Advertisement

Delivering Community Power CUPW 2022-2023

One year of genocide in Gaza

The future doesn’t belong to the forces of colonialism and imperialism but to those who rise up against them

Middle EastWar ZonesHuman RightsSocial Movements

A Palestinian mother holds her son while passing a residential building that was destroyed overnight by an Israeli air strike at Sheikh Radwan in Gaza City. Photo by Eman Mohammed.

After a year of genocide, with the slaughter now being extended on a catastrophic scale, the Israeli killing machine continues unabated as the Western powers go on arming and enabling its vast crimes.

On the face of it, despair might seem a necessary reaction to all this but that would be to miss some vital considerations. The long years in which Israel’s colonial project advanced relatively incrementally, under cover of a fake peace process and the charade of liberal democracy are now over. A reckless, deeply racist and unspeakably brutal effort to complete and extend the act of dispossession is underway. The mass murder and wanton destruction that this involves is only too obvious but it is a wild and desperate exercise that seeks ‘solutions’ that only engender more massive problems.

The Western powers still insist on preserving Israeli impunity but, on an international scale, it is already a pariah. The isolation of the Zionist project is increasing at every turn.

Israeli society itself is deeply divided. Though the ascendant right enjoys mass support, many Jewish Israelis are not ready for the consequences of the colonial end-game and want an impossible return to a more ‘moderate’ form of ethnocracy. The economy is in deep trouble and large numbers are leaving Israel, especially the professional and technical elites. A social and political crisis is playing out within the Zionist project.

An unprecedented movement of Palestine solidarity has emerged across the world. Even in the West, huge numbers have mobilized doggedly and popular sentiment has experienced a seachange. Israel is supported by the elites and power brokers but more and more people understand that justice is on the side of the Palestinians. As this movement grows, its ability to disrupt the lifeline of military, economic and diplomatic support that sustains Israel will only increase.

The mass killing operations of Israel are there for all to see but the military objectives of the Zionist onslaught have not been met. Even in the confined quarters of the Gaza enclave, a year of unrestrained criminality hasn’t subdued the armed resistance. No matter what lengths the killing is taken to, even if all out regional conflict takes place with direct US involvement, imperialism will reap what it sows.

Israel is a settler colonial project that is also a garrison of Western interests that was established to serve an agenda of regional domination. The despotic Arab regimes that Washington arms and preserves are the other component of that system of domination. Throughout the region, the deep-seated grievances that unleashed the Arab Spring have intensified and the anger is only compounded by the horrors being inflicted on Palestine and Lebanon. Far from guaranteeing control and stability, Israel’s wild course is generating the conditions for a regional social explosion of vast proportions.

The torn bodies and the devastated cities are terrible but they speak to realities and possibilities that make Zionist triumphalism ring hollow. The future doesn’t belong to the forces of colonialism and imperialism but to those who rise up against them.

With the endorsement of the Canadian Dimension editorial committee.

Advertisement

PSAC leaderboard

Browse the Archive