require food aid; only ten per cent will get it, since although some food can get to warehouses, as the Israelis humanely open a crossing for an aid convoy, it cannot be distributed to the majority of the citizens as the Israelis have destroyed the infrastructure through which it could be delivered. It is of course, the old Israeli tactical trick of giving with one hand while taking away with the other and previously having taken a great deal with both.

So, as Gazans are still proving stubborn, are still not marching in the streets to plead with the Israelis to finally take them over as a client, pliant, colony; are not marching in the streets demanding that Hamas (now, in Israel-speak “this murderous Palestinian organisation”: you see the Israeli desire now to extend their ‘reduction’ to the Palestinians of the West Bank?) goes into exile on a cruise liner, nor demanding they cease rocketing Israel. As if they could: who could dare, could be determined enough, to risk even standing for ten seconds in a street knowing that they would be targeted almost instantly and the house they stepped out of shelled or reduced to add to the rubble blocking the roads?

So, the determination of the Israelis to effectively destroy Palestine and reduce Palestinians to a state of utter despair and incapacity is unabated. Its public expression, yet again, adopts the pseudo-legitimacy of the language of Americans in their war on terror. They will not be ‘dictated to’ by ‘foreign countries’, least of all, now, by such as ‘American cheeseburger-eating surrender monkeys’.

This is where, as many of us anticipated, where American foreign policy and ‘pre-emptive’ military ‘armed diplomacy’ has led: to ruthless action by a ruthless state under the guise of protecting its statehood and its own self-respecting, self-obsessed status and power apart from the rest of the world. It is an attitude that has brought the USA in the end to an economic collapse and an international disrespect that not even the most liberal new President (and Obama is not that for all his outward charm) can cure for a generation.

In its desperation and defiance, Israel is set on a course to follow its mentor, but unlike its parent, it cannot threaten countries internationally. The USA has bought (no doubt with of offers of finance it could never, it turns out, afford anyway, or threats of withdrawal of arms and technology, a couple of European countries to place its ‘Star Wars’ stations in them. The whole of Europe is now reaping the rewards of this American intervention aimed at Russia. (It is ludicrous to suppose that antimissile missiles, never yet proven to work in the way they are claimed to, must be placed in Poland or the Czech Republic to intercept missiles fired from Iran or North Korea.) All those states bordering on Russia are now short of gas in a cold winter, and in terms of heating will be no better off than the Gazans who have equally been deprived. In desperation, are they going to turn to the USA for energy it neither can nor would supply to Europe? Rather they are going to abandon it.

What countries can Israel buy or threaten to support it against the Palestinians, apart from the USA? Just as despised, it can only rely on propaganda ; or will it dare, finally, in desperation at losing all international support as the UN Resolution now shows with even the USA abstaining instead of vetoing it as it has done so many times before, threaten, sub rosa, the use if its own terror weapon, its nuclear arsenal on its feared near neighbours?

The Russians have learnt that the USA is powerless and impotent in some areas in which it has (literal) power; that in the field of energy supplies its supposed power of ‘protecting its allies’ is meaningless. It, and no doubt others will find more holes in that fabric, and the USA, like Israel, will no doubt find itself in the desperate situation of being almost entirely without allies and friends.

Yesterday, while the US was still blocking any UN resolution that was not kind to Israel and cruel to the Palestinians, President-elect Obama held a press conference in which he refused to answer any questions on Gaza. However, a correspondent described his body language showed he was very angry. Perhaps it was the knowledge that within a matter of days American policy over Israel might change was what finally persuaded the American ambassador, a friend ot the notorious Neocons who led the USA into these disasters of intervention in the name of the ‘War on Terror”, the same the Israelis immediately adopted as excuse for any of their own actions, to abstain.

In any case, the determination of the Israelis, who immediately said the cease-fire resolution was ‘unworkable’ without, obviously, even discussing it, makes almost any new American policy also unworkable in the short term, unless Obama can raise the determination to defy the powerful Jewish-American lobby that has kept the USA in such close step with their spiritual homeland.

Meanwhile, the situation of all Palestinians will remain desperate. A hundred civilians. it is reported, were recently ‘encouraged’ by Israelis who controlled a part of southern Gaza to take shelter inside a house. Which the Israelis shelled. The ambulances finally allowed in by the Israelis could not reach the dead and wounded: they had to be carried to them on carts. There are eyewitness testimonies. Many will be determined that the Israelis should stand before an international tribunal for war crimes when this is finally over. Or as, if Israel cannot e stopped, the skeletons of the starving are collected from the ruins of Gaza.

Possibly, all the Israelis can hope for in future support from the USA may be that an Obama administration might bow to a Jewish lobby and prevent that final humiliation. And then, of course, any suggestion of morality in either ‘democratic’ state would be in shreds.

Wars that arise out of small events in their turn create other events and those lead to greater events that unpredictably dwarf those out of which the war began. That was true of the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years War, the First World War, the War on Terror and will be true of this.

And, of course, in all this, no-one has been saying very much of self-determination.