by achrilock
europe
Hot take from a random nobody on the internet. Take with a bubble of ball sweat. People keep saying that IDF operational tactics make no sense with regard to defeating Hamas. Half true. They’re doing a kind of shifting surge thing, trying to degrade resistance command structures, communications, and movement ability, and separating Gaza into bite-sized segments that are easier to occupy, control, and re-enter later. If they break enough tunnels, this would weaken their opposition significantly.
It won’t defeat it, however. And this is where the speculation comes in. It will have the effect of breaking resistance groups up from a single, unified fighting force into smaller resistance groups. Something larger than a cell but smaller than an insurgent army. Now, when coupled with the fact that the population is being starved and deprived of basic necessities over a year, what this does is ensure that, while resistance won’t be broken, it will be controllable in terms of space and volume.
They don’t want Hamas defeated. They want it, and the population and any potential new resistance recruits, tamed. Functional but not strong. Too hungry and sick to grow. They want the terrain of Gaza split up into sectors that can be occupied, entered, disrupted, policed, and then left in a state of relative ‘normalcy’ after the occupation has things under control. This is a plan for a decades-long occupation, with the specter of an ever-present armed resistance enemy for them to ‘fight.’
If a sector behaves, it’ll be developed and settled, similar to how things work in the West Bank. There will be food (in amounts and types controlled by the occupation). There will be medicine (likewise, strictly controlled by the occupation). They can then police Gaza as they do the West Bank. Usually no one bothers putting a paramilitary police raid of a house on the world news, so long as you say it was a police action against ‘terrorists’ or whatever. They can do that every night, forever.
They can then settle Gaza as they do the West Bank, while at the same time using the sporadic local uprisings as an excuse to keep the sectors militarized and heavily controlled. It’s not a campaign to ‘defeat terrorism’ or even to squash an insurgency. It’s the same playbook as the West Bank, a campaign of slow displacement, with episodic ethnic cleansing, from which Israel can profit over the long term while realizing its goal of eventual default annexation of the Palestinian territories.
This is the twenty-first century version of a nineteenth-century colonization plan, on live television. They have no intention of ‘winning’ this war. The plan is for a manageable long-term excuse to do what they’ve been trying to do since Israel was founded: get the Palestinians out, either through displacement or slow, orchestrated replacement. This is Zionism, and there is money to be made and political capital to be harnessed, all over the west, which is why it isn’t being stopped.
I’ll keep this short, first, because it’s obvious and second because the advocates of colonialism and imperialism love nothing better than for good people to feel things and express their disquiet over the excesses of empire in what seems to them an ineffectual display of naivete and sobbing misguided moralizing.
I’m not here to cry. I’m here to tell you how you’ve fucked up. In challenging even the ICC’s involvement in what any objective observer understands to be willful, intentional ethnic cleansing on the part of the Israelis and their partners in the US and Europe, and crimes of war on the part of Hamas, Biden, and his administration, and the colonial beneficiary vanguard in Europe, are giving away the game.
I was speaking with someone earlier and we were talking about how colonizers and imperial ideologues react when challenged, when even the slightest criticism is leveled against their disregard for the legal and human status of others. You are seeing that in action in the United States, in Europe, and in Israel. Like any fascists, they will lash out, violently if they feel it necessary, for they are simply the arm of fascism that chooses to obscure its daily practice in more palatable rhetoric.
Western civilization is the abomination child of colonialism, racism, and capitalism, which, as history and current events teach us, becomes fascism when practically challenged. Israel is the proxy battlefield, not just for Netanyahu, for his government, for Zionism (itself a supremacist, colonial ideology), but for the entire idea and fundamental foundations of the colonial, supremacist empire spanning the Atlantic. This is ‘the’ proxy war for the idea of the whole system.
But, make no mistake, the historical implications of this are not minor. This decision means that there will be no legal consequences for Russia in its campaign of erasure against Ukraine. There will be no consequences for China and the atrocities it will commit if it invades Taiwan. There will be no consequences for the United States in its next major war, and make no mistake there will be another. And that is precisely the point. The law exists for those who are subservient, not the powerful.
You can see it in real time as they express sympathy with dictatorial Iran after some of its fascists died, as they stop Ukraine from winning its war with Russia as they profiteer off the conflict, as France struggles to hold on to one of its colonies, as they use violence to invade places of learning, as they tighten the borders, including those around Gaza and the West Bank, that protect elites and their functionaries and constituencies from the people they exploit all over the world.
Remember this when they preach nonviolence, when they use the words ‘law and order’ to shame you, when they talk about equality, justice, or morality. These are just words to the elite. They are meaningless. The only rights you will have are those you choose to take and keep by force. The only humanity to be had is in challenging this monstrosity of capitalism that strangles the world, to take any opportunity to strike at the heart of empire.
And remember that neither your life, your so-called rights, your dignity, the quality of your existence, nor indeed the concept of law itself mean anything whatsoever to these so-called leaders and owners. It’s rhetoric meant to preserve the system and destroy those who would challenge it. And each time their rhetoric fails, they resort immediately to violence, in the streets or on the battlefield (which is just someone’s streets). It’s not about justice. It’s not about law. It’s about power.
TL;DR version: placing aside the extensive ethical and consistency considerations already mentioned, and taking the matter simply in tactical sociopolitical terms, you couldn’t have done a bigger favor for the so-called ‘radical’ left had your teleprompter been written by ruthless anti-colonial, anti-capitalist anarchists. You are less, even, than the rulers who came before you, because you aren’t even trying to tell a pretty, holistic lie, anymore. The less the oligarchy pretends, the less we all feel the need to.
An elite in Slovakia was shot. A few thoughts in rebuttal as elites throughout the West close ranks around the unjust violent order they control.
First, we do not live in democracies, so you can’t attack democracy by attacking those who claim to represent it. We live in a global oligarchy with provincial, fenced-off zones of control, where elites tell lies and make corrupt deals in petty competition with one another for power through silly popularity contests. These people do not represent our interests. They represent the oligarchs, everywhere in the world. It’s not politics. It’s business. It has nothing to do with people or progress.
Second, there are no such things as human rights, either as a consistent ethical or legal concept or as a matter of practical fact. There are things that humans do, and things that other humans will allow them to get away with, things humans can take and hold and things they can’t. Thousands of people are, intentionally and through simple neglect, murdered by the global oligarchy every day. Human life means nothing to them, only the preservation of their systems of authority.
Third, because each of us not born to or gifted with tremendous, unprecedented wealth is, in essence and in fact, a slave, we should shed no tears when one of the mighty is harmed. It is both gratifying on a personal level, a kind of social blessing for all to enjoy, and an important political lesson when our world is reminded that elites bleed just as easily as the rest of us 🦀
Finally, the person in question isn’t worth your tears: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/25/robert-fico-slovakia-veteran-populist-prime-minister