After months of unrelentingly legitimising Israel’s bloodshed in the besieged Gaza Strip and the West Bank, some United States leaders have begun hinting at an end to the Israeli assaults. As the war rages in Palestine and surrounding regions, with now over 31,000 killed in Gaza Strip alone, and, the flow of military supplies continues to Israel, United States political leaders have suddenly begun more direct criticisms of the Benjamin Netanyahu-led Likud Party coalition Government.
Although it has chosen to conduct this unending war, the hardline Jewish supremacist coalition Government is one of the most unstable governments in their country’s history with the thinnest of majorities in the Knesset.
Washington has long known that five times Premier ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu is the senior politician facing the greatest number of corruption charges in Israeli history – an interesting parallel to former US President and 2024 Presidential contestant Donald Trump. It is no secret that Netanyahu is desperate to cling to power to avoid Court convictions.
Many analysts agree that he has used the Gazan attack of October 7 as an opportunity to wage war with the hope that a major annihilation of the Palestinian ‘enemy’ will help him win another election. It will not be the first time that a politician has waged war with the direct motive of boosting popularity and winning elections.
A week ago, President Joe Biden alerted various allied capitals and shocked Israel by talking positively about the need for a ceasefire. True, in that TV news interview, ‘Genocide Joe’, as he is derided by his own Democratic Party anti-war activists, had argued for only a ‘temporary’ ceasefire.
But what shocked the Likud Zionists in Occupied Jerusalem, is that Biden had gone on to warn that Israel may “cross a red line” if its IDF pushed into Rafah City, the last so-called ‘safe area’ for the 2.5 million Gazans after months of massive bombardment and invasion.
US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the most powerful politician in the Senate and an American Jew himself, has gone further: he openly called for an end to Israel’s current trigger-happy ruling coalition led by Netanyahu.
In a media briefing at the US Capitol on Thursday, Schumer described the Israeli Premier a “major obstacle” to peace in Palestine-Israel. He noted that Netanyahu, as well as his coalition, opposed the so-called “two-State solution” pushed by the West as the means to end the conflict in Palestine.
Schumer, a veteran American politician, heads the dominant Democratic Party’s group in the American upper house. He emphasised the need for a new Israeli Government to replace the current one. Commenting on the current Israeli Government’s refusal so far to change course, Schumer hinted that the US may be forced to “play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using leverage”.
This “leverage” is precisely what the Biden administration has refused to use all along. The ‘leverage’, as the whole world knows, is the massive military and financial aid with which Washington virtually bank-rolls the existence of its vital client military power in oil-rich West Asia. The US has only to reduce, by a small amount, either its arms supplies or its credit lines, and Israel’s current status as the most powerful State in the region will be undermined.
Support
Likewise, Washington’s diplomatic protection for Israel – it has used its veto in support of Israel in the UN Security Council for the greatest number of times by any Permanent Member.
In earlier decades, in the 1950s and ’60-70s, Washington administrations have used their aid clout to push Israel to step back from the brink of regional conflagrations. Such US pressure was most prominent during the infamous ‘Six-Day War’ of 1967, the worst military aggression by Israel since the Zionist State was forcibly created in 1947.
‘Leverage’ is exactly what the American anti-war movement – the biggest since the Vietnam War – demands today as they watch their tax dollars and national prestige squandered in Israel’s war and Occupation. Similar anti-war movements in European countries are also demanding the withholding of aid by their governments. But will their governments listen?
This has been the big question among international relations analysts. Everyone knows that the West’s strategic interests in the Mediterranean seaboard region of West Asia that is historically called ‘the Levant’ (from the French word for ‘rising’ – i.e. place of sunrise) predates the modern State of Israel by centuries.
The sheer number of ports from these ancient times onwards, demonstrates the immense economic value of this region. And the peoples of the Levant area thrived in being the ‘middle-men’ for this trade. Even as the Roman Empire declined, creating a power vacuum, western Europe’s nascent capitalist urban centres (e.g. Florence, Venice, Valencia) coordinated with the Vatican and allied kingdoms to launch military expeditions called ‘Crusades’ to invade the Levant and recover some influence in that area.
By then the Arab tribal federations had evolved into a powerful Islamic empire and they successfully resisted the crusades. The eastern coastline of West Asia, including Yemen and Oman, along with the Persian Gulf ports, had already been beneficiaries of this very ancient East-West trade for over two millennia. Sri Lanka’s own Mahathittha and even bigger ports of South India along with such western Indian ports like Dvaraka were the eastern entry ports for this trade with West Asia.
Western Europe’s subsequently blossoming capitalist empires soon sought access to the lucrative East by their use of modern long distance sailing technology to go round Africa and sidestep Arab middlemen. That was the beginnings of Euro-colonialism as the emergent capitalist centre established its economic diktat across the globe.
This is the historical origins of the West’s current vital geo-strategic interest in the Levant. This is the raison d’etre for the very creation of ‘Israel’ inside a section of the Levant which the local people call ‘Palestine’.
Nearly 2,000 years ago the Jewish community had either been forcibly expelled or voluntarily migrated out of their own small territory of Judah and Samaria (a part of the Roman province of Palastina). They had spread out in communities (‘dispersal’ = Diaspora) throughout West Asia, the Mediterranean, and continental Europe.
It was actually in tandem with the growth of capitalism in continental Europe – in the forging of an interconnected market in that geographically compact region – that the Jews of the region then prospered as an inter-kingdom business networking community. It was this unique role of a trans-polity financial exchange and credit network based on their ethno-religious affinity that is perhaps the Jews’ greatest contribution to world civilisation – as the financial interlocutors for the birth of European capitalist power, the bankers.
It was with the later fading of this role, as powerful European nation-states took over finance and commerce, that the Jews, then, fell into the predicament of marginalised and unwanted minor middle-men. That was when the pogroms began in later centuries; when those Jewish middlemen who held local business power as creditors of rich peasantry, became easy targets for ‘debt liquidation’ of a horrifically physical kind.
Thus, the European Jews who were settled in Palestine by their supposed European big power ‘protectors’ now find themselves trapped in what is clearly yet another off-shore ‘ghetto’ created for them.
If Gaza is under siege today, it is likely that this siege is but the knee-jerk, crude, desperate, escape strategy of Israel’s Ashkenazi Jews to survive their own siege predicament in this militarily created colony of theirs surrounded by millions of outraged Arab and other indigenous populations of the Levant.
No wonder this besieged ‘nation’, fuelled by a frantic ethnic fanaticism (Zionism) as a means of community solidarity, ends up producing gangster-type politicos for their Government.
The West, which has sponsored this final colonial experiment in a region of continuing vital interest to it, must now manipulate their client nation in attempts to enforce a continued strategic presence in the Levant.
Solution
Will mere regime-change suffice? How will NATO and the EU dredge up the remains of that pretentious ‘two-State solution’ to create a political arrangement that will satisfy Palestinians as well as protect an Israeli Euro-Jewish state? Where will they put the almost six million displaced Palestinian refugees waiting to return to a homeland from the slum-type refugee camps they have lived in as non-citizens for 75 years? And where will the West put those 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers on the West Bank?
In South Africa, there was a large geographical space that enabled the Boers to find living space once they were abandoned by their European colonial sponsors. Here, in tiny Israel-Palestine, such a ‘change of plans’ by the colonial sponsors is not that simple.
In South Africa, despite the extensive living space, there was no attempt to consolidate the Bantustans and Boer republics as separate states. Rather, it was in everyone’s interest to totally reform a single State; to transform Apartheid into a multicultural liberal democracy.
How long will the West persist with its pretence of crowding in two states in tiny Palestine-Israel? Does the West’s strategic need for a ‘beachhead’ in West Asia/Levant override any creative negotiation of a genuinely stable political arrangement for both Palestinians and Jews?
An increasingly impatient, postcolonial Global South watches while their former imperial powers dither over what is best for themselves at the expense of both the latest victims of European genocide, the Gazans, and the former victims, the European Jews.
What the enlightened world prays for is a Mandela to replace the desperados or, at least a Nyerere. After all, this is the same ‘Holy Land’ where a Saviour was once labelled a ‘terrorist’ and crucified.
