As the unspeakable carnage and morally questionable politics of the West-backed Israeli war against Palestine continued last week, those same Western powers displayed a similar ‘diplomacy’ in their boycott of Japan’s memorial ceremony on Friday for the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki city in 1945.
Part of the original World War 2 alliance that executed the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities, the United States, United Kingdom and other Group of 7 major Western powers collectively boycotted Friday’s commemoration of the 79th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, organised by the city Government. Their reason? The failure of the Nagasaki municipality to invite Israel to the event on grounds of security due to anticipated anti-Israeli peace protests.
The peace protests went ahead anyway. Clearly, the Nagasaki city authorities were not prepared to baton-charge their citizens as they expressed protest against the genocide in Palestine. In marked contrast, Western governments have been continuously baton-charging their own dissenting citizens throughout these past nine months of the Palestine war.
Precisely because of the immense trauma of the nuclear bombings and subsequent humiliating defeat of imperialist Japan (by rival imperialist powers), the Japanese people have long nurtured a powerful pacifist approach to their geopolitics and foreign relations.
It is only in recent years, due to increasing tensions in the East Asian region amid the US’ confrontation with China directly in China’s maritime sphere, have Japanese governments begun leaning in favour of a military build-up to meet these geopolitical challenges. In coordination with the West, Japan had begun deploying its forces in regions beyond its own locality in response to such geostrategic needs, particularly the protection of sea lanes.
Nuclear
Tokyo, however, is learning in recent years, the costs of being persistently loyal to an extra-regional power (the US) that is persistently imposing its military dominance along the Pacific shores of the Asian continent, a continent with its own emerging great powers with their own geopolitical sensitivities. At some point soon, Tokyo may have to weigh the cost-benefits of continuing to follow a distant, declining, superpower, as opposed to engaging more closely with the neighbouring, global economic powerhouse, China.
After all, the Asian continental heartland offers a large neighbourhood market as well as new, land-based, communications and trade routes free of the instability currently affecting the main Indo-Pacific sea routes vital for Japan’s energy needs and industrial exports. Tokyo must be envious of China’s vast, modern, land transport systems stretching from Pacific ports to central Asia, West Asia, and, ultimately to the rich market of the European Union.
At least 150,000 people, the bulk of them civilians, were killed outright at the very moment of bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In comparison, the number of Gazans killed in the unceasing West-Israeli military offensive in Gaza over the past nine months amounts to only about 40,000 (in terms of actual body count; tens of thousands more are ‘missing’).
Over subsequent decades, another 150,000 citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are recorded as having died due to direct injuries or through extended radiation sickness. The transmission of radiation poisoning via human embryos to next generation Hiroshima and Nagasaki population cohorts resulting in deformities is another serious outcome of nuclear warfare that is being monitored by scientists in Japan and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, in Israel, with little criticism from the West, both the Government in Jerusalem, as well as opinion leaders, continue an unrepentant justification of the systematic sexual abuse of the tens of thousands of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. This amazing, shrill, public defence of such barbarities has actually become louder after someone leaked a video of the sexual assault of a male detainee by a set of Israeli prison guards.
While the ten guards concerned were arrested, most of them have been bailed out. Hundreds of Israelis protested against the punishment of the rapists, and invaded the prison last week demanding the suspects’ release. On Israeli television, experts and politicians were unanimous in defending such behaviour as being part of the “defence of the State”. A common trope is that “everything is possible” for the purpose of defending the state of Israel.
Only a very tiny minority of Israeli Jews, involved in peace advocacy, rights monitoring and, justice advocacy is seen condemning this continuous abusive behaviour in their country. Western governments again called for investigations and ‘deplored’ the ‘allegations’ as they have been doing for decades of the Zionist state’s illegal, military occupation of the land of Palestine.
This pattern of Western apologetics is just as much a pattern of systematic complicity by the West as is the systematic pattern of genocide and counter-insurgency violence against Palestinians, displayed by the Israeli forces and even by Zionist civilian thug gangs.
The terrible irony is the public justification of acts of homosexual rape by Israeli personnel by public figures (commentators, politicians) of the Jewish-Zionist fundamentalist camps. It is those same fundamentalist camps that are the prime upholders of the Hebrew Bible in which their God (Yahweh, Adonai) condemns and punishes such depredations as immoral, figuratively defined as ‘sodomy’. Conversely, some Israeli Zionist champions are publicly criticising the leak of such videos as a betrayal of the Zionist State.
Indeed, it will be interesting to see how American-based Christian fundamentalist churches, now actively supporting Israel’s war project, can resolve their own faith with this overt, crude, Israeli violation of Biblical mythic morality. Those same ‘Conservative Christians’ comprise vital vote banks of both the Democratic and Republican parties, as they whip up electoral support for their rival candidates in November’s presidential election.
Kamala Harris
Despite her posturing for a “ceasefire” when she met visiting Israeli Premier Benyamin Netanyahu, Democratic Party presidential candidate and current US Vice President Kamala Harris gives every indication of being firmly within the current Washington regime’s West Asia policy of strong militarist backing of Israel. Most non-western analysts today see “no daylight” between Biden’s and Harris’ approach to the Palestine Occupation. Neither is there any sharp difference seen between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in relation to the Palestine question.
On Friday, the Biden administration announced the approval of yet another military aid package for Israel. The US$ 3.2 billion package is basically a re-supply tranche aimed at smoothly sustaining Israel’s ongoing military blitz in Palestine and in its neighbourhood (Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen). There is no indication that Harris disagreed with this continued military involvement by the US in a war described by the UN and world judicial institutions as being genocidal.
However, as regards other global issues, many non-American analysts see some significant differences between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he would work with Russia to end the Ukraine war. The Ukraine war is currently largely seen as a military stalemate that is more costly to NATO-dependent Ukraine than to the incomparably bigger, far better armed and, highly self-reliant Russia. The European allies in NATO are likely to quietly welcome a gradual scaling down of the politically worrisome, economically destabilising, war on their eastern flank.
Currently, there are fissures to be seen inside the European Union and NATO among European states along ethnic loyalty lines, with many European Slav nations empathetic with Russia. At the same time, some poorer east European states are balking at higher military spending to meet NATO commitments at the cost of social welfare for their citizenry.
Likewise, the continuing EU-NATO interventions in Syria and Libya aggravate Europe’s illegal migration problem that exploded in the early 2000s. That migration disaster followed the West’s totally illegitimate military interventions that virtually destroyed or partly undermined these two once-prosperous, stable, modernised Arab states.
Many analysts blame the sudden massive and un-manageable influx of non-European illegal migrants into Europe and, consequent social and cultural outcomes, for the parallel rise of White racist, Fascist-oriented, political movements in many otherwise socially sophisticated European countries.
What is generally termed as Europe’s “Far Right” or “Rightwing” political movements has emerged with a vigour not seen since the 1930s when similar movements resulted in militarily expansionist geopolitics by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Some of these current movements are similar to the US Republican Party in their disinterest in costly confrontations with regional neighbour Russia.
At the same time, a Donald Trump presidency will also see a soft-peddling of confrontationist geopolitics with both North Korea and China. And Trump’s characteristic political timidity may also result in a toning down of confrontation with Iran.
More concerned are America’s Western partners about chaotic decision-making processes that may mark another Trump regime given the poor expertise of Trump’s retinue that will take over the White House. But this is seen as more likely hurtful to America’s domestic institutional strength and socio-economic wellbeing.
The victims, worldwide, of US-Western imperial interventionism would prefer a weaker rampaging superpower rather than having to suffer the degree of global violence and economic instability currently occurring as a result of the West’s unrelenting aggressive geopolitics so meticulously implemented by the Democratic regime.
Yahya Sinwar
Meanwhile, in Palestine, the Hamas-led administration of the Gaza Strip on Thursday announced Yahya Sinwar, the Gaza-based military commander of Palestinian resistance militias, as the movement’s new political bureau chief to succeed the late Ismail Haniyeh who was assassinated by an Israeli bomb strike.
Born in 1962, in the Khan Younis refugee camp, Sinwar is yet another Palestinian resistance legend, having lived his militant career entirely in the Gazan underground. Like Haniyeh, he has been a target for assassination by Israel for years.
Part of the command leadership of the October 7th Gazan militia assault on Israeli siege lines encircling the Strip, Sinwar on Thursday, emerged from the tunnels among the ruins of his homeland to brief the news media. Photos showed him gaunt but wiry and seemingly resolute in his commitment to the survival of his people.
Many analysts see his succession as the dominance of the hardline faction in Hamas. However, other Arab analysts point to Hamas’ increased reliance on a collective Palestinian leadership along with other Gaza-based movements and predict that this would modulate any obdurate militancy by Sinwar.
At least six militias coordinated the one-day October 7 counter attack against Israel. They and other groups are all collaborating in the ongoing administration of Gaza and the persistent resistance against the combined military might of the Western powers that is available to Israel.
