Genocide the last refuge of the oppressor losing a conflict

In King John, one of Shakespeare’s comparatively less mentioned plays, he says, “Your breath first kindled the dead coal of wars, Between this chastised kingdom and myself, And brought in matter that should feed this fire; And now ‘tis far too huge to be blown out, With that same weak wind which enkindled it.”

The war triggered by the Zionist entity over the last 76 years has come home to roost as well. If the war can be a source of realization of accumulated capital, it can be the midwife of a revolution, Marx predicted. The dialectics never let one down, neither in history nor in the science of war.

“I like it when people break out of concentration camps,” was the first response of Norman Finkelstein on hearing the news of the Palestinians breaking through the sickening wall of apartheid. He was smeared and pronounced by the Zionists with their age-old hackneyed label of being antisemitic.

Bold and daring as Finkelstein is, he refused to succumb and retract his statement, albeit the Zionist propaganda forced him to concede acts of terror committed by Hamas on the fateful day. However, he immediately neutralized it with Net Turner’s slaves ‘uprising, which cost many slave owners’ lives.

On hearing the news of active genocide and before having a stroke Noam Chomsky categorically said, “The state of Israel must come to an end”. It was a shocking statement as Tariq Ali, in one of his interviews alluded to because, after the 1967 war, Noam and Hana Ardent were the only two Jewish scholars who overtly supported the Israeli entity.

For Israel, as for capital, every calamity is an opportunity. It used Hannibal’s doctrine killing most of its people on the eventful day while blaming everything on Hamas.

The ever-agile Max Blumenthal exposed the lies even before the hierarchy of the Israeli regime was aware or pretended to be aware of the grisly crimes, it committed on its people in the name of Hamas.

The Zionist state took the opportunity as manna and decided to push the Palestinians into Sinai, failing they went on to commit an overt unending genocide, going on even now. Yet the victory has eluded them.

The genocide has made two things obvious; first, Israel cannot survive without the backing of the US and second, the country is incapable of keeping unity among its ranks even during the period of what it calls a war, in reality, a genocide.

This is apparent to a common human being, but those at the helm of affairs have even far more ominous predictions of the ultimate consequences of this one-dimensional war. Way back in January 2023, Israeli outgoing army chief Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, no friend of Palestinians, expressed grave concern about the incumbent right-wing coalition’s plans to create three separate sources of authority in the West Bank.

The Israeli army is already operating in the West Bank as an occupying force. The impotent Palestinian Authority is hand-in-glove with its masters, and now Smotrich is running an SA-type fascist force of settlers under his command threatening to sweep West Bank clean of Palestinians.

Such a division is not only strengthening, the settlers encouraging them to collide with the army directly but turning a section of the army under Smotrich’s command to fight against its main component.

Recently, the Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar criticized the settlers’ hooliganism in the West Bank in an unambiguous statement. Once again, it must be kept in mind that the head of any Israeli institution is bereft of any empathy with the Palestinians. His only concern is to limit the ever-spreading anarchy in his state.

The principle of fascism is to use the cultural industry to integrate society, which for Adorno manifests a triumph of repressive unification attained politically under fascism and now is repeated in liberal democracies.

Anyone who does not conform to the norms of the cultural industry is either a criminal, a suspect, or antisemitic. From Julian Assange to Max Blumenthal to Richard Midhurst, all “intellectuals are called on the carpet... Don’t you conceal something?” Herbert Marcuse queries, “You talk a language, which is suspect. You don’t talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.”

Returning to Roner who wrote a letter to the Israeli hangmen Netanyahu, Gallant, and a few other high-ups, has complained “I am writing this letter to you with a heavy heart, filled with concern, as a Jew, as an Israeli, and as a member of the defense establishment, about the growing phenomenon of Jewish terror from ‘hilltop youth,’” a code name for the settlers. “They are a hotbed of violence against Palestinians,” he writes while expressing his concerns about the dramatic increase in violent incidents without receiving any punishments. “Continuing in this direction will lead to much bloodshed and will change the State of Israel beyond recognition,” he warned in the letter.

Smotrich, a far-right terrorist and the security minister, immediately demanded the firing of Ronan Bar from his post. In his letter Bar also “decried Ben Gvir’s contentious visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem last week, which drew international condemnation as a “provocation.”

Despite Smotrich’s scathing criticism and his removal from the post, Bar is going nowhere. Despite political interests working in the background the institutional positions in Israel are mostly secured. A country that went through five polls in the last four years, where the political structure is so unstable, cannot afford to change its institutional leadership so often.

Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the immediate predecessor of the newly appointed chief of army staff Herzi Halevi also met Netanyahu twice to warn him about the far-reaching consequences of the coalition’s moves for the cohesion of the defence establishment, asking him not to create a three-tier power structure in the West Bank which was bound to have lethal consequences for Israel.

Recently, there was a verbal spat between Netanyahu and his defence minister Gallant. The latter dispelled the illusion of an outright Israeli victory in its genocidal war against Hamas. For the first time, Gallant has spilled the beans speaking out openly against his premier.

Netanyahu is not only at loggerheads with Gallant but is finding himself at odds with his negotiators, David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Roner Bar, the head of Shin Bet and Nitzan Alon, the IDF/IOF point man. He blamed them for showing weakness at the negotiating table with the Qatari-Sisi nexus.

Although the latter is trying its best to maintain Israeli coercive hegemony over the people of Gaza. For the correspondent of the “Time of Israel”, the criticism by the premier could be surprising but when the predator’s grip on the conflict begins to weaken, the collision within the hierarchy of power becomes inevitable.

The genocidal conflict has become stagnant. Genocidal intent is itself a proof of the oppressor’s decline and defeat.” “I’m on my own, facing the entire security establishment and the negotiating chiefs,” the TV report quotes Netanyahu as saying. “They are showing weakness and just looking for ways to capitulate…says the Czar of Zionism”, so much confidence in his kitchen cabinet. He is insisting on occupying the Philadelphia Corridor, captured by IDF “only in May eight months into the war”.

Such an insistence is merely an excuse to delay the ceasefire until the outcome of the US elections, albeit it is evident that even Trump’s triumph will not improve the situation for Israel. Netanyahu is desperate to start a US-backed war with Iran with American marines saving his blushes. No US president is going to oblige him.

Adding insult to injury, retired Major General Yitzhak Brik warned that under the given situation if the war with Hamas and Hezbollah continues Israel could face a “collapse within a year”.

In a piece published in Haaretz, Brik stated, “The country is galloping towards the edge of an abyss. Most of the pretentious declarations made by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant throughout the war in Gaza have proven to be groundless,” he said, and “With these pronouncements, Gallant, along with his colleagues IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have been throwing dust in the eyes of the Israeli public,” he added. “Gallant,” he said, “has begun to realize that “the concept of total victory in Gaza is nonsense.”

Netanyahu’s tantrums have made Brik the least sanguine about achieving a hostage deal with Hamas, nor does he think it is plausible to defeat Hamas or catch Yahya Sinwar alive or dead.

Brik deals with the inherent flaws within the Israeli army. It’s a small army heavily reliant on reservists who serve for a limited duration. With technology overtaking the conventional war methods and neo-liberal austerity replacing Keynesian economics, Israel has cut down its army. “The ground forces are so small,” Brik complains, “that there is no surplus of troops. To reinforce one sector, soldiers need to be withdrawn from another sector. The situation is so bad that the IDF does not have enough soldiers to fight more than one and a half sectors”.

The lack of readiness of the military to fight and the neglect of logistical and maintenance units for civilian companies, responsible for providing necessary responses during the war were other problems. The soldiers fleeing the army were another matter of serious concern.

Including Hamas, Brik identifies several other enemies encircling the Jewish state. Hezbollah—the so-called—pro-Iranian militias in Syria and the Syrian army, tens of thousands of freedom fighters (terrorists for him) in the West Bank, and “thousands of extremist Bedouins and Arabs within the State of Israel” and Iran, whose forces may cross the eastern border with Jordan to attack Israel.

“And now,” he says, “they [Israelis] are crying out that they are missing 7,000 soldiers and asking to bring back three-year mandatory service. This shows a lack of foresight and a lack of strategic understanding in the face of growing threat around us, and they did not even acknowledge a single mistake, all out of arrogance, ego, lack of vision, and not understanding what war is and how to prepare and build an army for it”.

He complains that despite his warnings about the lack of preparedness of the Israeli air force to fight a battle, no one took notice of it.

Nevertheless, it is his amazing confession regarding the easy accessibility of the enemy’s precision missiles and drones to penetrate, attack, and destroy Israeli aircraft that leaves one flabbergasted. One wonders about the role of the Iron Dome, which requires billions of US taxpayers’ $ to protect the Zionist entity. The admission justifies and proves the repeated Iranian and Hezbollah claims of penetrating the “not-so-invincible” Iron Dome.

Besides this panic in the power structure, a massive strike in Israel to bring back the hostage, joined by the labour union Histadrut, an extremely reactionary, racist but powerful union, is bringing the economy to a halt. Hundreds and thousands marched in Israel on Monday, while half a million marched on Sunday in various cities, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Caesarea, and other sites across the country, fuelled by the killing in Gaza of six hostages but not on the genocide of the Palestinians.

In the Dialects of Enlightenment, the quote of Adorno & Horkheimeris meant for the Jews. I am taking the liberty to replace it with Palestinians. They wrote that “adults to whom the cry for the blood of Palestinians has become second nature do not know the reason any more than the young people who are called upon to spill that blood. Those in command who know the reason do not hate the Palestinians and do not love their followers. But the hatred felt by the led…knows no bounds”. Isn’t that the case in Israel?

The Zionist breath that kindled the dead coal of wars and fed it cannot blow it out, with the same weak wind that kindled it. Shakespeare wasn’t wrong.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024