Author: jonathan

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.)

(5) https://www.palestinechronicle.com/secret-of-palestinian-resistance-why-is-gaza-able-to-fight-for-years-to-come-analysis/

(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

Our Genocide and its consequences

How does a human group assume the right to kill thousands and thousands of human beings, indeed the number of potential deaths seems, in the underlying mentalities of the perpetrators, to be without end?  What kind of right is being summoned?  The killing perpetrated by the Israeli state is being supported by the ruling classes of the ‘West’. The basis for this support is ostensibly the claim of self defence but it is obvious that this is not substantial.  The actions of the Israeli state in Gaza and the West Bank are the exertion of repressive power over a population from whom the perpetrators are stealing land.  How can this be justified?  What is the underlying principle of this action?  Before whom do these people need to explain and find approval?  The participation in this massive crime must have consequences other than just material gain for the perpetrators.  Are they really driven by the need for security and the maintenance of a ‘way of life’?  The governing authorities in the UK are defining opposition to the action of mass slaughter as extremism.  As the events unfold they will be shown to be morally disgraceful.  They will be seen to be without true authority and they will be demeaned and defeated.  Their participation in mass slaughter marks the decline of their rule.  The justification for their holding the power of life and death over the subjected people in their domain will disintegrate.  Their use of force – the power they exert over the bodies of their subjects, with police powers, powers of imprisonment, military force over life, violence against what is private, will be rendered inoperable.  The fundamental power of the state is grounded in regalian power (1)  – the power of the sovereign authority to enter property, to take charge of human bodies, alive or dead, and dispose of them as it sees fit, but it can only do so if it is embedded in moral right, shrouded in divine mystery and lived out as a basic assumption. This regalian power – the power over life and death – derives from that of the sovereign, rule of the monarch.  The other structures of the state are built around this function in order to both disguise and protect it, to give it authority and to sanctify it. Our state is built on this assumption of power.  This becomes more difficult to see because of the delegation and the organisation of relations and spaces that ritualise and mystify these fundamental processes.  It is this abuse of state power which underlies the genocide. The genocide in Palestine has rendered our current state – UK but this applies also to the nation-states of the West – constitution discredited and morally negative because it has openly pledged its support to actions that are incompatible with its own stated beliefs in justice. It is only a matter of time before the moral consequences of this will appear before our eyes.  Our current state is dead, it requires us to lay it to rest.

Consequences for the West

What are the consequences for the political entities of the West (2), those that are complicit with the Israeli state in its genocide? Growing authoritarianism and eventual disintegration are my quick answers. Their participation and complicity is suicidal.  It is a self-imposed disaster from which they will never recover. Where do we start in order to understand the processes involved in this collusion?  Why have the governments of the West programmatically failed to take action to prevent Israel’s genocide?  Why have they brought upon themselves global isolation?  Why have they so ostentatiously contravened the basic principles that they have declared to underly their dominance:  humanism, human rights, international law and the recently vaunted rule-based order?  Of course, at this late stage, they are taking remedial action.  They are distancing themselves from the Israeli state and trying to mitigate the reputational and political damage. It is too late.  They will be dragged down with the Zionist entity. If they were individuals their actions would appear to be compulsive and irrational. Why are they racing with such alacrity towards their doom?

The ‘West’?

I am using the word West as short-hand.  What do I mean by this?  This is not to do with the compass direction.  It is a geographically dispersed phenomenon deriving originally from European imperialism. The foundations of the industrial imperialism that has been a powerful and dominating movement on earth for the past 300 years were laid on the Western seaboard of the Eurasian continent.  Another way of describing what in common parlance is called the West is the G7.  It is defined by modernity and by being economically ‘advanced’. So the West can be seen to include Japan and it can include Australia and New Zealand. The sign of European imperialism is the white supremacism that is not comprehensive but is underlying. I do not believe it is a culturally coherent entity and homogeneous and I resist defining it any further than the group of nation-states which has, up until the current crisis and since the wars of the twentieth century, been led by the United States of America.

War on Terror

The latest stage in the complicity between Israel and the West in the genocide in Palestine was initiated by the declaration of the War on Terror in 2001 (3). This strengthened the collusion between Israel and Western imperialism.  In turn it may have increased the political coherence of all components of this alliance. The exceptional nature of this relationship meant that immunity continued to be granted to Israel for its egregious breaking of international law and contravention of United Nations Resolutions. This was the sign of problems to come.

After the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the US president, G W Bush announced a new ‘coalition’ to the world: whoever you were, you were either ‘for or against’ the US and the coalition that was forming around it.  If you were against, you were on the side of ‘terror’. 

This powerful message, the declaration of global war, was intended to dynamise relations between nation-states and relations of coherence within them.  The borders of nation-states could only be guaranteed by the coalition if the composition of the population within them were moving in the direction of alliance with the coalition. If the ‘nation-state’ regime was moving in another direction, the coalition arrogated to itself the right to invade or interfere.  All human beings were called on to defy their nation-states (if they had one) if that state was on the side of ‘terrorism’.  Loyalty to any nation-state was subordinate to loyalty to the anti-terrorist (anti-Axis of Evil) coalition.  This meant that the edicts of the coalition of global superpowers had force over individuals.  This was a new form of allegiance that trumped nation-state-derived identities. It was as if all human and social organisms and organisations were, more or less, pervaded by a kind of atomic capsule, a ‘for or against’ agent, a polarising micro-entity that determined the key orientation of the body in which it lodged.  This was a new kind of subjection. Since the spread of this catalytic spoor was global, emitted by the world’s most powerful political-military entity, it was as if everybody in the world would eventually have to decide which side they were on.  Global fear was summoned and operationalised.  

This was an attempt to reform subjectivity on a global scale.  It was not necessarily completely successful.  It cracked national identities, shattering composite bodies into fragments and tied these fragments to new global determinants.  These processes were energised by electronic social media, financialisation and were embedded in notions of modernity and civilisation. 

After the Cold War

The adoption of the policy of which this ‘idea’ was an instrument was the effect of the export and dispersal of Israeli foreign policy to the West in the post-‘Cold War’ period. To some extent this was triggered by the second ‘intifada’ in Palestine in 2000. To make this policy turn effective, the ‘neo-conservatives’ had gained influential strategic positions in the US state administration and government.  A well-resourced communications strategy operationalised through multiple commercial and financial links between Israel and the West, mainly in the US, was put in place. The period between the First Gulf War/Desert Storm in 1991 and the attack on 11th September 2001 saw the preparations for this initiative.  This was effective because of the ideological vacuum caused by the success of the West in the Cold War. The West no longer had an imminent threat through which it could attain political coherence.  It needed to supplement  the ‘free market ideology’ that it had connected to anti-communism and anti-big state/collectivism. A new ideological boost to the vitality, individualism, democracy and freedom of capitalism was required.  After 1989 socialism and communism could no longer be presented as an imminent danger. There was a need for a new, more convincing ‘enemy’.  The adoption of the ‘war on terror’ policy strategy was drilled deeper and secured into core civilisational values.  It connected up to secularism, modernity and the notion of economic advancement. It was also a regression to primal forms of identity connected to spirituality and rationality that lay at the basis of the idea of christendom and European racial superiority.

Our ‘way of life’.

‘Our’ way of life’ had prevailed with the dismantling of Soviet communism. At that point a blind eye was turned towards China. The generation of a set of values, beliefs and assumptions that could be formulated or spun as ‘a way of life’ could have more grip if it could be considered to be special and exclusive. It was an exclusionary political creation. It must be capable of making the people who were the beneficiaries of it feel special and it must excite envy in those that were excluded. Something could only be ‘ours’ if it was not ‘theirs’. I have written about this exclusionary mechanism elsewhere. (4) Thus the pre-occupation with borders. It is in the nature of the ‘nation-state’ form of social organisation that this tension is required to hold it together, to give it cohesion. It is connected to the myth that the nation-state needed to be ideologically and ethnically uniform. The structures of sovereignty and integrity in the development of the ‘nation-state’ were, and are, energised by envy and desire.  These emotional processes operate at an individual and collective level.  They are interactive, shared and are propelled by mimetic ‘movements’. This is enacted by the modern nation-state in being based in and on the interlinked principles of private property and individual freedom. These are the fundamental principles of its organisation. Social relations embodied and habituated in institutions are co-created simultaneously with subjectivities.  These are the interactions between how people behave, how social spaces are realised and transformed by them, how they are lived, and how individuals see themselves, attain identities, recognise each other and thus mutually create each other.

Society-making and mimesis

What are the functional requirements of the institutions that are constructed to make mass murder possible and acceptable? In order to unpick this and understand it better, go back to the origins of these forms of power and see how they have played out as institutions and practices. They have been shaped by specific needs of the ruling group.  The assertion of the right to take human life and the institutionalisation and organisation of the practices that surround the operationalisation of this right, must be accompanied by ideological and spiritual justification.  You must be technically able to do it and you must be able spiritually to justify it.  The justification must be coherent and ritualised.  How do political structures enable these processes?

The operation of any form of rule or of any society-making process is the ignition of desire through mimesis.  We want what the other wants; we want, what is desirable not simply what we desire. (5) We are engaged in material and sensory appropriation simultaneously with symbolic articulation. There is no kudos in property or ownership, no value, if the envy of the other is not ignited. Since this describes a particular micro instance as well as a general condition, it is evidence of the organic, fractal character of human social organisation.  The totality of the human population – maybe those who have died and those not yet born – are engaged, consciously or not, in society-making. These mimetic structures operate in individual interactions and also they bind and insinuate themselves into the body of the society and the structures of the state. The nation-state structure is not unique from this point of view. Its historical development has made it an effective instrument of rule. The creation of a viable ‘other’ is essential for the maintenance of the cohesion and coherence of the nation-state. Inclusion, even security, can only be realised on the basis of exclusion, on the maintenance of borders. The significant development of this political form, the nation-state, took place in the Western part of the Eurasian continent. It was a long development that was seeded in the organisational dynamics of the human groups that migrated into the European territory and succeeded the Roman Empire as it declined. (6) These populations both superseded and inherited the land and structures – institutional and architectural – of the Roman Empire.  They conquered and occupied the land territorially as they inhabited and were incorporated into the remains of the Empire. This organisational dynamic was based on Christian ideology and the invention of a particular form of kingship.  The creation of a sovereign with absolute right over all life in a particular territory was powered by the semi-divine figure of Christ. As well as crystallising patriarchal power it sacralised the brute power of possession.  De facto power, facts on the ground, were complemented by de jure divine intercession. The idea that God has authorised expropriation through military force has always appealed to big gang leaders and warlords.  A central symbolic practice amongst the early holders of ‘divine’ power in the European territories was that of ‘christo-mimesis’, the deliberate imitation by monarchs of the ‘Christ the King’ figure.  (7) This was elaborated processionally and iconographically.  The iconography is there to see, though it may now have less mesmeric charm. So the political solution to the problem of territorialising sovereignty and establishing domains of authority and right was discovered and established.  If the formation of the state arises from a definition of kingship that constructs a ‘body’ or ‘figure’ that has both human and divine aspects, this enables it to  authorise ‘regalian’ (power of life and death, power to break down the division between public and private) powers.  These are forms of control based on access to bodies and spaces which can countermand private property and individual freedom.  In other words in the later development of the nation-state as it adapted itself to the capitalist system of rule it embodied and assured private property and individual freedom. This happened through a strange double structural movement which appears at first sight contradictory.  The state and the groups that control it assume powers of life and death over bodies and spaces both as a right of contravention, and an enforcement of the sanctity, of private property and individual freedom. 

This whole complex evolutionary process of the nation-state produced the forms still current in the modern capitalist nation-state.  The core energies function unchanged.  In this respect the crucial development of patriarchy, capitalism or patriarchal commodity production, in its secularised form appears as Western modernity, ‘our’ way of life.   Because of the exclusionary nature of these components the processes of conformity and belonging that hold the entity together are almost secretly connected to power over life and death. One can understand why the most astute contemporary analyst of genocide asserted that ‘genocide is endemic to modernity’.  (8) (cf Daniel Feierstein GENOCIDE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE)

Exclusion and patriarchy

The forms of organisation on which the modern nation-state are built are rooted in archaic patriarchy and are essentially exclusionary.  This aspect of group organisation was organically linked to securing of territory through expansionism. This laid the basis for European imperialism, especially and primarily in the maritime nation-states of the Western seaboard of Europe.  The seed of empire is planted in the soil of the nation state. The exclusionary energies that were summoned by the military basis of rule were not just a vital source of coherence, they were essential.  As the developmental accumulative process of mercantile and maritime domination received further power through industrialisation, the nadir of this movement of the ‘West’, was embodied in the USA.  As this imperialist project became linked to modernity and civilisational pretensions, its racist and genocidal core permeated it and energised it. These processes became the basic assumptions of its operation. This is what made settler colonialism a key formational process in its political development.  The imprint of the Norman invasion of England (1066) and the formation of a predatory ruling elite further integrated this tendency.  The first coherent practice of settler colonialism was of Wales by the English ‘crown’ culminating in the later part of the 13th century. (9) These ideologies of expansionism and exclusion were disavowed and hidden in the postcolonial (post 1945) process where the overt domination of the empire was replaced by economic structures that created client states and submission to resource exploitation. This was effected through the proliferation of nation-states. The basic assumption is the ingestion and proliferation of the values of modernity, rationality, and civilisational bias. The signs of this global process can be seen in the history of indigenous people all over the world but particularly in the North of the American continent and in the slave trade.  However Its generative foundations were in European antisemitism and the ‘Crusades’. These foundations were laid in the ‘nation-state’ forming period of the centuries that followed the transformation of the structures of imperial Rome.

Western Imperialism and Israel

The formation of the ‘nation-state’ of Israel, its attempt at ethnic homogeneity and its rooting in a sacred divine mission, is characteristically European. It is in this respect that Israel was formed out of the West, an amalgam of guilt, anti-semitism, political opportunism and imperial assumption. It engaged at its birth in land expropriation, sacralised by divine intercession. It reenacted generative European historical processes on the shores of the Levant.  It was and still is the ‘modern’ project par excellence.  The Israeli colonists are ‘the West’s’ colonists.  This is one strong ligament, a kind of tentacle of complicity that binds the populations of the West, to the genocide in Palestine.

The crystallisation of the ‘War on Terror’ deriving directly from the dramatic situation of this latest (perhaps last) ‘Western’ colonial adventure gave a political and technological resource to the West. It offered a pertinent and adaptable narrative, based around the ‘figure’ of the muslim-islamic, migrant, terrorist.  It gave a simultaneous coherence to home policy and foreign policy. Even creating internal bordering by a policy of ‘hostile environment’ against migrant communities. It was capable of implying connections in a confusion of fear that offered the basis for policy positions on migration, islamism, extremism and political disaffection.  It played on popular racism. The West was offered a model of an imminent danger to its ‘way of life’ to which it could ascribe envy. The political alchemy of anti-migrant, anti-terrorist, anti-muslim sentiments were given a rich and high-sounding nourishment in the pronouncements of the theories of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the ‘end of history’ (10).

The ‘War on Terror’ has been a political instrument that has secured the complicity of the West in the genocide being carried out in Palestine. Adherence to the alliance with Israel is presented as a matter of loyalty to the home state and of submission to resistance to extremism. The Western states’ reliance on this gambit is a sign of their deterioration. This genocide originates in the West. It is the outcome of the West’s decline.

Genocide and perpetrator group imperatives  

The nature of genocide as a process of social organisation can be obscured by legal and judicial definitions.  The legal definition is different from the practice-based social science description (8). That is looking at the genocide as a series of interconnected practices that develop as a way of re-organising society. If genocide is viewed as a means of social re-organisation then it becomes clear that the impulses behind this process are impelled by the perpetrator group’s needs. The genocide process is also entangled with military processes. The escalatory movements of genocidal processes are determined by risks and dangers of incoherence in the perpetrator group. This might be felt as a deep fear of splitting and loss on a mass scale. As the danger of splitting or division or incoherence in the group becomes more acute, the genocide escalates and moves on to a more overt stage of its development.  Genocide can lie dormant or only relatively active and the antagonisms between the perpetrator group (in) and the victim group (out) can be suppressed or kept at a containable level.  At the earliest stage of its development it takes the form of the stigmatisation of the ‘out-group’. The escalation of the genocide can be ascribed to the actions of the victim group and the attribution of blame is a significant feature of this process. However it is always driven and determined by the ‘needs’ of the perpetrator group.  Very often the genocidal process is deeply linked to expropriation and theft by the perpetrator group. Mass killing is a late stage in the process but it might only be at this point that the destruction and effacement of the victim group becomes evident.

The society that is being re-organised by the genocide is defined by it.  The genocide gives the society its coherence in the face of its decline, defeat or struggle for survival. In the case of the genocide in Palestine, the direct perpetrator group is the Israeli zionist state but the society that it is being re-organised by it is the society, or societies, in which this process is rooted and from which it seeks and receives its sustenance.   The range and scale of the relationships of complicity, the feigned ignorance, the justifications, the ‘turning to look the other way’ as much as the more overt support – supplying arms and media backing – are composite aspects of the process.  The genocide is effective and active as a re-organisational practice in all these social entities.

Complicity in genocide

The statement that ‘the genocide in Palestine is the West’s genocide’ at first seems to contradict what appears to be happening. Tracing back how exclusionary processes and the core importance of settler colonialism have operated in the European nation-state’s history can help to reveal why this might not be so difficult to believe.

All genocidal projects are suicidal, essentially self destructive, since if the only basis for cohesion of the perpetrator group (‘in’ group) is the destruction of the other (‘out’ group), the final success of the project will be its ultimate defeat.  The disappearance of the ‘out’ group will deprive the ‘in’ group of its means of cohesion. It is auto-cannibalistic and compulsive.  The perpetrator group cannot by, and in, itself stop the process.  It is a slave of the process that promotes its domination. As the genocidal process reaches more and more intense stages of its realisation, it is only military defeat or collapse that can stop it.  The action of the genocide is the enactment of the ‘for or against’ mechanism taken to a general and final intensity.  

The question routinely asked by the operatives of the Western media at the outset of the escalated genocide:  Do you condemn Hamas?  is an attempt to test the loyalty of the interviewee. The significance of this ‘test’ question with its inquisitorial tenor relies on the conflation of ‘Hamas’ into ‘terrorist’ and ‘Palestinian’.  But it is the same question: ‘are you for or against?’  This question could be rephrased as: ‘Are you or are you not complicit with the genocide?’

In order to see more clearly what the impacts and consequences of the escalation of the genocide of Palestinians it is necessary to look at the fabric of the political organisation in which the killing is embedded.  The consequences for the Palestinian people in Gaza and for those living on the West Bank, who are subject to genocide at a different stage of its development, are clearer than the political consequences for the complicit political entities in the ‘West’.  It is a proxy genocide.

Social division is intrinsic to genocide. In the ‘West’, as in Israel, the grip of the political elites on popular sentiment is loosened. Desperate measures are adopted. The state apparatus is mobilised and police powers are sharpened and refocused. The ruling elites, operating through the state and through the adjoined public relations networks of corporate capitalism, are pressurising all institutions, especially sectors who work for media and cultural sectors to conform to its messaging. This is happening particularly in sectors such as education and the arts that have state funding. The strictures on public expression of solidarity with Palestinians are tightening.  In the retail sector employees have been called into line. The control of the public face of the commodity exchange process is being tightened through silencing, victimisation, cancelling.  They are being called to order despite the hypocrisy of the ostentatious partisan displays that the elites adopted and encouraged for Ukraine.  In policy terms, descriptions of actions taken by the police force internally against signs of overt support for the resistance in Palestine quickly link into foreign policy actions taken by the state.  The creation of a new normalcy is an urgent task.  An indication of their outlook is the name of the alliance that the US have put together against Ansarallah in Yemen: ’Prosperity Guardian’. This should give more than a clue about the underlying values they are attempting to defend. Their success is not certain.

The nation-state crisis

The genocidal crisis may accurately be described as a crisis of the nation-state.  The solution the ‘international community’ are constantly trying to impose on the Palestinians is the formation of its own ‘nation-state’.  State formation is obsessively proposed along with a ‘revitalised’ and subordinate ‘governing authority’. The creation of ‘postcolonial nation-states’ in the post 1939-45 war period has been the main instrument of neo-imperialist hegemony. At the same time, on a global scale, we are witnessing the disintegration of the relationship between populations and governing structures. This gap is significant. In Dabashi’s book THE EMPEROR IS NAKED (11) he describes this as a break-down of the relationship between ‘nations’ and ‘states’.  The gap that has opened up between the governors and the governed is of a variable scale in each instance.  Possibly it is most intense in the Arab states.  How much of a danger does this represent for the regimes complicit in the genocide? The West may realise too late what their support of Israel might lead to.  There is a risk that the failure and isolation of Israel will drag them down with it.  They are at this late stage (late March 2024) asking for restraint and making feeble efforts to appear to be countering the Israelis’ worst excesses.  The size and vigour of the pro-Palestinian movement has destabilised political life.  It is endangering the continuation of Biden’s presidency. In the UK the election victory of George Galloway in Rochdale sent shock waves through the political establishment.  The ruling elites were relying on a supine Labour Party to take over government and this is now no longer assured.  In a disastrous move the Tory government is reaching for more repressive measures with new definitions of ‘extremism’ and attempts to malign the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.  Their reliance on ‘war on terror’ rhetoric will be ineffective.  The basis of the consensus on which they rely is crumbling and their support is hardening only in the sectors associated with the far right.  It is predictable that, as in the 2019 election period, they will connive with the intelligence community to stage events designed to show the imminent threat of terrorism. Gunpowder plots have always played a part of the organisation of the popular masses. These are not guaranteed to work. In this respect the political rhetoric of the West and Israel are in tune. However, the discrediting of these regimes in the eyes of the global and domestic populations could prove to be irreversible.  The depth of the crisis is unclear but it may not be just a superficial public relations problem.

I have described genocide according to the observations set out in Daniel Feierstein’s book, GENOCIDE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE where, in accord with the originating work of Raphael Lemkin, he looks beyond legal definitions and explores the process of genocide, its genealogy and its phased development.  He says the effacement of the ‘out-group’ is driven by the social reorganisational needs of the ‘in-group’.  He gives a taxonomy of genocidal processes and talks specifically about the significance of what he describes as ‘reorganising genocides’.  Since his view is a comprehensive one, examining the widespread consequences and implications of these processes he asks wide-ranging questions.  For example:

‘What happens, then, to a society that remains silent while people are beaten in the streets and disappear?  What happens to a society in which some denounce their neighbours and others steal their jobs or businesses, their homes or other assets? All these forms of ‘moral participation’ in genocide must inevitably lead to a blurring of moral distinctions, an inability to distinguish between right and wrong, fair and unfair.  This is true not only for those who live in a time of genocide , but for subsequent generations as well’  (p127 Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice)

The scope and scale of this question suggests that the moral consequences and the deterioration of functional and operative ideas of truth and justice can have a devastating and long-lasting effect on social structures and on human relations.  Credibility and trust can irremediably degenerate.  This can go deeper than a danger to the political effectiveness of the ruling elites.  They will be seen to have transgressed and betrayed key principles on which their ‘regalian’ powers rely.

Roots of genocide

The genocidal processes lie deep in the social structures of the perpetrator group.  In the ‘West’ the preparation for this genocide can be seen, as I suggest above, from the beginning of the ‘war on terror’.  This was an attempt to shape the mentalities and consensual submission of the populations of the West.  In the UK it built on the genocidal processes already initiated during the Thatcher regime where the working class and its trade union organisation were stigmatised as ‘the enemy within’.  This was accompanied by a mediatised public relations campaign that is described in CHAVS by Owen Jones (12).  What Feierstein points out is that the genocidal drive is prior to the precise determination of the victim/out-group. So for example, the National Socialist regime in Germany sought out the victim group over a period of years: the mentally ill, communists, gypsies as well as the jewish communities, on whom the last stage of the process focused.  Similarly in Argentina, during the military dictatorship (1976-1983), the definition of ‘subversive’ took time to develop and was engineered to include indigenous people and working class activists and communists.  These ‘fascistic’ processes vary from place to place and the historical circumstances determine their currency.  With sufficient destabilisation, deprivation and fear the scapegoating of ‘extremists’ in the UK may or may not prove to be the salvation of the ruling elites.

What can make this political strategy potentially effective? The construction of the ‘islamic terrorist’ was made possible by the historical circumstances: the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the war in Afghanistan, the development of radical political islam by Al Qaeda and others, the dispersal of the mujahideen army from Afghanistan, the encouragement of islam as an ideology of resistance replacing socialist/marxist organisation/values. But it also had deep resonance with other more historical determinants.  These determinants ‘rhymed’ with the early movements of European identity-formation.  The organisational processes that created the Crusades were based on the need for European early ‘nation-state’ formation, affirming their definition as ‘Christian’.  The function of the Crusades as early genocidal movements was to ‘conform’ and give coherence to ‘Christian Europe’ and to clear out other remaining ideologies from the European territories.  This process carried on through the period from the first Crusade in 1100 to the expulsion of the Jews and the ‘Reconquista’ in Spain in the 1490s.  This was accompanied, for example in France by the eradication of the Cathars and the use of the Inquisition.  The inquisition later transferred its activities from the European homeland to the colonies. 

The basic ground-work for the development of the ‘war on terror’ already existed in the social ‘soil’ of Europe and, by association, of Western Imperialism.  It was as if the ‘war on terror’ revived ancient and deeply rooted fears and antagonisms.  The spoors of this xenophobia were already there in the air and earth.  The other factor that made this construct potent was the later development of secularisation in the nation-state transformations post-English, American and French revolutions (1640, 1776 and 1789).  The demystification of kingship – the constitutionalisation of the monarchy and the mitigation of divine right in the Protestant revolution in England were pushed further in the secularisation of the French state in the revolutionary period and as it moved towards its current form in 1870, the establishment of the Third Republic. The separation of the Church and the State or a reorganisation of the relationship between them is significant in disguising the political theology of the states as they emerged from revolutionary processes of the late 18th century. This is especially important in the characterisation of terrorism’s association with islam, stigmatised as a kind of religious fanaticism. 

Splitting and divisions

The xenophobic racist ‘war on terror’ political strategy even when its iterated in its current form of ‘war on extremism’ is divisive.  The job of government is to ensure that the divisions created in the course of corralling the population are manageable and the ‘out-group’ is capable of being isolated and stigmatised.  However the growth of the pro-Palestinian movement may have popular consent.  It could be a unique convergence of popular sentiment and action. (13) The government, the political elites, the powers that be, may well fail.  Looking at the UK state and considering the impact of the solidarity movement is instructive. For example, the cracks that have already appeared in the ‘union’ are repeated in the distribution of support for Palestinians.  In this respect, the contrast between England and Ireland (of course not or only partly a part of the UK state) is marked and Scotland and Wales may share this bias.  It is indicative of the legacy of the institutions of the Roman Empire mentioned earlier that the borders of England are those established by Rome and were adopted by the migration from Europe in the post-Imperial period and were reconfirmed by the Norman invasion. The foundations of this state are now unstable.  Characteristically, endangered regimes regress and attempt to revive the mythic roots of their coming into being. Whereas exclusionary processes may be invigorating at an early stage of state formation and regime consolidation, in a terminal crisis, they may make the predicament worse. Divide and rule can backfire.

The processes of disintegration and division are emerging in Israel.  It has conducted the military violence against Gaza without visible success and has accomplished none of its declared objectives.  Its army has lost its way.  It has programmatically and intentionally failed to identify the military enemy and its actions are becoming more and more degraded and ostentatiously genocidal.  There could be a suspicion that they never sought Hamas’ military defeat since an undefeated Hamas is a pretext for the main genocidal purpose. It is failing without even having faced its most powerful enemy on its northern border.  Divisions within the population and its governing institutions are becoming more inflamed and intense.  Its actions will have led to mass recruitment for the Palestinian armed resistance and support for this resistance amongst the population. Exhausted by the pressure of the attritional attacks by the axis of resistance, blighted by the increasing isolation due to global disgust, beset with military failure, weakened by the deterioration of its international alliances, forestalled by economic damage, the break-up of the zionist entity is impending. All of these significant circumstances could lead to the emergence of a break-away more right-wing statelet, highly armed and based on the settler community.  The main rump of the entity may compromise on the more overtly genocidal – displacement and mass killing – actions and attempt to ameliorate the relationship with the West.  There is a territorial basis for this splitting, the ‘liberal’ camp being based in Tel Aviv and the right-wing more openly fascist domain being centred around Jerusalem. These divisions were tearing at the fabric of this society before October 7th. Neither of these sectors or constituencies will be pro-Palestinian but the ‘Tel Aviv liberals’ will be working more assiduously for the two-state solution and the formation of a ‘revitalised’ Palestinian Authority.  All of these processes are at an early stage of development.  

The disintegration of the zionist state will be reflected in the internal divisions within the key states of ‘the West’- the Anglo-American core, the UK and the USA.  The components will be ideologically similar.  This is because the basic fabric of the regimes – it might be more accurate to call it ‘the regime’ – is constitutionally similar.  They are patriarchal, white supremacist regimes. The genocidal process will fail to provide cohesion in all these faulty assemblages. The current UK government’s blandishments about extremism will be ineffective.  Of course the fascistic tendency that this policy ploy emanates from may gain ground in the short term and even become dominant just as might the right-wing settler statelet in Palestine.   It will be this process of disintegration and global isolation – look at the voting patterns at the UN to get some idea of this – that will lay the basis for the democratic revolution that the dismantling of the state structures of the West urgently need. Democratic transformation is synchronous with the disassembling and opening up of the state structures. For the UK it requires intense democratic engagement, a diversification and localisation of democratic forms, more direct democratic participation in public affairs, a de-monarchalisation of the state, a de-hierarchisation of public institutions, an abolition of inherited privileges, making public administration and political structures and processes transparent, an abolition of secrecy.  Clearing away the duplicitous contraptions and rituals and influence of the royal court and all the corrupt quasi-aristocratic ‘orders’ will have to happen at the same time as the growth of public participation in social life and the vital functions of learning and healing that properly lie at its core.    The failure of the ‘nation-state’ model of human organisation is imminent.  The idea that our society needs a mystical ideological or religious coherence and the myth of the state being ethnically monolithic will be surpassed.  The racist tenets of imperialism are meeting their deserved fate on the shores of the levant.  They are exposed as sheer violence. The liberation of our societies from this imperial yoke are inextricably linked with the Palestinians’ struggle for justice and freedom. 

References and Notes:

(1)  For a good historical description of regalian powers and how this power was retained by the ruling elites in the transition from the trilateral to the bilateral state.  See Thomas Picketty’s CAPITAL & IDEOLOGY (Harvard University Press 2020)

(2)  I am not referring to the ‘West’ as if it is a cultural homogeneous entity, a kind of ‘civilisation’ in  the way that Oswald Spengler describes it in The Decline of the West  (Alfred A. Knopf 1926).  I mean as a historical set of alliances a factor of political organisation.

(3)  President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001 said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

(4)  Exclusion Processes by Jonathan Chadwick blog article

(5)  Rene Girard Violence and the Scared (The Athlone Press 1988)

(6)  Guy Halsall Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 (Cambridge University Press 2007)

(7)  Erwin H. Kantorowicz  The King’s Two Bodies, A Study In Medieval Political Theology (Princeton University Press 1997)

(8)  Daniel Feierstein Genocide as Social Practice, Reorganising Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas. (Rutgers University Press 2014)

(9)  The first ‘Prince of Wales’ (later Edward II) was born in Caernarvon Castle in 1284.  The title was stolen from the Welsh.  The Welsh King David III was executed in 1283 by order of Edward I of England, father of the above, after his conquest of Wales.  In 1290 the English state undertook the first wholesale expulsion of a Jewish population in 1290.  Edward I was a crusader.  His first born Joan of Acre was named after the city in which she was born.

(10) Samuel P. Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster 1996) republished as a paperback in 2002.

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press 1992)

(11)  Hamad Dabashi, The Emperor is Naked: On the Inevitable Demise of the Nation-State (Zed Books 2020)

(12)  Owen Jones, Chavs, the Demonisation of the Working Class  (Verso 2011)

(13)  Richard Seymour, The pro-Palestinian movement has exposed the cynicism of the political elites.  Where will that energy go next?  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/19/palestine-movement-politics-gaza-war-protest (viewed online 27/03/24)

Lest we forget

My mother was an ambulance driver and my father was a flying instructor during the Second World War.  My uncle was a fireman during the intense bombing of London, the Blitz.  My grandfather served in the British Army in Northern France during the First World War.

I am against the effort made by the UK government to create division between those who, on Remembrance Sunday, wish to honour the dead, killed in action in armed conflicts and wars and those who support the Palestinians’ resistance to occupation and for justice. The government have tried to confuse people. Remembrance Sunday has never been referred to as Remembrance weekend.  11 am on the 11th month etc. is well before the March for Palestine starts. You can do both if you want.

I am calling out to those who identify as English or British to wake up to what is happening in the Middle East.  I believe the events there have deep consequences for us.

My mother and father – and my uncle – were fighting to prevent an occupation by the German armed forces during the 1939-45 war.  The Palestinians have had their land occupied for 75 years. I appeal to people who haven’t experienced this in their own lives, to give it some deep thought.  What would you do if you were in this situation?

My mother drove ambulances for the ARP (Air Raid Patrol) in Leicester and, for example, when the worst bombing raid by the German Air Force laid waste Coventry on 14 November 1940, my mother immediately volunteered to drive an ambulance across to help people.  She told me that she knew Coventry ‘like the back of her hand’.  I loved my mother’s hands and I always saw them on a steering wheel or painting – something she took up later in her life.  When she arrived in Coventry  on the morning of the 15th November, she could see no recognisable landmark building.  The City had been flattened.  She was responsible for transporting the bodies of the dead who had been drowned in the air raid shelters, due to the destruction of the water mains supply, to the football stadium for identification.

Many of the people who my father trained to fly would have been dead by the end of the month following the commencement of their active service.  Some would have joined Fighter Command and therefore they would have fought during the Battle of Britain and other battles.  Some would have flown with Bomber Command and would have flown sorties over what was then enemy territory.  Some would have taken part in the bombing of German cities like Dresden towards the end of the war.

When my mother, stepped down from the cab of her ambulance, and looked around at the landscape of Coventry and failed to know where she was, she must have seen something similar to the bombed landscape of Gaza.  She had left school at 14 to become a trainee hairdresser. She hated this work as she felt that her youth was taken from her and she was nothing more than a slave, so when the war happened she became a driver and she later joined the Motorised Transport Corps.  She was posted to an airfield in the Midlands where my father was a Flying Instructor.  In 1940 she was 27 years old.

She told me that in the event of an invasion: ‘We would never have surrendered!’

My feeling is, that my mother and father would have been a part of the resistance to the occupation of the island of Britain by the German Armed Forces had it taken place but I can’t be sure.  I believe they would have been predisposed to think of resistance as armed resistance.

When I watch the TV footage of the medical and emergency services in Gaza struggling with the consequences of the Israeli bombardment I identify strongly with them.  They are my people. I see them as working people like my antecedents.

My parents and my uncle and many other members of my family were resisting occupation.  I have never thought of them as terrorists.

Resistance to occupation is a human right.  Self Defence cannot be admitted as a plea, in actions taken against an occupied people.

I appeal to your sense of justice and I appeal to you to join the March for Palestine on Saturday at 12 noon in London if you can.

Our society – UK April 2023 – is governed through processes of deception. This could be attributable to recent large-scale growth of information management enabled by advances in technology – mainly improvements in the efficiency of microprocessors. (see CHIP WAR by Chris Miller) Attempts to shore up power through deception and empty demonstrations of control are features of any regime where a group holds power and manages the submission of other groups. The centralised and convoluted ways in which the information is authorised and collected may be furthering a tendency towards delusional behaviours and mentalities that are incident to the decline in the regime’s – the West’s – stability.  This tendency has intensified over the last 20 years but especially during the pandemic. During a period of decline such as the West is suffering now there is an enhanced need for deception in order to resist the consequences of this decline.  This enhanced need is leading to delusional behaviours.  The need for deception is so great that key sectors of the ruling apparatus become delusional. They actually find themselves given to believe in the deception they are perpetrating.

Two tendencies – overproduction of information and collapse of profitability (not necessarily all profits in all sectors) are linked to each other in complex ways. The fall in profitability or productivity (not the same thing but related) is to do with the tendency for technological innovation to have an impact not on production but on distribution. (See Smart Machines and Service Work by Jason E Smith).  Division within the manager-worker relations of production becomes more marked and the owners of the systems are more distant from the operatives.  This is manifest in terms of income, wealth and living conditions as well as in physical terms. This occurs in production as well as in social relations and can make the ‘masters’ delusional. There is a peculiar alchemy of dysfunctional impotence and illusions of omniscience and omnipotence. The latter is particularly the case with the increased capacity for surveillance that has occurred. ( see Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) This is why I am arguing that our political system, based as it is on deception, is liable to being deformed by delusion.

With our free media, democracy and the openness that our social life assures, we believe our society – the society of the West – is able to understand the truth and base our way of life and system of values on it.  This belief is false and it is the basis of the great delusion. A turning point moment in this respect happened 20 years ago when a military invasion of Iraq was undertaken on the basis of lies.  The lies were obvious.  Public relations outfits were hired to sell the policy to the public. Because the attack and mass killing happened, people thought that the lies must be the truth otherwise the launching of the attack and the unleashing of so much violence would be evil.  People believed they were not evil and therefore they believed that lies were the truth. When the ruling elites of the West, undertook the strategy of the ‘War on Terror’ it marked a new stage in the deliberate and programmatic use of deception.  

Is this delusional tendency dangerous to the regimes?  Will it form a negative feedback loop and lead to it all blowing up in their face? Can it possibly do the regimes of the West any harm, for example, to attempt to deceive the public about who carried out the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic? (See Seymour Hersch’s How America took out the Nordstream Pipeline) Will it be a problem that people who cluster around the US regime believe that the US was not guilty of this action?  We are used to the social media and information management strategies that call any questioning of the authenticity of the West’s official media-approved version of reality ‘conspiracy theory’ and construct other stories of an even more incredible character to associate with these and thus degrade them.  Any information about any event within the conspectus of government is subject to what is called ‘spin’.  However it is because of the huge material resources that are implemented in support of approved ‘information’ that it gains support and belief.  As I have said, one of the biggest ‘information’ events from this point of view was the ‘spin’ campaign around the attack or ‘war’ on Iraq in 2003 when few were persuaded of the maintenance of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by Iraq but, since the massive movement of resources that the invasion involved, took place, people accepted this story almost in hindsight even though no such weapons were discovered.  It is almost as if the collateral (and perhaps central) objective of the whole enterprise was to gain the submission, not just of the Iraqi population, but of the populations of the countries that joined in with the invasion.  Can a ruling group maintain its rule and continue to lie?  Surely information must be managed in such away that the functionaries of the regime don’t become delusional.  But isn’t this a danger? These delusional behaviours are characterised by the increase in securitisation and the isolation of the ruling group in what can appear to be a preparation for flight.  Their destination of choice resembles a bunker, even if this terminal space looks luxurious, a tax haven or gated securitised community. 

As our regime – the West – with its democracy coating monarchical presidential structures – comes to an end, a part of the strategy to sustain it is increasingly and deliberately to practice deception.  The very brief period that the USA will have been the ‘leader’ of the West started to come to an end with its defeat in Vietnam in 1975.  After that it vastly increased its destructive potential – a major part in this was played by information technology (see Chip War by Chris Miller ) and brought this to bear in First Gulf War in 1991. Its domination of the battlefield was unquestioned but its military goals were unclear.  It was engaging in a display of power as if for publicity or propaganda purposes.  It could not, at this stage of the inauguration of the New World Order, appear to be a conquering army even though it had overwhelming force. It was rather an army of liberation. Its empire from the outset had to be disguised as a freedom project. It could not easily adopt the model of the old European imperialism its destiny was to replace. It needed to proclaim its liberal credentials counterposed to the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union. In its replacement of the older European Empires, it had to appear to be de-colonial or anti-colonial.  A delusion, or at least a deception, was built into its basic project: the empire that brought freedom.

The adoption by the ‘West’ of the ‘war on terror’ strategy as a unifying foreign policy platform really flowered in the second Gulf War.  The invasion of Iraq saw a crystallisation of the imposition of power over the truth. This demonstrated by the introduction of use of widespread torture.  This was not intelligence-gathering. It was primarily an instrument of terror, an enforcer of the ‘lie as truth’.  Many of the torture techniques were designed to destroy the internal structures of resistance, to break the will and sensibility of the ‘tortured’, to gain their fundamental submission. This disintegration of the resistant character was aimed at permeating the social sphere. If someone is holding a gun to your head and telling you that the red colour you are looking at is green, you may begin to see it as green.  Problems proliferate when the person holding the gun starts to see the red colour as green. Torture became an extreme form of salesmanship.

The celebrated quotation from Karl Rove is pertinent and summed up the post- communist new rule. It is said that Rove was talking to a group of journalists or academics who had asserted overly simple ideas about truth: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The strategies that have characterised the recent decades of declining US power saw a reversal of rational idealist decision-making processes. People argue for a course of action, gain consent to it and then carried it out. This was replaced by the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ a la Rove.  One remarkable example of this is the Israeli government’s colonisation of occupied Palestinian land.  In fact the degree to which the shaping rhetoric of Western foreign policy has been determined by Israeli policy in the ‘war on terror’ period is also remarkable. This of course will have been assiduously denied and consigned to  the bin marked ‘conspiracy theories’.  This will have been to some extent effected through the weaponisation of the accusation of anti-semitism. An extraordinary strategic by-product of this has been the use of anti-semitism to defeat the left in the Labour Party in the UK.  Or maybe it was not a by-product but the singular way in which the neoliberal establishment could continue to deepen its struggle against socialism. The declaration by the Israeli state, after the withdrawal of its colonies and armed forces from within the perimeter of the Gaza Strip in 2006, that it was no longer in occupation of the Gaza Strip was followed by the announcement that Gaza was ‘hostile territory’.  This meant that Israel completely controlled the space of Gaza through material flows, its currency, surveillance, power over its borders, and military control of the air, land and sea but denied occupation and designated the Gaza space as an enemy state.  Do they really believe they are no in occupation? Because foreign policy and domestic policy are contiguous, the implications of the ‘war on terror’ seep into ‘internal security’. The UK government decided to further the stigmatisation of immigrants through harassment calling its policy the creation of a ‘hostile environment’.  The idea that a government should create a hostile environment inside its own territory is a remarkable policy innovation. It extends the work of the Thatcher government in defining aspects of trade union and working class organisation as the ‘enemy within’. 

The processes of deception mean a greater closeness between the ‘intelligence community’, the media and the academy.  These institutions in their interrelatedness appear archaic in their submission to absolute power. (See Tucker Carlson and John Pilger) They can seem, in their doctrinal conformity, to belong to an earlier political epoch, an arcane priesthood, where a unified established religion, christianity was created within the emerging nation-states of the West and used as a combinatory ideology.  The reason why Israel acted as a kind of model for this most recent period of policy development was because it offered a telling and typical story of struggle against fundamentalist islam.  This was presented at a transitional moment for the West. Having accomplished the downfall of the Soviet regime and the apparent defeat of real existing socialism a new ‘enemy’ needed to be found.  The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan had been effected through the financing and arming of islamic opposition, the warlords amongst whom the Taliban were the most prominent. The dispersal of the foreign fighters and their return to their respective countries offered the pretext to talk up the danger of islamism and this played into the ‘war on terror’ story. For this brief period of domination – before Ukraine was enlisted as the frontline state in the West’s war against the rest of the world – when fundamentalist islam was constructed as the main enemy and Middle East oil was a key commodity – this synergy between Israel and the West was crucial. It is not surprising that as the West turns its attention to more significant real opponents, Russia and China, the Israeli state project is seen to suffer ruptures and internal divisions.  Fissures consequently will occur between it and its main supporter, the USA. Meanwhile with the brokerage of China, Iran and Saudi Arabia begin a process of rapprochement.  And in the foreground is the emergence of the new togetherness of China and Russia bringing together the largest industrial base with the largest source of key raw materials, a powerful combination.  This is especially significant because the receding ice due to global warming has freed up the route to the East via the Arctic thus cutting out the need for transport through Suez i.e. through the routes controlled by the West. An unforeseen consequence of global warming. Although the heyday of Israeli influence is now over we are still left with the legacy of the war strategies they generated and of course Palestinians are in an even more vulnerable position, faced by a vicious genocidal project which is no longer disguising itself as a peace process.

You can’t measure delusions. There is no way of estimating how delusional a given regime or connected series of political spaces might be.  Nor whether it makes the political and intellectual elites and their cadre vulnerable.  Certainly they have been loyally supported by the modern secularised version of the Lords Spiritual, the media and the academy. How is it that the liberal intelligentsia of the West have been such a push over?  Is liberalism such a powerful and convincing ideology?  Have they been fooled into believing that secularisation and democratisation have brought an end in their milieu to the underlying function of established religion in offering support and justification for the aspirations of the expansionist delerium of the military-oriented leading section of the elites? They are the functionaries of that religion. The liberal intelligentsia have been at the core of the generation of delusion.  Journalists programmatically went along with the stories about antisemitism in the Labour Party and failed as an institution to investigate what was going on. They didn’t feel they even needed to appear to be impartial so obvious was it that Corbyn was a usurper, a traitor, a coward, a king of shreds and patches. The search for truth – or just simply the other side of the story – was easily staunched.  In this instance and this may reveal a general truth, it is clear that there is an underlying agenda.  I repeat what I said at the beginning that any ruling group that holds sway over other social groups uses deception as a means of gaining submission.  This is patriarchy.  The group that holds power is a concentrated expression of the institutionalised power of men over women.  Capitalism is a further elaboration and dispersal of this structure.  Men’s power is only power over women, the prioritisation of production (economic growth) over reproduction.  Reproduction is reduced to the production of labour power. The capitalist state has to ensure that this is done as cheaply as possible in order to enhance profitability.  However it cant appear to be doing this.  This is where deception is so important. Of course if men take women’s power it is in their interest that women are powerful so long as this power is already becoming submissive.  This is the control of beauty. The character of the state structures themselves are built to deceive.  They are in themselves deceptive.

The modern capitalist state is a vehicle for patriarchal rule but hides, disguises or ceremonialises and it appears to both display/ritualise and defuse this core value structure. It enacts discourses that lead these values to be internalised or introjected as natural.  This is a consequence of patriarchy’s initial move which was to take control of symbolic power, of ritual, of the symbolic order. Control of knowledge, secrecy, ‘information management’ are an essential part of the domination of society by a group within it. I believe, because of this, that the reform of state structures is necessary, that is, the thorough extension of diverse forms of democracy, the prohibition of hereditary power, the abolition of secrecy and the establishment of transparency in government. 

So what follows is a series of essays on why deception is intrinsic to patriarchy and capitalism. It should be treated with suspicion and I am sure it will give rise to mild ridicule.  What underlies my argument is the perception that the change of which we are feeling the tremors is a species change, a change in the sexual organisation of our species which is an adaptation to environmental change.  The depth and extent of the change is measurable against the protracted and complex process that brought patriarchy into being.  It is this deep and wide.  So the decline of the West is just an echo of this more fundamental change.  Since the West is patriarchy taken to its ultimate degree of development, its instability brought about by its predatory character, its exhaustion of resources and its delusional mentalities we will see here the paradigm begin to shift. It might not be a pretty sight.  Its drive is expressed in modernity and its essence is militarist and genocidal.  As the greatest contemporary thinker about genocide, Daniel Feierstein has recognised: Genocide is endemic to modernity.  

Is deception an essential aspect of patriarchy?  Does this current development of an increased intensity and capacity for deception that seems to have escalated during this period of the system’s decline make apparent something that is a basic characteristic? Deception and the consequent delusion that it produces is deeply connected to the whole ideological carapace of patriarchy.  It is germane to it.  Patriarchy could not have developed without an accompanying system of knowledge control.  This is based on secrecy. This is the use of the control of space. This is what secrecy means.  It relies on the partition or barrier between one space and another. Have a look at The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations by GCHQ. Secrecy accompanies the appropriation of ritual and symbolic power.  This human development, a change in our species organisation, characterised the strategies patriarchal males deployed in order to ensure paternity and patrilineal succession.  It is energised by the need to counter women’s power. In giving birth, the central act of species life, gives women initial control over reproduction. This has been systematically taken away from them. This is one of the fundamental efforts of modern science but of course it is seen to be rooted in the primordial ritual of patriarchy, the witch hunt.  Have a look at the appendix where I have attached a spoof report on a men’s meeting 12,000 years ago.

The evolutionary revolution that brought about the development of the modern human species (homo sapiens sapiens) was based on the suppression and management of alpha male individualistic behaviour traits – those associated with sex-for-food exchanges. The work of coalitions of human females in creating the primary social space of reproduction for the protracted vulnerability of big-brained early-birthed creatures involved the containment and distribution of sexual energy. Women controlled who had sex with whom. After approximately 180,000 years of species development conditions changed and the male ‘takeover’ took place – a complex process of long duration. The element of secrecy and the question of deception arose out of men’s collective experience of wresting control from women.  The development of animal husbandry, crop cultivation and sedentism introduced new conditions making possible the domestication of women.  The subjugation and oppression of women was carried out in different cultural settings and environmental circumstances.  The germ of the use of deception by patriarchy and capitalism is seen in how it became a part of masculinist culture to accuse women of being deceitful. Men will have experienced the ritual power of women in their control of sexual distribution, guarding the young women going through their first menstruation.  The location of this rite of passage may well have been in a menstrual hut from which men were excluded.  Certainly strategies of seclusion and ritual were a part of this original human culture. How men mimicked this sacred space and inverted its function is typical of the processes of ‘take over’. Exerting their control over death and installing the artefacts thereof in their men’s houses formed an integral part of the development of hierarchical forms of organisation and the development of an appropriated and guarded sacredness.  Of course the precise truth of what I’m saying is open to question.   Instances of red ochre body paint used by female coalitions, of menarchal huts, of sacred rituals guarding menstruation, of men’s huts, of initial developments of hierarchy are a part of the ethnographic record. Some of these ideas derive from my inexpert understanding of the precepts developed by the Radical Anthropology Group. The variety of developments in different human groups will always provide rich and contradictory evidence.

As human males came to take over social organisation and place production over reproduction as the social priority, they enforced their rule by incorporating features of the pre-existing cultural order.  They could not exercise their will – based on the new priorities that they were moved to adopt – only by violence and brute force.  They had to recognise the power of the kind of internalised organic community that they saw reason to change.  Recognising how powerful the unknown was over them, they saw and experienced how the power of women depended on their knowledge of their sexual availability and the relationship between this availability and reproduction.  They recognised the power of the protection offered to young menarchal females by the coalitional strength and ‘co-ordination’ capacity of women which was integral to women’s control of the distribution of access to sex.

The initial development of the species involved the collective coalitional influence of women in the first movement of the species in creating society. This was held together by the inherent structures that arose in the course of reproduction and child-rearing. This organisation was organic. This is not to say that these functions were the province of women alone.  On the contrary, the society was centred on the assurance of the continuation of the community through the defence and protection of the young.  The young were not at this point looked upon as a source of human labour capable of being exploited. 

Rule cannot be upheld over a long time by violence.  Control is exerted by threat of violence, the sanctification of violence, but mechanical force is ineffective without the control of symbolic power and symbolic power is gained through deception unless it is organic.  Symbolic power is the knowledge of the code, the ability to elaborate what things mean.  In order to disclose what things mean it is presupposed that there is knowledge that is withheld and then released under circumstances of submission.

A major feature of the mimetic incorporation of women’s culture – or the appropriation and masculinisation of human culture – was how men inverted what they experienced as the power of women at the level of symbolic organisation. This inversion of human culture happens at the level of ritual and of poetry and of mythic narrative. Masculinist culture is constantly referring to the original human culture. Deception as a major component of patriarchy arose in the need to hide the sources of their power as successfully as the sources of women’s power had, in their experience, been hidden from them.  The development of these structures (the sanctification of violence through the exercise of ritual power) of patriarchal society brought forms of rule that depended on external forms of control as well as internalised structures of belief, making the exercise of power appear to be a matter of natural force.

All systems of rule, not to say all forms of social organisation, control populations through deception.  If the rule of one section of society is imposed on another – the first example of this was men’s oppression of women – then control of what the population believe to be the case is essential.  What does this control amount to? What are the methods and technologies involved?  Of course it may be true that there are or have been societies that haven’t needed a state because no group, as a group, or section programmatically exerts control over any other group.  If control is exerted then this control is evident in the submission of the oppressed group.  The submission may seem to the oppressed group to be completely internally motivated.  They even might believe themselves to be an integral part of the oppressor group and see their interests as the same.  They may have been convinced that they gain protection from the oppressor group and therefore submit.  Their submission may be habitual and be interiorised through the experiences that form and shape their behaviour and attitudes.  How much easier it is for the oppressor if the oppressed are not aware of their oppression. 

One of the functional aspects of hierarchies is that the people inhabiting the different hierarchised spaces have the power to permit access at different levels.  This means that people are admitted to spaces from which they have previously been excluded or prohibited and thus they gain access to knowledge and perspectives, even secrets, that they were previously ‘not privy’ to.  So if the keeping of secrets is a function of the ordering of the hierarchy and hierarchies are themselves a primary technology of oppression of one group by another then deception is an intrinsic part of all systems of rule.  Only when a society is held together by an organic internalised non-exclusive process of inherent co-ordination, maybe an internalised rhythm or harmony – can a society dispense with secrecy and deception. The movement towards the restructuring of the state through processes of organic democracy is not fanciful.  People all the time have strong social experiences of love and equality.

The idea that the rulers of a given society ‘know’ things that the population cannot or should not know is contrary to the thorough operation of democracy.  What we witness in the modern capitalist state form is that the hierarchy is shielded and protected by democratic elements. These elements are structured, like concessions permitting the oppressed group to participate in its own oppression and are ways of gaining the population’s consent to the rule of power. In the current instance the appearance that all the participants in a given society are equal is significant insofar as this equality hides the inequality that resides underneath or behind it. I repeat, the modern capitalist state form is itself deceptive.  It is based on the separation of the state from civil society. The outer casework appears to grant access but the inner structures are impenetrable and are made inaccessible by the apparent accessibility of the outer casework.  This means that these democratic elements are oppressively deceptive but also offer footholds for the completion of the democratic process. This access can only become an effective lever of change when society has assembled as a democratic force.

Does this make change impossible?  Everything that is made by human beings can be unmade and made anew. Change of the sort that will break our submission to patriarchy must involve the critical mass of the population.  Millions and millions of people will participate. It must involve a qualitatively different democracy than the concessionary representative sort. Is there a point during this radical participatory democratic process that decisively separates the democratic elements that are a part of the defensive oppressive deceptive structure of the state, the concessionary representative sort, from those that move towards the proliferation of democratic forms, transparent government and the abolition of secrecy? It is public democratic power over the material resources of society that is decisive.  Power over finance and the ability to redistribute wealth has to be accompanied by the abolition of state secrecy.  The structure and institutions of the state have to be thoroughly democratised. If these two measures are not carried out in tandem with each other no movement forward of society can take place.  The forms of the modern capitalist state are operationally incapable of resource redistribution.  Any redistribution of this sort will become liable to corruption and exploitation by groups acting in their own interests. The basic frame of the modern capitalist state will remain in place and this will continue to be a deceptive structure which, through its array of institutions, obscures and disguises its real functions.  

The state form of our regime is built to ensure profitability by reducing the cost of producing and reproducing labour power.  The modern capitalist state institutionalises the division between politics and economics, giving the appearance of political equality in order to maintain economic inequality.

Capitalism is a direct adaptation of patriarchy and this can be seen in the transition from the feudal state to the modern capitalist state.  This transition contains continuities and discontinuities. I have described elsewhere how capitalism is a dispersal and interiorisation of patriarchy.  Its development is founded on the continued oppression of women and the extension of the dominance of production over reproduction. According to Roswitha Scholz ‘Value is male’ and capitalism is ‘patriarchal commodity production’.  If the intrinsic tendency of patriarchy – in its insistent pursuit of the domination of production over reproduction – is to find a way of making into commodities all elements in the social space then knowledge too is bound to be subject to this process – commodification.  A sign of this will be the reduction and quantification of knowledge to information, the rendering of knowledge into data

The change in our species, the reorganisation of humanity by patriarchy – a massive complex process – triggered by multiple factors including population growth and environmental change is now, in our own epoch, disentangling itself.  We are having to change as a species in our organisational life and we are having to make an adaptation to similar factors but at a different stage of development and interrelatedness.  Of course it is not accurate to describe the profound underlying species crisis which is having such a profound impact on our political structures as a reversal though this is how it appears.  Our systems are deeply structured on deceptive and delusional processes. An institutional inability to face the truth and operate in accord with it is widespread. 

Is this our system really under stress?  Where does the stress come from? Why are there moves to dispense with the democratic veneer in this period?  Why are there tendencies towards autocracy? In the period when the West – because it was the initiator of the capitalist industrial development and had a kind of first mover advantage – was for a historic period able to moderate its need to keep ‘wage costs’ down in the ‘metropolitan’/imperialist centre, it could protect itself through the super profits from imperialist expansion.  This capacity no longer exists. As well as the over-exploitation of the earth’s natural resources it has reached the limits of this competitive advantage and is in a period of growing impoverishment.  The reason why the UK is the only advanced economy with a minus growth rate is because this domain above all others has now exhausted the advantages it accrued from empire.  Of course there is residual wealth.  Of course there was a hope to return to the days of this competitive advantage in a UK free from the restraints of the EU, taking full advantage of a renewed deregulation of the financial industry.  This however has been forestalled by the pandemic.  The long term decline proceeds.  It is in the UK that all the features of the West’s decline can be seen writ large. 

The socialist or left opposition restricts itself to making what are effectively economic demands.  The suppression of political thinking is general. There is no doubt in my mind that unless there is a programmatic movement to reform and restructure the state institutions by creating massive democratic pressure to do so then problems of redistribution will not and cannot be solved. 

My basic point remains: if a political system depends for its continuance/existence on deception – in other words, that a major part of its ability to apply the instruments of government depends on making people believe that they are not being governed and that the guiding parametres in which they operate are simply natural forces – then as that system moves into its terminal crisis the deception will become delusional.

It could be that the successful demand for the abolition of state secrecy and for transparency in government may create the first cracks in the current order.  Political demands of this sort are sparse.  Economic demands, even if successful, are bound to reproduce current oppression.

Appendix 1:

Here is a report of a meeting that was held 12,000 years ago at a critical moment of the development of our species.  As we know from our studies of biology even at an elementary level the primary feature of a species is the sexual relations that determine its reproduction:

The men were faced with what appeared to be a problem of awesome proportions.  They had reached a point where they understood that the old system of hunting and gathering had started to come to an end.  The changing conditions had led to the herds being further and further away. Also they were victims of their own success.  Human populations had grown substantially and certain species that they hunted were no longer plentiful.  Also they had developed new ways of controlling the herds of animals that provided food and of cultivating the vegetable food sources that they depended on.  The old pattern of life where the monthly movement of hunting and feasting was more difficult to sustain.  The men were faced with resistance from groups of women to the new systems they wanted – and felt they needed – to implement.  They had to assert their power over women as a group.  They had to make the men’s word and the men’s priorities dominant.  They traditionally had their own space, their own hut where women were forbidden.  Now they gathered there to talk about what to do.  They knew some of their number were true visionaries and leaders and would be coming up with some dazzling ideas about what must be done.  It felt to them that they had physical power; they were stronger than the women and when they worked together there was no force that could resist them.  However they still felt the women were powerful.  The women still determined who should have sex with who.  They had amazing ceremonies when they initiated the girls who were becoming women.  Furthermore, the men couldn’t tell when the women were sexually available.  The women had the power to tell them.  It was true that they controlled the flow of blood from the animals that they killed on the hunt but the women controlled the secret flow of blood that designated a woman as ready for sex.  One man had said that just as he owned his goat herd and just as his spear and his weapon were his when he was hunting he should also own his chosen woman.  Unfortunately everybody found this idea so comical that they couldn’t stop laughing, especially the women.  Even the idea that the tools and weapons that he used were a part of him made people laugh, especially when they started looking for his tools in various parts of his body.  The men when they started talking came to the conclusion that the women were keeping secrets from them.  They began to understand, or so they thought that the women’s power was their ability to deceive them.  Women are deceitful, one of them proclaimed.  This struck a chord.  The women had their secrets but with the men nothing was secret.  For example when they were aroused sexually it showed and it was obvious that their penises had power over them or rather women had power over them through their penises.  In fact, some of them said, the women wanted to take their penises away.  This brought little eddies of cautious laughter amongst the group of men.  One of the visionary leaders exclaimed suddenly that they needed secrets and if they didn’t have any then they would have to create them.  They would create secrets by doing what they were doing now, that is by keeping their talk between themselves.  He suggested that they take an oath of secrecy, a secret oath that they would not tell anyone what they had talked about no matter what it was.  They would even keep secret the fact that they didn’t have any secret to keep!  This was such a brilliant idea that strong intakes of breath could be heard and murmurings of approval.  Just as when they fought their battles over territory with other groups of men they would not let it be known how an attack would take place, the same was true of the women.  Somebody protested that the women were not their enemy and quite a lot of the men groaned with impatience.  Of course not but also women were like enemies if they didn’t do what the men required them to do.  Another quietly spoken but influential man told the group that he believed that as well as having secrets they need to make displays of power, ritual celebrations of their power and make these the dominant events and make them time with the seasons, when the crops were gathered or when the herds gave birth to their young.  Some of the men muttered about the idea that this was women’s stuff.  But most of the men began to see, as the conversation continued, that they needed to take over the rituals that the women organised.  None of this was really new and all the ideas and suggestions were things that they had talked about endlessly but the time had come for action.  They knew that similar processes were happening in other neighbouring communities. Then they started talking about stories and how they should take over the stories from the women or only allow them to be told in certain circumstances.  They needed to keep the basic elements of the stories the same but turn them inside out.  Yes they needed to invert them.  Like this, some clown shouted, taking his garment off and turning it inside out. It’s the same garment! They need to keep the women in the stories and show how powerful they could be but seek different outcomes.  One of the older men said that they wondered whether they would come unstuck when they tried to use deception on the women.  They haven’t come unstuck, another blurted.  No, because they don’t even realise they are being deceitful, another opined.  But what happens if we start to believe our own deceit, said the first.  The truth is what we say it is, said the visionary leader and everybody cheered but this was partly because it was getting late and the men were getting tired and restless.  They wanted to have a drink and do some dancing.