Palestine and the revenge-based disorder of US

“If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Inquires Shylock, a Jew in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. “If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that”. By no means an insensible response from a Jew. Nevertheless, when a similar question was posed by the people of Palestine, the reply they invariably got was not in words but in a blitzkrieg.

The latest one has so far massacred 15000 babies, killed and maimed hundreds and thousands of unarmed civilians, including women. The figure of 35000 Palestinians as the victims of cold-blood murder by Zionist forces is as old as the lies spoken about the incident of October 7 if not the history of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

A lot has happened in the last eight months during which the helpless global South has been watching the live streaming of human massacre perpetrated by Israel in Palestine, all happening with the collaboration of the “Civilized” West.

The vapid and vulgar slogans of “Israel’s right to self-defense”, “the rising tide of anti-Semitism among youngsters”, and a hoax of any “possibility of a future Jewish holocaust” have lost all the venom if they ever contained. The shenanigans are wicked and shop-worn, no one, not even the European states, is buying them. The world can see through the shallowness and opacity of the Israeli lies.

In the last days of the White Apartheid South African regime, Europe found itself facing the same imbroglio. It desperately wanted to rescind the support it provided to the apartheid regime, but the US-Israel nexus forced them to tread along on the primrose pathway of disaster. Lest one forgets the white minority state had nuclear bombs which it developed with the help of Israel but could never use.

After the ICJ labeled Israel committing a plausible genocide, the ICC (International Criminal Court) stepped in to indict the Israeli premier and defense minister for deliberately committing serious war crimes. For Israel, it was the double whammy. The decision could not have seen the dawn of realization unless it was backed by Europe, especially and interestingly by the Germans who are the biggest sponsors of this ongoing genocide.

The decision has obvious political dimensions to it. The indictment of Ismail Hanieh, Mohammad Deif, and Yahya Sinwar was an outright mockery of justice. As the occupation was under attack Ismail Hanieh, the head of Hamas was not even present in Gaza but was in Qatar.

It was Yahya Sinwar and a small elite of the Al Qassam brigade who knew about the attack that occurred on October 7. And how can the ICC equate “the violence of the oppressed, suppressed, depressed, and repressed” with that of one perpetrated by the Zionist oppressor for the last seventy-odd years?

Walter Rodney succinctly inquires, “By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?” Despite the flaws in the verdict, Karim Khan, the prosecutor, had no guts to face the wrath of the imperial power on his own.

It was the battleground of Gaza, the heroic sacrifices of the Palestinians, and the valiant efforts of the masses, especially the students, that forced him to come out of his hibernation to give an unexpected verdict.

The US, which applauded the ICC for declaring Putin a war criminal, finds itself in a quagmire. It will impose sanctions on the ICC and Karim Khan. His predecessor Fatou Bensouda, a Gambian High Commissioner to the UK, was unceremoniously removed from her post and was banned from entering the US, for she demanded an investigation into the US army’s and the CIA’s crimes against humanity committed during the war in Afghanistan. She also had the temerity to investigate Israeli war crimes of 2014 committed in Gaza.

Despite the humiliation suffered in the General Assembly, why is the US keen on continuing this genocide? The answer lies with Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. The world dominated by capitalism is a crisis-prone system in which, despite abundance, scarcity prevails. Every day nearly a billion people sleep on empty stomachs, while massive food is wasted by the corporate world of the global North.

The competition in the corporate sector leads to the introduction of new technologies, making the old redundant, hence laying down the mass of labour out of the productive process. Technological investment for sheer profit, and the lack of buying power of the masses, lead to a fall in the rate of profit. To sell its commodities, capitalist needs new markets mostly in pre-capitalist areas. Once those countries develop identical skills as China did, those areas start competing with the exploiters.

The search for colonies leads to wars among the capitalist powers, an extremely lucrative business. Not only the accumulated capital is used, but the destruction ultimately leads to construction. In either case, companies like Lockheed Martin, which manufacture arms and simultaneously deal with medicines make trillions.

Rosa Luxemburg was succinct; capitalism cannot survive without wars. Financialization is the other key factor that helps the banks to control the governments not only of the poor countries—through IMF and World Bank—but the rich ones as well. In the US banks, are the biggest creditors playing with the future of students and average consumers who are the biggest debtors?

In 2008, those all-big impregnable banks crashed like nine pins. Trillions of taxpayer dollars were invested to bail them out, but nothing was done to help the ordinary consumer. The housing crisis led thousands to become homeless in a few months. Blackstone, a housing company that gobbled up homes for dirt cheap, was the biggest beneficiary of that crash.

Akin to Israel, the artificial and insecure state of Saudi Arabia saved the US $ from a definite crash in 1973 immediately after the Arab -Israel war, when in exchange for the Saudis’ security petrol prices were attached to the US $.

The Saudis also provided inexpensive fuel to the US soldiers fighting an imperialist war in Vietnam. Later, it helped the US destroy both Iraq and Syria. Mearsheimer and Walt, in their book, insist on the role of Israel and Dick Cheney in the destruction of Iraq but Saudia was not far behind.

Since Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen were instrumental in enhancing the cause of the liberation of Palestine, they faced an apocalyptical nemesis. Imperialism not only stole their oil wealth, but Libyan gold and its fresh water resources also became the property of US multinationals. The military-industrial complex earned its fair share of the plunder. Once the Ukraine war was practically lost, the military-industrial complex moved to Palestine.

An unstable Middle East suits the hegemonic designs of the US. The only reason that the US wants to keep an apartheid pariah entity of Israel intact. Freedom of Palestine cannot be seen in isolation from the freedom of the entire Middle East from the clutches of imperialism. The battle for the liberation of the entire community of the oppressed of the world is being fought in Palestine. The Palestinians are carrying a huge responsibility of saving the world from the wrath of capitalism. To liberate the world, they must win their battle. “A moon,” Mahmoud Darwish said, “will” definitely “rise from the darkness” surrounding it.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024