Military asymmetry, overwhelming force and genocide
I want to ascertain what is the relative importance of the armed struggle to the successful accomplishment of freedom and justice for the Palestinian people. It’s coming up for mid-April now and there are negotiations going on in Cairo. When I hear what Hamas are proposing as the bottom line: a stop to all military attacks, withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, guarantee of free movement through the Gaza Territory so the population can return to where they used to live, immediate aid, resources necessary for people to start their lives and their work again. I agree, I think yes! They’ve got the right idea. And they are out there laying down their lives to achieve it. Who else is holding out for the interests of Palestinians around the table in Cairo?
It is noticeable how so many accounts of what is happening and so many declarations of solidarity seem to omit armed struggle. There was a stage in the movement of support for the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War (1955-1975) when the main slogan of the anti-war protests changed. The demand ‘For Peace in Vietnam’ gave way to ‘Victory to the Viet Cong!’. Will there be a similar moment in the pro-Palestinian movement?
The ruling elites have pre-empted this transition and have tried to suppress public support for the armed resistance. In the UK there is a completely absurd and unjustifiable ban on declaring support for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It is illusory to imagine that the Israelis will give up Zionism and its eschatological ambitions to dominate and appropriate more and more territory just because they suddenly see reason and realise that what they are doing is unfair or illegal. Their project has been intensely violent and there is no sign that they will be persuaded to act in accord with either international law or with strategic moderation. There seems to be a delusion that if more and more people world-wide pressurise Israel or their own governments through the use of peaceful demonstrations, judicial proceedings, resolutions in prestigious institutions then, only because of this somehow, the Israelis will see the error of their ways. Also it often seems here in the West that if a particularly sharp piece of analysis is delivered, a judicial pronouncement made or even a cutting piece of satire is communicated that somehow a victory has been won. The truth is that the Israelis can’t stop themselves. That’s the whole point about genocides. I have argued elsewhere that I believe they are compelled by forces beyond their control to continue their aggression.
2021
The 2021 attack on Gaza was of an entirely different scale and intensity than the preceding ones in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, 2018. The targets were of a sort that hadn’t been bombed in previous ‘wars’. The choice of targets was unpredictable. The attack was triggered by events in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem where there had been house dispossessions, ongoing theft of property from Palestinians. Hamas fired rockets into Israel and then the bombardment happened. It looked like there may be a ground invasion but it didn’t materialise. I believe that the Israeli army were outmanoeuvred in their attempted ground invasion. They may have realised that Hamas was better prepared than they thought. There was a ceasefire and a truce. I recall that a Hamas spokesperson described the military context as being asymmetrical. This was the first time I had heard this kind of language from Hamas. When I saw the press conference given by Yahya Sinwar at the end of these hostilities it occurred to me very strongly that Hamas was prepared for an escalation to a much fuller engagement and confrontation with Israel. Hamas must have seen the 2021 attack as a dress rehearsal for the attack they precipitated with their Al Aqsa Flood operation on October 7th 2023. They must have reached the point when they were ready to engage in a confrontation with Israel and to move forward their armed liberation struggle. They provoked a ground invasion. Their attack was used by the Israelis as a pretext for mass killing. The genocide escalated to a more intensive phase.
Judicial pronouncements
The judgement by the International Court of Justice of the ‘plausibility’ of genocide, the more recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Middle East are significant tools that serve to expose and isolate Israel. However they have been blatantly ignored by the only powers ‘on the ground’ that can stop the genocide. This would involve force majeure applied to stop the Israeli armed attacks and to take command over the points of entry to Gaza so that the ‘complete’ siege could be broken and access given to the population to food, water, medical services and all other goods required for its well-being. There is a danger that these pronouncements might habituate us to a less integral understanding of genocide, limiting it to a legal definition or they may create the illusion that Israel is itself capable of stopping the genocide and that this can be achieved through moral pressure. It can also distract attention away from the genocide that is happening on the West Bank, at a different level of intensity, and can lead people to misconstrue the fact that the ‘out’ group is not only the Palestinians who live in Gaza but the Palestinian people as a whole. It can mistakenly equate genocide to mass murder and thus limit understanding of the whole process of genocide, how it develops and of what its core processes consist. It is also true that the actions of these judicial and public international bodies can be seen as a part of the resistance of the Palestinian people and the widespread nature of their struggle for freedom and justice. An overemphasis of their importance is linked to an underestimation of the armed struggle being conducted by the resistance.
Axis of Resistance
The crucial powers on the ground that are actively resisting the genocide because they are confronting the armed capability of Israel, are the axis of resistance, Hamas and the other Palestinian fighting groups, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansarallah in Yemen and the Popular Mobilisation Force in Iraq. Having said this, it is important to emphasise the division between the war and the genocide. Like any war of liberation the military component requires a broad alliance of forces, military, civilian and cultural. In fact all the resources of the social movements who are supporting this liberation struggle throughout the world are necessarily aligning around the armed resistance. In an intifada everybody can do something and nobody is excluded. The armed struggle cannot prevail on its own. It is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of liberation.
This current Al Aqsa Flood ‘war’ is unlike the other Gaza/Israel ‘wars’, the first of which was the one in the winter of 2008/9. This current one was initiated by the resistance movement. It will be a protracted struggle. The negotiations of the sort that are happening in Egypt or Qatar will continue but will bring no end to the confrontation. These negotiations are another front in the resistance movement’s strategy. There is no victory that is simply and only a military victory but there is no victory without a military defeat of the Zionist regime. This observation sets the liberation struggle within the historical context of other anti-colonial armed struggles and social movements. For example, it would be inaccurate to believe that the Apartheid regime in South Africa fell solely because the ‘international community’ was successful in bringing moral and political, and even judicial pressure, to bear. The defeat of the South African Army in Angola to which Cuba made a crucial armed contribution was a determining factor. For more about the war in Angola click here. The fight of colonial people against imperialism has always been through armed struggle. This was the case in 1776 when the colonists in America fought against the British crown. Certainly the struggle of the Jewish people against the British Mandate in the 1940s was armed and was designated as terrorist. This is the case even though, in both instances, the fight was conducted by groups that were asserting their right to oppress the indigenous people of the land on which they proposed to found their ‘nation’. Even in the post-1945 war period the list illustrates the nature of historical movement: China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Kenya, Yemen….I’m sure that everybody reading this will be able to add to this list. In all instances the armed groups that have opposed imperialism have always been designated as terrorists. The Palestinian struggle for liberation will succeed because history is on their side.
All instances of settler colonialism are genocidal. The aim of the settler group is always to efface or ‘disappear’ the indigenous population, to reduce it to submission. In Palestine these two processes – genocide and the liberation struggle – are interconnected in a specific way. It was not the case in other liberation struggles that the insurrection of the colonised people coincided with an escalation of genocide. However the coloniser has always conducted its wars in a genocidal manner. Israel’s conflation of war and genocide and the disguise of genocide as war is potentially highly damaging for them from a military and political point of view.
Military Asymmetry
I want to try to understand the broad terms of this war. This is too often left to military experts. Because the current military struggle is a ‘mere continuation of policy by other means’ (1) it is possible to describe the dynamics of the military engagement by taking account of the aims and objectives of the combatant groups and the context in which they operate. I want to link the internal dynamics of the ‘groups’ which are disposed against each other with how they are set within, and determined by, global politics. The former is to do with the immediate historic and experiential movements and processes that have formed them. The latter is how they are shards of large-scale historical movements like, in this instance, the break up of the hegemony of the West and the emergence of a multipolar international ‘order’.
What is determining the character of the military struggle? What is the nature of the asymmetry? How is this connected to an underestimation of the importance of the armed struggle itself? Israel is attempting to address this asymmetry by negating it, by goading Iran into a wider armed confrontation. Accompanying this is a hope that the US will join this wider regional war. But why have the Israelis failed politically and militarily in the opening phase of this war? Does the axis of resistance retain ‘first mover’ advantage? Is it just that? The Israelis took up the opportunity to press home the advantage of size with alacrity. The talk of complete siege and total eradication and victory was so quickly unleashed that it was as if they were waiting for it. The axis of resistance was prepared and have been planning this campaign for 15 years. Readiness is all but even the senses of readiness in the opposing sides were different. The side that determines the timing determines the space. It must be obvious that the two sides are not conducting the same war. This is not simply a confrontation between two sides but between two kinds of warfare. This takes us further into the issues surrounding the asymmetrical character of the war.
What I have to say is not based on technological knowledge of weaponry. Although my immediate family was military, I grew up developing a deep anti-war ethic. My father was a Royal Air Force trained pilot who during the 1939-45 war was a flying instructor. My mother was an ambulance driver with the ARP in Leicester and then member of the Motorised Transport Corps. Their activities were animated by the impending invasion and occupation of Britain by Germany. I think the impact of the bombing campaign on British cities in the early 1940s and the sense of what an occupation would mean were present to me as a child though I was born after the conflict had ended. See Lest We Forget The two most influential movements in my youth were anti-Apartheid and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament but I believe I retained a deep interest in what happens during wars. In general I am against war but so what.
If I look at the forces on the ground fighting the genocide I would put an emphasis on the interrelationship between the different forms of struggle both inside Palestinian society and around the world with the armed resistance struggle at the centre.
Quantitative disequilibrium and overwhelming force
Am I just being hopeful? The military forms adopted in any armed confrontation embody the intentions and the energies of the combatants and the populations in which they are rooted. It would be normal to picture the military conflict in technological or mechanical terms. It is not difficult to see that the Israelis have conventional military superiority. Sometimes this is expressed in terms of the cost of the military equipment that they are able to deploy. If the cost-based quantitative description was taken as the main indication of outcome then there could hardly be any doubt that Israel would prevail. But the asymmetrical character of the war means that each side is fighting a different war. Because the military balance is asymmetrical the way to assess the significance of military forms and forces needs to be multidimensional. The commonplace is that the asymmetrically ‘weaker’ side does not have to win, it only has not to lose, whereas the ‘stronger’ must have complete victory, the predictable victory. The terms of the battle cannot be understood in purely quantitative terms. The sides are not homologous. This is true at a moral and political level. The stronger side can pretend it has time on its side and that its strength will eventually prevail but this is an illusion. The weaker side if it can avoid over-exposure to direct armed confrontation and can engage in ‘passive defence’ it can eventually exhaust the stronger. Because the stronger side is stronger, the potential for it to become weaker is greater and vice versa. This is to do with expectation and with morale.
In the public discourse in the West there is a constant underestimation of armed struggle. This aspect of the dominant narrative still assumes an Israeli ‘victory’ but little understanding is articulated as to what this victory might involve. The relative strength of the armed resistance is consistently denied and yet there is a paralysing almost pathological fear of it. It is almost as if the ruling elites, at least in the UK, are ahead of the game, have tried to ban public support for Hamas. They may know more keenly than the ‘governed’ what the relative significance of military conflict is.
Armed resistance and the oppressed
This attempt to suppress and anaesthetise open support for the resistance is a part of a programmatic strategy of the oppressor, a concerted effort to break the vital contact between the armed insurrectionary group and the population that they emerge from. Just as the principle of non-hierarchical connection between different parts of the resistance is at the centre of the intifada’s participatory principle – everybody can do something – the oppressor will seek to break the connection and divide off one aspect of resistance from others. The danger of the division between the armed resistance and its population, especially in circumstances where the oppressor deploys collective punishment, is brilliantly exemplified by the events in the Vilna ghetto during the German occupation of Lithuania in the 1939-45 war. This has been analysed by Daniel Feierstein and Stephen Sadow in The Dilemma of Wittenberg: Reflections on Tactics and Ethics. (2)
Another aspect of the asymmetry is the relationship between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian born revolutionary cultural activist writes:
“Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognise others as persons — not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognised….It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiates terror, but the violent, who with their power creates the concrete situation which begets the “rejects of life.” It is not the tyrannised who initiate despotism, but the tyrants” (3)
A similar view of the distinction in terms of precedence, in other words in terms of the dynamism between attack and defence, between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressor is expressed by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. (4) This distinction may not be easy to accept. Violence is violence. It is true that violence breeds violence and marks the perpetrator whether an oppressor or an oppressed. Also military victory can corrupt the victor. Continuing military forms of organisation and mentalities into civilian administration can hold back vital movements of participation and democracy in the post liberation society. National liberation struggles have been ‘bought off’ by the coloniser and the energies diverted into post-colonial state structures. The consequences of violence are multiple and intergenerational.
Defence and attack
However violence cannot be simply reduced to physical acts and mechanical actions. Because it takes place in a context of meaning and significance with the participation of real human beings who are created by their will and circumstances, it is always an enactment, a symbolic act. The relationship of defence to attack in the fighting groups is inextricably linked to this context. The Palestinians’ strategy of ‘passive defence’ is described in a blog piece appearing in Palestine Chronicle: Secret of Palestinian Resistance – Why is Gaza Able to Fight for Years to Come. The Israelis’ insistence that the ‘international community’ must support them in their self-defence and their intense campaign to make this idea the dominant one voiced by their supporters and even by those who are against them is understandable. Even though this plea of self defence holds no weight in international law since no such appeal can be made by the occupier in relation to the action of a population resisting occupation, the Israelis must claim this position of the aggrieved. Every attack must relate to defence. However the narrative persistently reiterated by the Israeli state propaganda machine can also obscure strategic and tactical clarity. This puts them in a problematic and confused position. The article from the Palestine Chronicle referred to above opens with a quotation from a senior Israeli military analyst cited by Al Jazeera:
“In the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, we found the forest, but we did not find the trees, but when we entered the Gaza Strip, we did not find the forest or the trees”. (5)
The military objectives and the genocidal objectives can contradict and stymie each other. In the current situation (April 11th 2024) the latter have obscured the former. This may also be because of, and at the same time a reason for, Israel’s military failures.
Group characteristics
What kind of group is constituted by the Israelis as they carry out the war and simultaneously perpetrate the genocide? They are highly armed and have an illusion of invincibility and indeed have a strategic need to create deterrence. This has already been ‘punctured’ not only by the Al Aqsa Flood operation but before that in the 2006 campaign in Southern Lebanon. However, animated by genocidal energies, they believe they are on the increase, that they are in a win-win situation. It is significant that a prominent motive behind their project is theft. The appropriation of land and resources is a key factor. They have the feeling of people who are getting something for free. Indeed it seems as if they are. They constantly proclaim their victory. It cannot just be victory, it must be total.
In the morphology of human groups described by anthropologist Elias Canetti in his book CROWDS & POWER (6) he describes human crowd behaviour as being based on key dynamic urgencies. Group behaviour as a human crowd is analysed through the determination of elemental energetic relationships. He describes pack behaviour as being ‘crowd crystals’. There are four basic ‘pack’ forms: the hunting pack, the war pack, the lamentation pack and the increase pack. Each form can transition into another or a pack can be a combination of these elemental structures. The Israelis are an ’increase pack’. This is a group who energise themselves in the belief that they are gaining material benefits. They are a voracious horde. Infectious feelings of massive consumption overtake the relationship in the group. It is primordial human behaviour and the ‘increase pack’ easily tips over into killing, either animals or other human beings. Increase is connected to fantasies of sexual potency. There are also narratives of sexual rampage which appear in the social media output of the Israeli Occupation Army but also in their propaganda about the October 7th attack. The increase pack in this instance is encased in military hardware and is wounded by the myth of its past deprivation and/or victimisation. The fight instincts of the group are very closely connected to flight. They are an example of an existential panic. They have to be on the attack. Group coherence depends on individual gratification and therefore the group is volatile and there is a strong tendency towards fragmentation.
You can see examples of ‘increase pack’ behaviour in the early morning scenes at the doors of retail locations at the commencement of the winter sales. Not so often seen now digital purchasing has become dominant, it would be only slightly inaccurate to call the behaviour of the Israelis ‘bargain-hunting’. The typical crowd behaviour induced by patriarchal commodity production (or capitalism), of which settler colonialism is a special case, is slow-release increase pack behaviour.
Glimpses of behavioural features and roots of terrorism
The evidential basis upon which to make observations about what is going on is unstable. One example of a tendency towards fragmentation was given in a video produced by Hamas. This was the ‘flight’ behaviour amongst a group of Israelis when one of their number was shot by a sniper. There was no sign of an attempt to help their wounded comrade. There is a possibility that the kind of pack of which the Israelis consist easily disintegrates and becomes individualised. In other examples, videos produced by the Israelis themselves show Israeli soldiers making displays of Palestinian women’s underwear in the houses they have occupied. They have video’d themselves ‘triumphantly’ parading themselves with these objects of clothing. Another example was given in the behaviour of the Israelis in the shooting of two unarmed Palestinians on the beach near Gaza City and the ‘clearing’ and ‘burying’ of the bodies using a bull-dozer. This was an example of fractured, panicked behaviour. For the Al Jazeera report on this incident click here. Was this an attempt to cover up what they knew was a crime? How effective could this ‘cover up’ possibly be? It is difficult to draw conclusions from these fragments. They are like glimpses, anecdotal evidence, of more general behaviour.
The Israelis have set themselves up in a paradox and this may give rise to miasma. Since the attack on October 7th the Israelis have obsessively asserted their right to self defence. They have portrayed themselves as the victims of a murderous attack. In doing so they must describe the Palestinian resistance as an overwhelming oppressive force that they ‘believe’ will destroy them. In their ideology, especially as it was formulated and operationalised during the 2006 Lebanon campaign in the Beirut suburb of Dahiya they conceived a military principle, the Dahiya doctrine, whereby the Palestinian resistance is operationally indistinguishable from the population. The accompanying fantasy is that all Gazans, in fact all Palestinians, are Hamas terrorists. They portray them as a swarm. This means that the occupation army soldiers are programmatically and deliberately unable to distinguish between the combatants and the population. This means that they do not know, or are practically unable to identify, who their enemy is. What they must do as an enactment of this fantasy is, at the encounter with any Palestinian male of a certain age, is to demand that the man takes his clothes off. This is programmatic but the meanings that abide are atavistic and internally, psychically self-destructive.
This is a matter of elementary intelligence that goes beyond the quantitative accumulation of information. There is also another almost unspoken knowledge secreted in the very heart of the Israeli operation. In the emergence of the Israeli state that was synchronous with the displacement of the Palestinian population in 1948, ‘terrorist’ activity was seminal and central to its project. The comparison is easily drawn between the practices of the German National Socialist government’s armed forces in the extermination of the Jewish population in Europe and the activities of the Israeli Occupation Army in Palestine. The history and dynamics of the struggle in the Warsaw Ghetto by the Jewish militants – who of course the German authorities stigmatised as terrorists – is reminiscent of the circumstances in Rafah in April of 2024. These are easy similarities to draw. What is more significant is the talismanic power of the success of the terrorist tactics of the Jewish groups, the Stern Gang and Irgun, who organised, facilitated the Israeli state-creation process and whose members became the first political leaders of the Israeli state. It is very difficult for the Israelis to admit the similarity of their own terrorist organisation with that of the Palestinian resistance, especially if they believe these early strategies were successful for them. These historic morsels must stalk their minds like vengeful ghosts. The mythic world is full of terrifying reversals. Out hunting one day Actaeon happens on a beautiful lake in which his eyes light upon Artemis, the goddess of hunting and the moon, bathing naked with her female companions. He is spotted by her and she immediately turns him into a stag, the very beast he was hunting. He dies being torn to pieces by his own hounds crying out his own name only heard now as shrieks of pain. (7)
Multiple fronts, one war
However, even this does not even come near to what needs to be said to give an understanding of the current conflict. Even the Israelis know that their main enemy is not Hamas though it is psychologically easier to have this single focus. They are facing an axis of resistance. Enumerating the different fronts may be helpful. The Gaza front, the North Israel front, the Red Sea front, the Iraqi front, the West Bank front, the internal (of Israel) front (this consists of the struggle against the Palestinian population who have Israeli citizenship and also the Israeli opposition to the way the war is being conducted), the diplomatic front (including the actions taken at the United Nations and the alliances between nation-state and populations in the Global South and the BRICS), the international judicial front (this is hardly distinct from the diplomatic front). All these fronts some of which can hardly be called fronts and might better be called sites of struggle are interconnecting and impacting on each other creating complex patterns of influence and movement. The early assertions of commitment by the Western ‘powers’ that they gave ‘backing’ to Israel have given way to more ambivalent statements. Popular support in the West has swayed towards the Palestinians. Other populations and even nation-states have been less ambiguous and a register of this are the votes for ceasefire at the UN.
If the violence of the oppressed is different in character this is because their struggle is primarily defensive. So even the offensive initiated by Hamas on October 7th and the implicit invitation that it made to engage in armed conflict was ‘attack in order to defend’. Of course this is not to say that the oppressed, the occupied, never attacks but it does so in a different context of significance. However much the Zionist ideologues point to the sacred books to prove that the land of Palestine is rightfully theirs and they are simply defending their right to the land, it is clear for all to see that they are attacking the Palestinian population and taking their land. The Palestinians are defending their land and their existence on it. This is an actual material fact, apart from divine judgement and myth-making. This lets us into an understanding about the character of the Palestinian as a group. According to the morphology of human groups in Canetti’s CROWDS & POWER the Israelis are an ‘increase pack’ and the Palestinians are ‘lamenting pack’. Just as the Israelis are not simply an increase pack. This basic energetic group relation permeates their constitution as a ‘war pack’ so the Palestinians constitute themselves in the resistance organisation as a ‘war pack’ that derives its energetic structure from the ‘lamentation pack’. This will mean that the two groups as military forces have different attack/defence dynamics. The asymmetry is not simply quantitative.
Lamenting pack
A lamentation pack is formed around the dead. It is held together by grief and mourning. The lamentation pack at its most extreme will throw itself on the body of the dead loved one. It is not ready even for revenge but revenge can emerge out of it as the pack develops. This foregoing description characterises the war as one in which quantitative inequality in terms of armaments and resources are countervailed by the different defence-attack structures of the different ‘sides’.
On April 10th, on Eid Al Fitr close to Beach Camp near Gaza City, the Israelis attacked and killed the three sons and four grandchildren of Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. He started his public statement about this incident by pointing out that his family “stayed with our people in Gaza and did not leave the Strip.” He went on to say “All our people and all the families of Gaza residents have paid a heavy price with the blood of their children, and I am one of them,” He added that at least 60 members of his family have been killed in the ongoing genocidal war. Then: “The occupation believes that by targeting the sons of leaders, it will break the resolve of our people. We say to the occupation that this blood will only make us more steadfast in our principles and attachment to our land.” Apart from the grace and poise of this statement, it showed a remarkable ability to turn and transform the situation, to transform loss, to overturn weakness. It is free of ego and rage. I believe this is a good example of how the Palestinian resistance are embraced by the structure of a lamenting pack. The movement within the pack as it receives elemental blows is one of collective gathering, of a refusal to disintegrate and individualise.
Through all the evidence of destruction you can search for the elementary movements of repair. These are biological and organic tendencies. They are sensed and observed intimately and internally in human beings, probably most clearly through intersubjectivity, relationally. This is a form of witnessing. It is no casual association that roots the word, shahid, شهيد, for those who have been killed in the struggle, with the act of witnessing. This may help us to look more deeply at what participation in the resistance involves. From a spiritual or psychological point of view, the act of resistance can be taken for an aspect of mental health. In this respect the work of Dr Samah Jabr, Head of the Mental Health Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, is pertinent. She notes how internally (spiritually/psychologically) destructive the occupation can be. She describes a state of polarisation that emerges as a consequence of the internalisation of oppression and points out:
“According to my observations and impressions of Palestinian people who participate in mature activism and planned acts of resistance to the occupation, that is, not the impulsive accidental actions of adolescents and children. I notice the following : such people are usually self confident, sincere, altruistic, and brave.They possess the intelligence and the sensitivity to feel the pain caused by oppression.” (8)
It is instructive to learn about the ethics and strategies advocated by Shaikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, after whom Hamas’ armed wing is named. Al-Qassam and his core group were hunted down and he was killed by the British in 1935. This event was a significant trigger in the first uprising against colonialism by the Palestinian people in 1936-1939. A good description of this is given in THE REVOLUTION OF 1939-1939 IN PALESTINE by Ghassan Kanafani (9).
The objectives of the axis of resistance have been clearly stated. They are aiming at the attritional exhaustion of Israel and the eventual – no time limitation – defeat of the zionist project. For the Palestinian people and their immediate regional allies, particularly Hezbollah who have unresolved issues arising from past Israeli aggression, there can now be no peace until the zionist entity is finally defeated. Each step taken by the Israelis makes the chances of any other resolution more and more impossible. All its actions drive recruitment to the resistance. Support for the resistance must grow although the deprivations and terror tactics of the Israelis over isolated populations may break resistance locally and temporarily. Each attack, for example, on Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon or further afield, each killing, will energise the lamentation and invigorate the war pack.
Negotiations, public discourse and divisions
What exact part military action plays in the complex set of relations outlined above cannot be precisely measured. It is a major way in which the alignment of forces will be changed. Ultimately there will be a series of momentous events when military action will cede its major role and various forms of agreements will have to be made through negotiation. This is a long way off.
Always the media and public discourse focuses on armed struggle in a confusing way. Or it totally ignores it. In the West it emphasises the crucial importance of the quantities of armament involved or required. But what determines the action if the quantity of military hardware doesn’t? The consequences of the Israel’s split motives should be considered carefully in this respect. The fact that support for Israel is leaching away, even amongst staunch allies, is due to this splitting and the confusion it gives rise to. It has never been clear whether Israel is actually conducting a military action according to its stated aims: the military and political defeat of Hamas and the return of the hostages. This is increasingly posing a considerable problem for Israel. They have been warned by the closest ally, the US, but no action on the ground has been taken to back up these warnings so the confusion of the US’s aims adds to the predicament. This is the synergy of complicity. What is being held before the world’s eyes is the Israelis’ ability to inflict massive death and deprivation on a vulnerable population in Gaza. The ineffectiveness of their actions in terms of the defeat of Hamas is ostentatious. For the main part, the action appears genocidal and not military. This contradiction is vividly enacted in the conflict within the Israeli Cabinet. This ineffectiveness is fracturing the certainty with which its closest allies are able to support it. So there is a corrosive process – no comfort to the people of Gaza – as this genocidal objective subsumes the military objectives. The more evident genocidal rather than military the action becomes, the more the fracturing of cohesion within Israel’s international alliances accelerates, and the more internal splitting occurs in Israel. The impacts of the genocidal elements, i.e. the general exhaustion, decrease and disablement of the population, may cause temporary slowing down of recruitment to the armed resistance but this is a short term impact. The war will find its end through the impacts of a combination of objective conditions, as in the military defeat of Israel, and of subjective conditions, as in the splitting within Israel and its effective loss of coherence.
As the work of the genocidal strategies on the population of Gaza take their toll and the Israelis hover on the brink of a ground invasion of Rafah the framework of the war is changing. The events in Gaza may be deliberately being used as a distraction from what is happening on other fronts and vice versa. The invasion of Gaza has already served to distract attention from what is happening on the West Bank. The resistance on the West Bank was less prepared for the events of October 7th. Netanyahu’s initial description of the war as taking place on four fronts shows that the Israelis were able to seize the opportunity given by the Hamas attack on October 7th to launch offensives in a number of different directions. The four fronts enumerated by Netanyahu at the commencement of this war were: Gaza, West Bank, Northern border and internal. This demonstrated an underestimation of the complexity of the situation. But Israel was prepared in ways that make their immediate response to the Al Aqsa Flood attack look inconsistent. They were hell bent on genocide. In 2022 the Israeli state had already reorganised how they were operating in the West Bank. They even renamed it as the state of Judea and Samaria. Immediate command was given to Ben Gvir, Israeli Minister of Security, to use armed settler attacks on West Bank communities using national guard/border force militias backed by the Israeli Occupation Army. This is where they believed their genocidal displacement of the Palestinians would begin. They were leaving Gaza until later. The West Bank communities were unprepared for the intensity of the assault, the brutal destruction of infrastructure and the mass imprisonment. The resistance may have taken a set back but it is beginning to exert itself and the West Bank will continue to be a battle ground in which the resistance will be conducting a defensive battle. This is volatile and unpredictable.
One feature of the development of this escalation has been the constant attempts of the Israelis to embroil the US in a wider war. The latest attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus (01/04/2024) is the latest ploy in this entrapment game. It looks like the Israelis having lost one war and are looking for another one to lose. The world awaits Iran’s response.
On a personal note, my primary working experience has been as a theatre practitioner and this activity gives no elevated or authoritative view of human events. It is primarily concerned with making the invisible, visible. As an instrument of human observation it pales in comparison to the microscope and the telescope, as for the hadron collider it is particulate. In the face of science, the penetrating comprehensive knowledge produced by probability and statistics, it is primordial. The field of experimental exploration it lays out withers in the face of a spreadsheet. It is regrettably only capable of special forms of wisdom.
My concern in writing this is to look at the situation in terms that do not ‘edit’ out the armed struggle but relate it to the other forms of resistance and the other non-military fronts. The various fronts and actions that have a bearing on the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people are numerous. That there is no peace without justice is proclaimed repeatedly. There is no such thing as an isolated military victory for the liberation forces but neither is there any possibility of a free Palestine without a military defeat of the occupation army.
Notes and References:
(1) Clausewitz, Carl von, On War (Vom Kriege – published 1832) Penguin Classics 1982
(2) Daniel Feierstein and Stephen Sadow: The Wittenberg Dilemma: Reflections on Tactics and Ethics Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies University of Nebraska Press Volume 20, Number 2, Winter 2002
(3) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Penguin Modern Classics 2017
(4) Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (First published 1961) Grove Press 2021 (see in particular the Chapter: Concerning Violence.)
(6) Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power – New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1984
(7) Ovid, Metamorphosis – Penguin Classics
(8) Samah Jabr Derriere Les Fronts – Editions Premiers Matin de Novembre 2018
(9) Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine – 1804 Books 2023
