Anti-Zionism is not anti-semitic
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Yes that would just be typical, almost obligatory war propaganda to motivate the soldiers to hate and kill the other side. Ukraine played that card too and Israel needed a new story after nobody believed the one about beheaded babies.
Looking for something else I came across this article from the Socialist Standard of March 1988 which is of contemporary relevance:
Lizzie – “Mea culpa, t’was a sweeping generalisation.” & “Fair point, but I don’t think anyone can be good at everything! 🙂”
Bloody hell, with reflective comments and a degree of modesty, you might be completely unique in the world of on line posting! 🙂
I hope I have the sense to follow your example, although doing the sensible thing has always been a struggle for me.
That the war in Gaza has a wider geostrategic aspect (and is not just about Israel trying to crush Hamas and extract revenge) is shown by what is happening on the major trade tour that is the Red Sea and Suez Canal.
Independently of what is happening in Gaza there is a struggle going on for control of the oilfields at the end of the Persian Gulf and the trade route out through it. The “West” has already fought one war to maintain control of this, against Iraq. Now the threat is from Iran.
The US has built up and armed Israel as its pawn in the area (even if a rather unruly one). Iran seeks to undermine Israel and Israel to undermine Iran. In fact the two states have been in a state of undeclared war. The US is supporting Israel in Gaza because it needs Israel to counter Iran, but its main concern is not Gaza but Israel’s effectiveness as its agent in the Middle East.
Iran can control the entry to the Red Sea through the Houthi government in Yemen which has been harassing merchant ships destined for or connected with Israel passing through it. As a result the big shipping companies are diverting their ships round Africa.
The consequences for the “West” could be grave — supply chains disrupted and costs and prices rise as they did with Covid, causing stagflation to be prolonged. So a war fleet has been put together to try to protect the trade route through the Red Sea.
Like we have always said, wars are military extensions of conflicts of economic interest over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets, investment outlets and strategic points and areas to protect these.
People are beginning to see the economic implications of trade via the Red Sea and Suez Canal being disrupted.
“Some analysts point to potential damage to the principle of freedom of navigation. More concerning, however, are the immediate economic costs to global shipping and oil prices, especially at a moment when inflation just seems to have been brought under control.
The precise magnitude of the economic damage is hard to predict, but real damage could occur and will probably increase over time if more and more vessels end up being rerouted. Before the crisis, 12% of global trade and 30% of container shipping passed via the Red Sea route. The Cape of Good Hope is the main alternative route, but it takes much longer and is more expensive.”The article (which wants the US to bomb Yemen, but not too much) also shows the wider geopolitical aspect of the Gaza War, as part of the US’s attempt to contain the Iran’s threat to oil supplies from the Gulf and Iran’s attempt to weaken Israel as the US’s attack dog in the ground. Which is why the US is so intransigent in its support for Israel. It, too, wants to see Hamas destroyed for being Iran’s proxies against Israel.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/22/risk-war-middle-east-biden-israel-hamas
https://en.internationalism.org/content/17428/reality-behind-bourgeois-slogans
Bourgeois slogans
“Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea?”
Hundreds of thousands of people have taken part in demonstrations across the world denouncing the devastation of Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. No doubt that many, perhaps the majority, are motivated by genuine indignation against this merciless bombardment, which has claimed around 16,000 victims, and left many more wounded or homeless. But despite this, the truth is that they are taking part in pro-war demonstrations, where the guiding slogan, “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea” could only be achieved through the military destruction of Israel and the massive slaughter and expulsion of Israeli Jews – a Nakba in reverse. And on its ruins, an Islamic Palestine on the model of Iran[2]? The indiscriminate massacre carried out by Hamas on 7 October, almost never condemned and even openly celebrated on these demonstrations, has clarified the real methods and aims of the “Resistance”
The impossibility of a “free Palestine” also reflects a deeper reality, again expressing the advancing decay of this system: the impossibility of all so-called “national liberation” struggles and nationalist movements being anything more than an adjunct to the bloody rivalry of imperialist powers large and small for control of the planet.
Humanity will only be free when the capitalist prison of the nation state has been dismantled and it lives in a world community without exploitation and without national borders.
https://en.internationalism.org/content/17434/war-atrocities-used-justify-new-atrocities
War atrocities used to justify… new atrocities
Submitted by International Review on 13 December, 2023 – 09:24
“War is methodical, organized, gigantic murder. But in normal human beings this systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication has been previously created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the latter must prepare and accompany the former”
(Rosa Luxemburg, “The Crisis of Social Democracy”, 1915)The terrible clashes that are once again bloodying the Middle East confirm once again what the great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote while in prison in 1915.
The Hamas militiamen who, on 7 October 2023, committed atrocious crimes against Israeli civilians, women, children and the elderly, were only able to behave with such barbarity because they had been conditioned and systematically brainwashed by the Islamist organisation that runs the Gaza Strip.
Similarly, if today the vast majority of the Israeli population approves of the criminal bombardments and the ground offensive against the inhabitants of Gaza, which have already caused thousands of civilian deaths, it is because they have suffered a terrible trauma with the massacre of 7 October, but also because they too have been the victims of decades of conditioning by the Israeli authorities and the various parties of the bourgeoisie.
This, about war propaganda, from the last Gulf War is relevant to today’s war in Gaza:
There is not any difference, and any real anti war movement has never existed, and it does not exist right now either, just a bunch of bourgeois and warmonger slogans. During the war in Iraq the Trotskyists were asking the workers to support Saddam Hussein because he was an anti imperialist
That anti-militarist got 30 days in jail (the first of many more such spells no doubt):
https://www.newarab.com/news/young-israeli-jailed-refusing-army-service-over-gaza-war?amp
I didn’t know that 13 percent of Israeli subjects were members of an ultra-nutty Jewish sect.
According to this there are over 200 other teenagers who have said they will refuse to be conscripted into the Israeli killing machine but that was in August:
“Over 200 high schoolers who are supposed to be on the path to being drafted in the near future to the IDF announced in August that they will refuse their call-up not only because of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform but also because of “the occupation.”
Further confirmation that the Gaza War is not just a war of savage revenge by Israel. In fact that shots have already been fired in what is a wider, regional conflict over oil and trade routes.
“Britain’s defense minister warned on Monday that London is “willing to take direct action” against the Houthis.
“We are willing to take direct action, and we won’t hesitate to take further action to deter threats to freedom of navigation in the Red Sea,” Defense Secretary Grant Shapps wrote in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.”And:
“Iran’s Alborz warship has entered the Red Sea after passing through the Bab al-Mandab strait, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.
Since 2009, Iranian warships have been operating in open waters to “secure shipping lines, fight against pirates and conduct other missions,” Tasnim said.
This comes as Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis have been targeting vessels in the Red Sea for weeks, justifying their actions as support for Palestinians amid the ongoing war between the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group Hamas and Israel, which began on October 7.”The Arab-Israeli Conflict/ The Middle East Conflict
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