Editorial: Rafah offensive would be a desperate manoeuvre by a cornered politician
Judging by statements he has made to the media, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was determined that the IDF press ahead with a ground operation against Rafah in the southern-most part of the Gaza strip. If had gone ahead – and it is looking unlikely now – it would have led to a steep rise in Palestinian casualties and a severe exacerbation of the humanitarian crisis that Israel has already created there.
Around the city of Rafah, nearly a million and a half civilians are concentrated into an area roughly five miles by five, and they have nowhere else to go. Netanyahu’s sabre-rattling over Gaza represents the desperate manoeuvres of a cornered politician. He has claimed that an assault is ‘necessary’ to free the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, but so far the bloody assault of the IDF has been distinctly unsuccessful in freeing hostages.
Since October 7, over 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, the big majority of them non-combatants, women and children. More than twice that number have been injured. Gaza has been bombed back to the stone-age, with every facet of civilian infrastructure blown to bits, irrespective of whether or not it had any military or strategic value to the IDF.
Herding millions of terrified refugees from one corner of the Gaza Strip to another has created a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportions and, as many have pointed out, Israel clearly seen to be using mass starvation as a weapon of war – denying food convoys access to Gaza and firing on civilians when they have surrouned those few trucks that are allowed in.
The Israeli population can do the maths
But how many Israeli hostages did all of this mayhem deliver? Three, to be exact. This is the same number as those killed by the IDF by ‘accident’ as they had tried to surrender. It is a tiny fraction of the number recovered through the temporary cease-fire last November.
The population of Israel aren’t stupid; they can do the maths, and there will be a growng awareness of exactly how little the IDF have achieved in their collective punishment of the population of Gaza. Moreover, there is the added fear that dozens more hostages may have been killed in the massive bombardments of Gaza over the past five months and there is at least a possibility that if they are being held in tunnels around Rafah, even more would be killed ‘accidentally’ by the IDF.
What we are witnessing at the moment, is a fundamental re-alignment of the politics of the Middle East, a shift of tectonic proportions, not least within Israel, and a corresponding shift in the international perception of Israel. The Gaza war and its political and diplomatic fall-out are taking the decades-old policies of the state of Israel to their logical conclusion. Policies based on the complete denial of rights, economic development or even hope to the Palestinian population have been the cornerstones of Israeli government policies for decades.
Israeli politics has been driven by its right wing, personified by Netanyahu, who has been the most important Israeli politician for two decades. Israel has been shoved up a blind alley, unfortunately taking large part of the Jewish population with it. But the system of apartheid that they have been perfecting for years was never going to work, as a basis for peace or ‘security’ for Israel. In that sense, all of those foreign politicans, who have sat on their hands and said nothing as apartheid was being perfected, share a responsibility for what is happening now.
Israel tries – and fails – to minimise media coverage of Gaza
Today, every Arab leader in the Middle East – each of them looking out for their own position, power and corrupt privileges – is sitting on a volcano of massive public anger over the slaughter in Gaza. Israeli might be trying hard to minimise the coverage of its genocidal attack by targetting journalists, but reports from Al Jazeera will be beamed into homes across the Arab and the Muslim world for five months.
If US diplomats are scuttling around the Middle East by the score, from one Arab capital to another, it is not at all out of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians – after, all, their government has been, and still is, facilitating the onslaught with its weaponry – but because they are trying to shore up the stability of rotten Arab regimes with the hope that the USA can “restrain” Israel.
Some commentators in Israel (Haaretz for example) do not think an offensive will take place in Rafah, at least in the near future, not least because it would require a new mobilisation of reservists who have already been sent home. But if it had gone ahead, and especially if it meant thousands of Palestinians fleeing for their safety into Egyptian territory, it would spell the end of the thirty-year-old Israel-Egypt peace deal. It could threaten another Arab Spring, a mass movement of Egyptian workers in support of Palestine.
It would threaten to engulf the whole region in mass protests. Egypt’s President Sisi knows it. The King of Jordan, whose population is half Palestinian knows it. The various kings, sheikhs and emirs in the Gulf know it. Above all, the Biden administration knows it and this explains the growing rift between the US and Israel.
Netanhayu, on the other hand, is a politician who has based his entire career on the lie of ‘security through strength’ and, besides, he is facing at some stage a trial for corruption. His personal position, therefore, renders him somewhat difficult to persuade. That is why the merciless conduct of the war in Gaza is increasingly being seen by the Israeli public and Western politicians as little more than a political strategy for the benefit of Netanyahu and his right wing coalition partners.
Netanyahu’s main war aim is his own political survival
An analysis this week in the ‘liberal’ Israeli newspaper Haaretz has the headline, Israel’s Lingering, Aimless War Is a One-way Ticket to International Isolation. Netanyahu may be “clueless” the article says, but he is “resolute about subjecting its management to his political survival”.
What is beginning to seriously worry the more sober representatives of Israeli capitalism, including the ‘liberal left’, is the the huge and unprecedented tide of world opinion that has swung against Israel over the Gaza war. “If this trend continues,” the Haaretz article continues, “Israel will cement its status as a pariah on the world stage.” The only thing wrong with this article is that it is out of date. Israel is already a pariah on the world stage.
Last week, the most prominent Jewish politician in the United States, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Party leader of the Senate, denounced Netanyahu. It is worth quoting in full what he is reported to have said to the Senate: “If Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down, and continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing US standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”
It would be surprising if US politicians were not already having discussions behind the scenes with political rivals to Netanyahu, to replace him at the earliest possible date.
Even David Cameron is more critical of Israel than Starmer
One Western government after another has now called for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the free movement of humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Palestinian population. The latest is Belgium’s prime minister who has said on Thursday that EU leaders had made “extremely clear” demands about the war.
“We finally have a unified position that is extremely clear,” he said. “Demanding that the violence stops right now . . . very clear that an invasion of Rafah is something that is not acceptable and a very specific demand that Hamas would release the hostages as soon as possible,”
Even the British Foreign Minister, David (now ‘Lord’) Cameron appeared to criticise Israel on social media for not allowing the free movement of humanitarian assistance, leading to a spat with an Israeli government spokesperson, Eylon Levy. Levy’s reply to Cameron was to repeat the lies being put out by other apologists for Israel.
“I hope you are also aware”, Levy replied to Cameron, in a tweet on March 8 (since deleted), “there are NO limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment into Gaza, and in fact the crossings have EXCESS capacity.” When the British embassy in Tel Aviv contacted Netanyahu’s office for “clarification”, Levy was promptly sacked, exposing the lies for what they were.
To their shame, among those Western politicians who are still clinging desperately to Netanyahu’s policy, there is the leadership of the Labour Party. Even within the lobby group known as the “Labour Friends of Israel”, so long parodied as the “Labour Friends of Netanyahu”, there must be serious foreboding about the dead-end into which the Israeli state has been driven. So far,
Labour’s right wing, echoing Netanyahu, have succeeded throughout the Party in an almost blanket association of any criticism of Israel with ‘antisemitism’. To be against Zionism, according to the LFI, is to be against Jews. This would be contested by the thousands of Jewish people going on marches against the obliteration of Gaza, both here and even in the US.
Labour’s right wing are completely behind the curve of history, because huge shifts in opinon have already taken place across the globe and that momentum will continue for some time. In 1996, llegedly angered by Netanyahu’s arrogance, the then US President Bill Clinton was alleged to have asked, “Who’s the fucking superpower here?” That little anecdote sets the tone for Israeli-US relations in the coming months and years. Things will never be the same again.
What is important for socialists to understand is that this historic divide will not be limited to diplomats and politicians. The latter, in any case, will soon get over their small quantum of ‘sympathy’ for Palestine, and the US will continue to arm Israel to make it the only military superpower in the Middle East.
But what matters for socialists is the impact on the ground and in the streets. The war in Gaza has created mass movements of tens millions of workers and youth in support of Palestinian rights. It is this political earthquake which has made the ground move under the feet of the world’s politicians, including those in the Arab world the main Western capitalist countries.
But in the same way, the political ground will shift under the feet of Israeli politicians. The Zionist project that saw the establishment of an Israeli state, with economic development and ‘security’ only at the expense of six million Palestinians, was always a hopeless chimera that would lead only to war, economic sacrifice and international approbrium.
Although beginning with a minority, the war in Gaza will eventually lead to millions of Israeli workers in reappraising not only their own interests, but the interests of ordinary Palestinian workers, and where these two can coincide.
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