They say United States Special Forces commandos are already inside Gaza’s concrete combat tunnels – the ultimate FIBUA zone, beneath the urban dust. That acronym for ‘Fighting in Built-Up Areas’, was invented by the British Army, but it is American warriors who have practised it most all over the world from Hue to Panama to Beirut to Fallujah.
Who knows if the GIs are there? These brave young, relatively educated, disciplined soldiers seem to be all over Africa, West Asia except Iran, and much of the rest of the world. And the compressed urban battlefield the Western powers created in Israel may likely be where the worst combat lessons are to be learnt.
Global audience
As an ever-growing global audience for the mounting conflict in Palestine-Israel watches, warfare is exploding in the tiny, but dense, concrete jungle that is the Gaza Strip. The Strip is roughly half the size of Colombo District but has a similar population and, has suffered a blockade of essential food and medical supplies and water and electricity supplies imposed by Israel since 2007.
Hamas, the political and military movement that has ruled Gaza since it was first elected to power a decade ago, has circulated photos of its tunnel fortifications.
The original Hamas offensive operation on October 7 was fully webcast by Hamas and other Gazan agencies as well as ordinary Gazan onlookers. The world community has gotten used to instant webcasts – fully live and localised – for over the two decades.
NATO’s ‘shock and awe’ offensives in the Persian Gulf, ostensibly against Iraq but more to make permanent a US military presence in West Asia, gave world audiences their first taste of the terror of great power warfare. Certainly, ‘shocking’ were those bomber raids that, in a few hours, dumped more bombs on a smaller area (Iraq) than that dropped during the several years of Allied bombing of Nazi Germany.
But whether this horrific destruction and human slaughter and, the display of this massive violence through mass media, actually caused ‘awe’ is doubtful. Surely most humans would recoil not with ‘awe’ but sheer terror at the violence and, distaste at its crass display by the media.
Successive generations have grown up and now govern (or misgovern) their societies in an ambience of global life constantly punctuated by systematic military violence, both from guerilla operations by anti state insurgents or ideological fanatics as well as from the state military.
It is important that society is firmly aware of the broader ecology of violent, large scale, politics and social upheaval, that now surrounds human life. Diasporas are bringing back some social and political lessons learnt from their migrations. Migrant experience in the worst flashpoint of all, West Asia, is now a powerful input to Sri Lanka’s own society.
Geopolitics today are not merely guided by strategic and tactical manipulations of a few great powers, especially the dominant club of great powers grouped in the NATO-EU bloc, led by outgoing superpower USA. Like it or not, it is this club that, since World War II, has meted out the greatest ever military destruction humanity has experienced, be it nuclear bombing or ethnic Holocaust in World War 2, or, carpet bombing in Vietnam or Chechnya, or, the double invasions of Iraq most recently.
The chaos caused by Western intervention in Libya and Syria still continues with partially concomitant political instability spreading south of the Sahara, too.
Today’s moment of global shock and terror focuses on possibly the smallest ever theatre of intensive conventional and unconventional warfare. The October 7 strike is the most intensive these puny Gazan fighting units could achieve.
The Gazan attack lasted less than a day, involved explosive firepower of several tons at most (not kilotons) and deployed less than 2,000 fighters and a few thousand small, erratic, rocket missiles. In conventional military terms this is no more than a minor ‘probing attack’ (breaking out of frontlines) or ‘skirmish’.
Of course, there was carnage. In war, in real combat there are actually no ‘rules’ of engagement. There is only field tactics and theatre strategy; of minor and major operations. The output, clinically speaking, is maximum or optimum physical destruction, social and infrastructural dislocation and community trauma and disarray.
Whether a whole city population (e.g. Nagasaki) is wiped out (or, mass contaminated) in seconds, all its humans and livestock, or, whether babies and elders are slaughtered in ‘random fire’ (a term used by lawyers), or in gas chambers, or in maniacal stabbings, these are all the heartless script of war or organised, political violence.
Often, the impact of the cruelties is felt by the intended victims first: be it random fire to suppress civil protest or death squad abductions or mass detentions and show trials. How many times in human history have such oppressed populations (starting with the mythical Exodus) broken out in fury and then invaded and pillaged in searches for a new sanctuary?
If not the mythical Exodus, and its supposedly divinely authorised genocide, how about the berserker warfare of the Norse people fleeing population competition in the confines of Scandinavia?
Israel is literally now the frontline of the Western powers against the Palestinians and the millions of mostly subject populations of many states across the world who are in empathy with the victims of colonialism. It is important to understand that the Israelis, too, are victims of this colonial exercise by the Western colonial powers.
How is it that the Western powers are in the battle?
When have the Western powers, originating from the Western Colonial powers of the 19th Century, not been in the battle over Palestine? The Lord Balfour Treaty initiated by the UK in 1917 was a deal between the Western Jewish community groups unified by the transnational Zionist movement and the UK Government.
Without an iota of formal consultation with the indigenous Palestinian population which it then ruled as a British colony, London promised to create a “homeland” for the European Jews purely on the basis of the socio-political pressure created in European society by these well financed Jewish upper class lobbies.
Economic hardships
In line with this deal, during the economic hardships of the 1930s, the colonial British government actively facilitated the private migrations of European Jews to Palestine. It was not the rich Jewish Zionists who fled Europe, but the impoverished Jewish working classes who sought a new life much like impoverished Europeans did in the Wild West.
Britain, at the time, the world’s most powerful colonial empire, was simply doing what it did best: settler colonialism. By the 1940s, there were western-armed and facilitated actual insurgent gangs of European Jews operating in Palestine, deliberately terrorising indigenous Palestinians in order to displace them from the lucrative coastal areas and inland valleys.
The ‘peace deal’ that gave a whole new ‘state’ of Israel to the migrating European Jews in 1948 was a deal signed by London with the neighbouring states of Syria, Egypt and Jordan. No Palestinian political movement was allowed to emerge in an organised way.
And ever since, the state of Israel has continued to expand at the cost of violence and displacement suffered by the Palestinian communities. Israel has done so, with the open political support and military arming by the Western powers. The US has used its veto in the UN Security Council in defence of Israel more than in relation to any other issue.
The world’s richest and biggest military powers are now lined up behind Israel. What must be noted is that there is no indication whatsoever of any specific military actions that the West may take in support of Israel. While actual battle plans are not made public, there is no explicit promise of military action by NATO or the EU or even the US itself.
That single foray against Israeli frontlines by Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants has been carried with absolutely deadly intent. Obviously cruel, deliberate, intent. That is the calculation of any deliberate armed hostility. The Israelis and the Western backers mirror a similar deliberate intent.
While the actions are intentionally cruel, the scale of the actions or the intensity of the actions by any one side decides the outcome of the combat. However, these cruel calculations are not solely military actions. The political war, the ‘armed propaganda’ in terms of the calculated communicational effects of the military actions, are also factors.
October 7 meted out a kind of ‘shock and awe/terror’ on a shoe-string budget with almost makeshift weapons. The political ramifications of such strikes are such as to create changes in the geopolitical dynamics that no carrier task forces nor missile submarines can balance out.
Long term warfare is ultimately asymmetrical. Rarely are political objectives won purely on actual battlefields with conventional military tools.
Despite their bravery and far superior military force, the Israeli forces invading Lebanon in the 1980s-90s against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation units based there soon learnt the limits to mere firepower against the ultimate in human concentration: the city.
Urban warfare has been fine tuned in West Asia, especially the Levant yet under European intervention, by the struggling, battered people’s of the region.
The Israelis have learned that Merkava tanks are far too large and clumsy for FIBUA. Instead, the Israeli infantry assault rifle has a new version: a Galil model that has a bent muzzle that can fire around a street corner or house wall. The Israelis were also the first to use micro drones for surveillance purposes, spying on Palestinian resistance units deep inside Palestinian neighbourhoods.
Even if American or other Western troops do not tread the dust in the concrete jungles of Gaza, Israel knows full well the rigours of such warfare.
The slight slowing down of the Israeli offensive momentum indicates a hesitation on the part of the Likud government in Occupied Jerusalem. They know the high cost of such combat. They are also realising the geopolitical trap that any seriously devastating operation will place them in.
It is bad enough that the Palestinians and Arab regimes all refused to meet US President Joe Biden last week. It is the first time ever that lesser states have rebuffed a superpower.
Already the Gazan attack has borne some geopolitical fruit. No carrier task forces can so simply achieve such a political outcome, even if tactical.
It remains to be seen how much domestic politics will compel Israel along the tragic path that its neo-colonial patrons have placed it: the electoral fantasy of a supreme Zion. When will its electorate learn that fantasy cannot ensure real-life security and prosperity?
