~ by Silvia Federici ~
The cruelty of the war Israel has been conducting against the Palestinian people and now against the population of Lebanon is so extreme, its genocidal intent so evident that we appear lost for possible explanations. Indeed, there are no words to describe the horror and the suffering the IDF’s military operations have been inflicting on the Palestinians. What we are witnessing is an extermination campaign, ensuring that nothing remains on the ground that may enable them to live on their land or simply survive. More than fifty thousand people have been massacred, mostly women and children, and this does not include the thousands whose bodies have been buried under the rubble of their homes, never to be retrieved, or the many executed, now found in mass graves, some clearly buried alive or mutilated. All reproductive systems have been dismantled. Homes, roads, water and electrical systems, hospitals have been destroyed, ambulances too were bombed. So have been all the trees and crops. And at least four hundred doctors, nurses and other health workers have died in this year-long campaign of extermination. Many have been executed, after been subjected to humiliating practices, and so have many people who had taken refuge in the clinics after their houses were bombed. What is clear is that systematically Israel is waging a total war on the everything Palestinians need for their reproduction. And now this brutal campaign of death is extending to Lebanon and possibly in coming weeks to Iran, Syria, Yemen.
Women and children, i.e. the very people who ensure the reproduction of the community and are the hope for the future, are being deliberately targeted. Every effort has also been made to erase the past. Israel fears the power of collective memories. It knows that keeping one’s history alive, keeping alive the memories of past injuries and past struggles is a powerful means of resistance. The memory of the Knakba of 1948, of the villages that were destroyed and communities displaced, have sustained generations of Palestinians inspiring to fight to the end not to leave their land. In response, all places where records are kept – libraries, universities, public or personal archives, have been turned to dust. And for weeks now no food has been allowed to enter the area, so that people are starving to death. Sadistically, when some food aid has come, people rushing for it have been shot and so have aid workers.
Adding to this deadly campaign, entering its second year, there is the brutal assault that Israeli settlers, heavily armed and often wearing military uniforms, have launched against Palestinian farms in the West Bank, forcing the owners to leave, on threat of death, stealing and killing their animals, destroying the beds for the cultivation of crops. Not last, we must mention the thousand and more arrested, who are also subjected to constant tortures and humiliations, some kept in chain for so long that they had to have their legs amputated because of the gangrene. What makes this genocidal operation especially horrifying is that it is conducted openly, in front of the whole world, and it has the unconditional support of the Unites States and the European Union, which are providing an incessant flow of money and weapons to sustain it. Indeed, such is the US commitment to unconditional support of Israel’s decisions, no matter how murderous they may be, that more than supporter its position seems that of a partner if not an instigator.
What, then, is at stake in Palestine? What makes governments that claim to be defenders of human rights drop all pretenses and strive to suffocate any protest against this genocide?
One answer is that the mass expulsion of the Palestinians from their native land and the campaign of terror Israel is waging are the completion of the task Israel was assigned since its formation, which was to defend the interest of US and international capital, and especially defend the interests of the oil companies in the region and keep a lid on the aspirations of the people of the Arab world who would want to recuperate the land and the resources taken aways from them from British colonization. As we know, since 1948 Israel has ensured that the oil fields of the Middle East would be open to US oil companies, and that the autocratic regimes the US and Britain installed in the region to protect their interests would not be challenged. Israel has so efficiently carried out this repressive task that it has become one of the leading arms exporters in the world and, more importantly, the main exporter of surveillance technology and repressive methods for which Palestine has been the laboratory and testing ground1. All autocratic regimes have benefitted from it. Israel was the main supporter of white South Africa, of the Mobuto regime in the Congo, it has collaborated with Rios Mont in the massacre of the indigenous population in Guatemala in the early 1980s, and the list goes on. It is not surprising, then, if Joe Biden already in 1986 stated that: “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it”, and, despite some mild condemnation, most government across the world are remaining silent as the Palestinians and now the Lebanese are being murdered. Most benefit from Israel’s provision of repressive tactics and weapons. Israeli drones today patrol borders, they (e.g.) ensure that no migrant boat can cross the Mediterranean undetected, its technology is used to erect walls, build electrified fences, turn borders into militarized zones. Keeping the Palestinians in a state of siege, depriving them of their land, their waters, their possibility to move from place to place, turning Palestine into a patchwork of separate, non-continuous areas, interspersed by an increasing number of settlers’ farms, making of Palestine an “open air prison”, with every form of resistance cruelly punished by imprisonment, killings, demolition of homes, has been a key element in the accomplishment of this project. Presently, moreover, another development is accelerating Israel and the US-EU war against the Palestinians. This is the discovery in 2000 of large deposit of natural gas off the coast of Gaza and Israel, valued in half a trillion dollars.2 As the history of the US well demonstrates, coups have been organized, governments have been toppled, in homage to oil extraction and there is no doubt this has been a powerful factor in accelerating the project of building a larger Israel and condemning the Palestinians to death or mass expulsion. As Charlotte Dennett has documented, in 2007 the Israeli government opposed the British Gas project to develop Gaza’s offshore gas resources, which would greatly benefit the Palestinians, and in 2008 “Israeli forces launched Operation Cast Lead”, that killed nearly 1400 Palestinians, with the declared intent to send Gaza “decades into the past”.3.
Still, we cannot fully understand what is taking place in Palestine unless we also connect it to the broader war that the United States, the European Union and international capitalist institutions, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, are making in order to gain control of the world economy and the world’s wealth. By means of an artificially created ‘debt crisis’ – the first step in a process of recolonization of much of the so-called ‘Third World’, and subsequently imposed ‘structural adjustment programs’, a state of permanent warfare has been created as new territories are opened up to capital investment and entire regions are robbed of their natural resources. In this sense “Palestine is the world”, as I wrote in a speech that I gave in 20024 at a Socialist Scholars Conference in New York, on the occasion of Sharon’s attack on Gaza. As I wrote at the time:
“What in Palestine is destroyed by the IDF, in many African countries is destroyed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. In Palestine it is the Israeli tanks that bulldoze schools and houses. In Africa it is structural adjustment, the defunding of the public sector, currency devaluation, but the effects are the same. … In both cases, the results are populations of refugees, the transfer of lands from the local people to the new colonial powers, forwarding and protecting the interests of international capital.”
Since then, the evidence that capitalist development requires a true war on the means and activities people need to reproduce their lives has been mounting. Whether by financial interventions or military operations or, more commonly by both, millions are dispossessed from their homes, their lands, their countries, as their lands are being privatized, opened to new investments and extractivist ventures, by petroleum, mining, agribusiness companies. This is why, throughout the world, there are today massive migratory movements. It is estimated that more than thirty thousand Africans have already drowned trying to cross to Europe in the last ten years, three thousand in 2023 alone. It is a genocide, like we are seeing in Gaza, but silent, invisible. In Latin America too, there is currently a massive exit of people willing to face the most perilous journey to reach the United States, where they are treated and hunted like criminals by border patrols, the border itself now being completely militarized.At a time of increasing capitalist crisis and inter-capitalist competition, development requires massive clearances, enclosures, the sacking of entire regions, as well as a policy tending to constantly reduce investment in social reproduction, benefits and wages. This is why, as we have seen above all in Iraq, war too is changing being primarily directed against the civilian population, aiming to emptying entire areas of their inhabitants, who have to be terrorized and deprived of their means of subsistence. In Iraq, as Dan Kovalik reports, in his No More War (2020)5, quoting the findings of the Commission of Inquiry of the International War Crimes Tribunal, the US army damaged:
“homes, electrical plants, fuel storage facilities, civilian factories, hospitals, churches, civilian airports, food storage, food testing laboratories, grain silos, animals vaccination centers, schools, communication towers, civilian governments office buildings, and stores…”
And most sites were bombed two or three times, “ensuring they could not be repaired.” (ibid). As a result, people continued to die long after the bombing were over, according to estimates more than 2 millions lost their lives as a result of this campaign, 500.000 of them children. This is, undoubtedly, what will occur in Palestine.
We cannot predict, at this date, when the killing and starving of Palestinians will come to an end. There now seems to be no end to the carnage, with the ADIF preparing a mass invasion of Rafa. But, whatever the result of this genocidal war, Palestinians will continue to die for a long time to come, because of the effects of the malnutrition, the diseases caused by lack of food and clean water, the consequences of the wounds and other diseases that can no longer be safely treated, and the unspeakable traumas people have suffered.
The war Israelis conducting in Palestine is especially cruel for women who are responsible for the reproduction of their communities and now are left with nothing – no homes, no food, no means to reproduce, care for and protect their children and their families. Many have given birth only to see their infants killed or condemned to die of hunger. One cannot imagine what must be the pain of the hundreds who are pregnant and must give birth under bombs, with no medical care, knowing their children they carry in their wombs will not have a chance to survive. The cruelty inflicted upon them has a special significance. Women are those who hold the community together, who when all seems lost hold on, search for some food, carry on life even under a tent, console the children. Along with the horror in front of Israel inhuman behavior, we must feel an immense admiration for their courage and strength and for the courage and strength of the doctors and all the Palestinian people, who, under bombings, continue to resist, telling the world that they would rather die where they are than leave their land once again, because leaving their land is also a form of death — and because they know that under Israeli occupation there are no safe places for them.
Denouncing this genocide, supporting their struggle with all the means we have, mobilizing to demand not only a cease fire but the end of Israel domination of Palestine is the least we can do in front of this abomination. We are, moreover, deluded if we think that the war Israel is conducting in Palestine is not of vital importance for our lives. The constant flow of money and weapons the Biden Administration is sending to help with this genocide is taken from our own schools, from investment in our communities, from our health-care systems and hospitals. And the inhuman, barbaric treatment inflicted on the Palestinian is a threat to us all. It is a warning of what it can be done to us – reminding us that we live in a social system that has no concern for human lives and does not hesitate to engage in mass destruction of people to achieve its ends.
- See Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory. How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. London-New York: Verso, 2023. ↩︎
- Charlotte Dennett, ‘Israel, Gaza, and the Struggle for Oil’. Counterpunch, December 11, 2023 ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Silvia Federici “Palestine is the World” (2002) Counterpunch, March 12, 2024. ↩︎
- Dan Kovalik, No More War. How the West Violates International Law by Using ‘Humanitarian’ Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests,Skyhorse Publishing, 2020, p.86. ↩︎
Kovalik’s quoted from a report of the Commission of Inquiry of the International War Crimes Tribunal.