The Compatible Left’s Support for Genocide
Carlos L. Garrido, Orinoco Tribune, January 6, 2024 —
What world are these people living in? Do you not see the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, women, children, and elderly indiscriminately killed by US taxpayer funded bombs? Do you not see the unprecedently dangerous situation for journalists, 77 of whom have been killed (as of Dec 31st, 2023), for United Nations workers, 100+ killed by Zionist crimes against humanity? Has collective punishment suddenly been removed from the list of war crimes under international law? Has using white phosphorus been removed from that list too? Are apartheid states no longer in violation of international law? Is keeping people in an ‘open air prison,’ as even conservative UK prime minister David Cameron called it (including Amnesty international and other global human rights organizations), suddenly acceptable by international law? Does international law now accept concentration camps as legal, the largest of which is the one Gazans are enclosed in according to Hebrew University sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling? Is international law now acceptant of genocidal rhetoric (a rhetoric backed up by actions) on the part of prominent state leaders? Is it acceptable, under international law, to keep a population of 2.3 (densely packed) million blockaded without sufficient water, food, and fuel? Is it acceptable to have leaders of a state refer to the people they’re ethnically cleansing from the land (since 1948) as ‘animals’ and ‘not humans?’ Does international law accept the indiscriminate bombing of schools, hospitals, ambulances, places of worship, ‘escape routes,’ and other civilian packed locations?
But the tides are well into turning. The world has come out to condemn the US funded Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. The Israeli Occupational Forces, although successful killing babies, women, and the elderly, have been unable to beat Hamas in actual conflict. Yemen’s Ansarallah is intensifying the pressure against the Nazi-Zionist state, as Pepe Escobar notes, with its “stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea.” In two key fronts – actual fighting and the information war – the forces of humanity are winning. Advanced imperialist weaponry and technology is no match for a people determined to be free – as the US’s defeat in Vietnam, Cuba, etc. showed. As I have argued before:
[Palestinian’s] struggle for freedom is not limited to Palestinians. A defeat of Israel, the US empire’s outpost in the so-called Middle East – the “baby child of imperialism in the Middle East” as Kwame Ture said – would be a victory for all of humanity.
A defeat of empire in any corner of the earth, as Che Guevara noted, must be celebrated cheerfully by every communist, every person driven by a deep love of humanity. The imperialists hate humanity; their capitalist system undermines, as Marx had noted, the “original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.” The Palestinian struggle against the racist Israeli colonial US-outpost is a struggle for humanity – for the exploited and oppressed across the earth. It is a struggle for life, a struggle against the Israeli imperialist death machine.
As is evident by the role Jewish Voices for Peace, If Not Now, and orthodox Jews have played in calling for a ceasefire and condemning the Zionist entity, more and more Jewish people around the world are rejecting the crimes the Zionist state is committing in their name. Many are even coming to reject the supremacist ideology of Zionism itself, fervently combatting the anti-Jewish equating of Zionism with Judaism (something both the Zionists and actual Anti-Semites agree on). Jewish people, especially in the US, are saying NO to the Zionist lies the elites have attempted to indoctrinate them with. Now more than ever Jewish people (especially younger ones) are coming to Katie Halper’s correct position: “As a Jew, I want to say that Israel does not make me safe. Israel makes me sick, and Israel makes me less safe, because they are committing crimes against humanity in the name of Jews.”
As US imperial power shows its moribund state globally, the forces it once held captive are jumping ship. A new world is coming into being, whether we want to call it ‘multipolarity’ (most common usage), ‘pluripolarity’ (Hugo Chavez’s term), ‘the Afro-Asiatic reconstitution of the world’ (Dr. Monteiro’s term), ‘post-hegemonic world’ (Mexican Economist Oscar Rojas’s term), or the Post-Colombian, Post-1492 world (the term I use in The Purity Fetish). As material conditions decline at unprecedented rates in the imperial core, the base of the last centuries bourgeoisified proletariat (and labor aristocracy) is dying. They are being, as Noah Khrachvik notes, reproletarianized. There is no longer an incentive for working people to look away from their imperialist government’s crimes when it is using OUR tax dollars to fund genocide while we lack healthcare, are in crippling debt, and are struggling to pay the bills at the end of the month. The United Automobile Workers, one of the nation’s largest unions, has been outspoken in its calls for a ceasefire and has connected this internationalism to the struggle of the union against the US’s imperialist war in Vietnam. A crisis of legitimacy, consent, authority (whatever you want to call it) is in the works – both globally and within the US itself. As we say in the US, something has got to give! The weeks where decades happen, as Lenin’s dictum goes, are approaching us in the months and years to come.
The pro-imperialist compatible left is no challenge for the real movement of working and oppressed peoples. Along with the imperialists themselves, they will be left in the dustbins of history.
If I am unable to return and live in freedom in Palestine, my children will return. – Leila Khaled
[1] In a sane society, stooges of imperialism and US power like Alan Dershowitz would find it hard to place their garbage anywhere. But it is too much to ask for sanity from a deeply irrational mode of life.