Unending War -- Tariq Ali in the New Left Review
Sid Shniad
Unending War
Tariq Ali
The gallery of grotesques assembled by Trump – only the toga was missing in his rendering of the Roman Emperor Nero – at Sharm-el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort synonymous with luxury and despotism, dutifully celebrated ‘Peace in the Middle East’. What ‘peace’? Earlier that day in Jerusalem, Nero had declared ‘victory’ while addressing his cheering barbarian auxiliaries and donors in the Knesset:
We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them. And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly. Bibi would call me so many times, ‘Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?’ Some of ‘em I never heard of, Bibi, and I made ‘em! [Laughter] But we’d get ‘em here, wouldn’t we, huh? And they are the best. They are the best. And you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well.
‘What a job! What a job you’ve done’, Nero marvelled. ‘These are just a few of the reasons why I am proud to be the best friend that Israel has ever had.’ And before the final trumpet sounded, there was a shout out to Miriam Adelson, seated in the visitors’ gallery: ‘Isn’t that right, Miriam?’ Nero reminisced:
Miriam and Sheldon would come into the [Oval] Office . . . I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else . . . Look at her, sitting there so innocently. She’s got $60 billion in the bank. $60 billion. [Laughter] I think she said, ‘No, more!’ And she loves Israel. . . Her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him . . . very supportive of me. And he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you?’ I’d say, ‘Sheldon, I’m the President of the United States, it doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in . . . they were very responsible for so much, including getting me thinking about the Golan Heights.
This train of thought – and the strings attached to the Adelsons’ donations – led him to wonder whether her primary loyalty was to America or Israel. ‘I’m going to get her into trouble with this, but I actually asked her once, “So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?”. She refused to answer. That means, it might be Israel!’
The question is, of course, supposed to be antisemitic according to the IHRA definition; at home, American campuses are being threatened or punished by Nero’s administration for less. Once again, he says the quiet part loud: laying bare the sordid role played by Israel Lobby cash in the shameless support by the US political and cultural establishment for the destruction of Gaza.
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Meanwhile, barely fifty miles away from the celebratory junketing in the Knesset, nearly two million starving and homeless Palestinians were searching for shelter, food and water. What happens now? Hamas has released 20 hostages and the Israelis 2,000. There is a partial respite. Good news. But the Israelis have made it clear that the colonial occupation will never end. In addition to perhaps 100,000 dead, Israel has accomplished a massive land grab. The IDF controlled over 80 per cent of Gaza’s 140 square miles before Nero’s ‘peace deal’. After pulling back to the initial withdrawal ‘yellow line’, according to Al-Jazeera they still hold 58 per cent of the Strip, including most of the Rafah Governorate, over half of the Khan Younis Governorate, parts of Gaza City, and Beit Hanoon and Beit Lahiya in the north. Thousands of Palestinians are still being held without trial in Israeli concentration camps.
The deal leaves the Gaza Strip effectively partitioned, with the mass of the Palestinian population forced into tent-city enclaves. The urban fabric has been almost totally destroyed by Israeli shells, bombs, drones and bulldozers: 80 per cent of buildings are either damaged or flattened, 90 per cent of homes are wrecked and 80 per cent of the farmland razed. The strip now contains 17,000 orphans and the UN estimates the last two years have set human development in Gaza back by as much as 69 years.
Six days into the ceasefire, Palestinians are still being killed and wounded at will by the IDF. The Rafah crossing and the other entrance points remain under Israeli control. Claiming that the Palestinians are breaking the agreement because they are unable to find the bodies of dead Israeli hostages amid the bomb damage, the Netanyahu government is already choking off aid.
Yet Israel has not fully achieved its war aims. Hamas, far from being destroyed, has been recruiting at an accelerated pace, as Biden’s Secretary of State Blinken conceded not so long ago. Although much of the top leadership has been killed, a Hamas official has described how the IDF’s assault brought ‘new generations’ into the resistance. They have grown adept at recycling unexploded American and Israeli rockets, bombs and artillery shells into improvised explosive devices. The third phase of the Trump deal stipulates that Hamas surrender its weapons, but Peter Beinart points out why this is unlikely: ‘For decades, the Islamist group has attacked its political rival, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, for abandoning armed resistance while Palestinians remain occupied. It’s unlikely Hamas would abandon that principle now, absent any hint of an acceptable political solution.’
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The Israel-Palestine war that began in 1947 has still not ended. Its leaders – social democrats like Ben Gurion and Golda Meir in the fifties and sixties; far-right figures like the Netanyahu Cabinet today – have made no secret of their ultimate aim: Eretz Israel. Since 2023, their overt goal has been to end the Palestinian story forever. This, too, has not yet succeeded, despite the backing of Biden, Trump and most of the European satellite states, with Britain in the lead.
The message to the extraordinary Palestine solidarity movements that have sprung up in many parts of the world is clear enough. The Italian general strike for Gaza has revived radical politics in that country. An overwhelming bulk of Germans, French and Brits oppose their wretched governments. Trump and Starmer are pushing authoritarian measures at home. The war crimes in Gaza have woken up an entire generation. The Arab world, alas, still sleeps though its nightmares are darkening, with Israel appointed as the senior imperial relay in the region. The message is this: Don’t move on. Stay angry. That is the very least we can do for the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. The 1947 war has continued in multiple different forms: 1956, 1967, 1973 and 2023. This last phase is not the end. Not by any criterion.