Questioning the call for ceasefire

Workers' Liberty calls for and campaigns for a ceasefire. The below letter responds to our 25 October editorial.

There is much that is unique and noble, principled and courageous in Solidarity’s 25 October editorial. There’s so much to agree with, and yet…

The editorial asks pointedly, “Of what politics is the war between Israel and Hamas a continuation?” But this won’t quite do.

Israel is a state; Hamas is a theocratic fascist organisation that rules a semi-autonomous state/region. The correct symmetrical ways of posing this are either: of what politics is the war between the Likud-Kahanist government and Hamas a continuation? Or of what politics is the war between Israel and Palestine a continuation?

Still, the editorial inadvertently posed the question, I think, correctly, but for reasons it does not properly acknowledge. This is a war between Israel and Hamas, not between the reactionary leaders of Gaza and the reactionary leaders of Israel; nor between the Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms.

If this were a war between two reactionary governing elites, in which the peoples of both nations had no essential stake, then we might raise the call, in anachronistic terms, for the fraternisation of soldiers of opposing armies.

This is so blindingly absurd that no one could make this demand and still claim to be taken seriously. Who are the dissidents that “Breaking the Silence” or “Combatants for Peace” could speak with in Hamas and Islamic Jihad? And how would they speak? By séance?

And if AWL thinks that “Standing Together” is a replicable example of “fraternisation”, it is simply deluding itself.

Neither is this a war between two national chauvinisms that could be resolved through territorial compromise. This is a war between Israel, led by a revocable coalition including dyed in the wool racists, domestically opposed by at least half of their citizens — many of whom accept the right of Palestinian self-determination — and a Palestinian people deprived of political agency by nationalist usurpers.

The problem with this editorial is that it is trying to maneuver two enemies, Palestinian nationalism and Hamas, into the same place. If the editorial writers don’t do it consciously, they do it blindly and unwittingly by assumption.

Hamas is not a nationalist movement by any rational understanding. It does not seek self-determination; it does not use its resources to build a state; it does not choose its alliances to leverage concessions needed to elbow a state into existence. It lives solely to erect a military powerbase. And it therefore uses its resources and chooses its alliances and leverages its concessions for one purpose and one purpose alone: to aggrandise its armed capabilities.

Ok, a military power platform, but for what end? To realise the elimination of Israel as a step towards a broader caliphate. Any future Palestinian state in the West Bank would simply add one more obstacle to be eliminated on the way to consolidating its goal of an Islamic empire. It is about as sensible to see Hamas in nationalist terms as it is to see Boko Haram or ISIS in nationalist terms.

Palestinian nationalism is only an imaginary factor, a deceptive signifier, in the war between Israel and Hamas; a delusion of the left, but not only of the left. If this eludes many observers, it is because more secular versions of Palestinian nationalism have been tinged by Pan-Arabism. And they have been infused with unifying Islamic cultural and religious symbols, including the commitment to Sharia injunctions. Nationalism and Islamism bleed into one another at the edges. They use one another. They camouflage themselves in the other’s uniforms. They poach from each other’s ranks.

But the fact remains that Palestinian nationalism and Islamic imperialism remain two mutually incompatible projects. Palestinian self-determination is the exercise of a democratic right; a caliphate is the antithesis of all democratic rights.

Israel must be prepared to make concessions to the former. This is something different. It is neither a war of Israel against Palestine, nor of the Likud against Hamas, but of an aspiring caliphate against an upstart infidel obstacle to a reordering of the Middle East.

What then to make of AWL’s humanitarian call for a cease-fire? There have been innumerable cease-fires, the last negotiated in June, that have all been abrogated by Hamas. So the call for a cease-fire is operationally only a demand that Israel and Israel alone halt all military actions. And to nail it down, the editorial also calls for an international arms embargo against Israel.

The editorial doesn’t even make the call for a cease-fire contingent on the release of hostages.

AWL recognizes in principle the right of Israel to defend itself. But evidently not through armed force. Or at least not beyond its Iron Dome, a military and technological marvel powerless against the forces unleashed upon its southern borders. The editorial characterises targeted bombings of Hamas storage depots, weapon assembly plants, rocket launching pads and military bases nestled in housing blocs, schools, hospitals, UNRWA facilities, etc as “indiscriminate.” And advanced warning to Gazans to flee likely battle zones given by phone, by leaflet and by duds (“knocks on the door”) is labelled as “collective punishment.” It’s an abuse of language, but so be it.

Now, no one with an ounce of humanity regards bombing or any other operation of war with anything but disgust. But there is something very distasteful in asserting the “right to defence” while dodging responsibility for its more obviously barbarous consequences.

And this editorial does both, which is far worse than the crime of language abuse.

Two hundred thousand Israelis have been internally displaced. Towns and communities on the Gaza border long weathered gasoline balloons, lit kites, terror tunnels and border breaches and remained steadfast. Defying expectations, the residents were remarkably dovish in their political leanings.

But this pogrom has done what these earlier offences failed to do. It left a swath of Israel totally depleted and uninhabitable, a no man’s land. A ceasefire without security guarantees from a power whose words are intrinsically worthless means that Israel agrees to permanently relinquish sovereignty over its own territory.

And should Hezbollah, an Islamic ally, make the north similarly uninhabitable, and squeeze another several hundred thousand Israelis to the interior, and with Israel again urged to accept a one-sided ceasefire, Israel will slowly unravel.

In twenty five years, predicted the caliphators of Iran, Israel will cease to exist. That is a possible reality, which this pogrom laid all too bare and which the repeated call for unilateral ceasefire could make a bit more likely.

One of the trenchant things Orwell wrote was this. “You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.”

So let me turn back to the demand for a ceasefire. Is it Israel’s responsibility to save Hamas for the sake of the Palestinians? Could this proposition be sold to any combatant? Should Sherman have ceased his march to the sea, even if it required the burning down of Atlanta, to save innocent Southern lives?

But, I can anticipate your objection. The cause of the South in the American civil war was not equivalent to the cause of the North, which was to end slavery. And because our attitude towards war is conditioned by our understanding of the underlying politics, this analogy cannot hold. For unlike the American civil war, the politics of this war are symmetrically equivalent. The right to Palestinian self-determination is surely equal to the right of Israel to self- determination.

But that is exactly what I contest. It is a red herring. Hamas is not fighting for self-determination. It is fighting for a transnational religious empire. It is indifferent to the issues of one-state or two with regards to a future Palestine. It wants no Palestine, no Israel and no states.

The demand for a unilateral cease-fire, and that is exactly what it is, for this reason is both ahistorical and unprecedented.

Why not raise the demand that Hamas surrender in exchange for safe passage to any country that will take them? That is exactly what the PLO did as it departed from its strongholds in Lebanon to Tunis.

That at least has historical precedent.

What you can’t do is opt out of selecting between the only horrible alternatives that actually do exist. Magical realism is not politics.

• Workers' Liberty calls for and campaigns for a ceasefire. See responses to this article by Daniel, Zack