Israeli mothers demonstrating on Jerusalem’s streets wailed and cried for their loved ones either killed or taken prisoner by Gaza’s Hamas militants last October 7.
That was the first time in years that Israelis had to cry for their loved ones due to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Palestinian mothers and fathers and children and siblings and aunts and uncles and grannies have all been crying for the past 75 years and, even before that, for loved ones lost at the hands of Israeli Jews and, before that, invading European Jews.
Unlike the Israelis, who at least have the comfort of a new ‘national’ territory gained, these successive generations of Palestinians have the additional tragedy of their whole homeland lost and plundered. That continued plundering through successive Israeli military expansions and military occupation of nearly a century is being scrutinised right now by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the top United Nations (UN) semi-judicial body on a plaint by 50 Member States and three UN-affiliated specialised organisations.
Extended tragedy
Alongside this extended tragedy of Palestine, the world’s last European-engendered colonial conflict, a new, European-engendered war, in Europe itself, completed its second year last week with Ukrainians and Russians mourning their loved ones lost. If the war in Palestine is one of a continuous resistance by a long colonised, dispossessed people against a military occupation by a new State sustained by the world’s richest, most powerful, States (some yet colonial powers), the war in Eastern Europe is between two strong, long-established States.
It is a far more equal match between two industrially strong, affluent, States. It is not a coincidence, though, that it is that same set of the world’s richest and most powerful States that are supporting Ukraine, while Russia is alone and economically and politically beleaguered. Russia, however, has a countervailing deterrent of nuclear weaponry.
Why is it not simply a “coincidence” that Ukraine is being equipped and financed by that same, currently world dominant, powers that also equip and finance Israel? The parallel is not only very clear but it is also official in terms of actual bilateral and multilateral alliances.
Israel has benefited from a formal military alliance with the United States of America (USA) from the very inception of the militarily imposed Israeli State in Palestine. Since the 1950s, Israel has been a beneficiary of US military hardware assistance and funding to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. More recently that annual aid package went to the level of a billion dollars on average. Many NATO States, in collaboration with the US, have also been pumping military assistance.
Given its tiny size and population, the Israeli nation is the most foreign subsidised State on Earth and in history. Is this not clear evidence of the geopolitical intent of the Western power bloc of sustaining, for nearly a century, an Europeanised dependent colony in an otherwise non-European part of the world? As argued in these columns previously, the geo-strategic value of such a European political enclave in the Levant region is very obvious – as has long been argued and strenuously promoted by most Western strategists and political leaders, especially political leaderships in the US, UK and Western Europe. Canada has also been actively contributing to this project.
The belated nature of this very last European colonial project, at the very time colonialism was being systematically rolled back in the rest of the world, speaks to the immense importance given by the Western to its Israel project. These columns have also argued that, almost parallel to the fate of the indigenous Palestinians, the main victims of this final European colonisation outside the home continent, has been the fate of the European Ashkenazi Jews themselves.
The European Jews have been seduced by a false promise and now find themselves having to face the hostility of all surrounding States who have been at the receiving end of the western-armed and financed European Zionist aggression. It is they who yet have to host nearly six million Stateless Palestinians.
Meanwhile, an Israeli society, weighed down by this surrounding hostility and filled with paranoia and an encouraged xenophobia, has produced the most corrupt and irrationally ethnic supremacist political leaderships.
The entire society is paranoid to such a degree that up to 80 percent of Israelis still want the war to continue even if all they can conceive of as a ‘solution’ is the totally unviable idea of an erased Arab population and an exclusive Jewish State, leave alone the two-State solution proposed even by allies including the US. This is what we have today as the result of the creation of a purely European Jewish Israel; that fateful, beguiling promise by the UK Government in the early 20th century.
Genocidal operations
Encouragement of European Jewish migration out of Europe long predates, by over a century, the Nazi German genocidal operations against the European Jews and various other ‘unwanted’ humans like the Roma, elderly, disabled and homosexuals. By the 19th century and the triumph of Euro-colonialism, the value of a European stronghold in what may be called the vulnerable ‘under-belly’ of the richest and most powerful continent, continued to have immense attraction.
Thus, the explicit political promise by the UK Government to the Zionist movement’s chief Jewish financiers to help set up an European Jewish colony in Palestine, made in 1917, must be seen in this light of a deliberate colonial project by the Western imperial powers. Initially, in the 1920s and ‘30s, the British colonial authorities in Palestine turned a blind eye to private Jewish colonisation of Palestine – a combination of high-value land purchases from the indigenous Arab population and economic pressures to push other Arabs out of farmland and townships.
Shiploads of Ashkenazi Jews soon raised the European Jew population in Palestine to several thousands by the 1940s. Just as much as it is the western military alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) combined with the European Union (EU) that supports Israel in the continued bloodbath in Palestine, this same power bloc also encouraged Eastern European states to join NATO in an oppositional posture to Russia.
If the Levant is seen as a vulnerable under-belly (why should it be so?), post-Soviet Russia is seen by the EU as a vulnerable doorway for a non-European Eastern Hemisphere. Thus, post- Cold War NATO forgot its assurances of peace to Moscow and continued to build its military alliance as if the Cold War had not ended. The Ukraine war, as many Western analysts themselves quietly admit, is the result of this expansionist policy.
After two years of the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, the reality of NATO’s expansionist policy is laid bare – threadbare.
As one Western media analysis last week points out:- “A week before the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka fell to Russia. It was the latest development in a war that is now entering its third year.”
“Millions of Ukrainians have also been displaced by the conflict, with many former residents of besieged and bombarded cities forced to seek safety in western Ukraine or abroad. Almost 6.5 million people, the vast majority of them women and children, have fled the country, while almost 3.7 million people remain displaced within Ukraine’s borders, according to UN data.”
A report issued last week by the United Nations Human Rights Office puts the number of Ukrainian civilian casualties at almost 10,600 people killed, and nearly 20,000 injured. However, the UN notes that the actual number of casualties is likely significantly higher.
Russia’s economy
Meanwhile, the IMF predicts that Russia’s economy, thanks to the massive re-arming industry prompted by the war, is actually growing by up to 2.5 per cent this year. While this is less than the economic growth that prevailed before the Russian ‘Special Operation’ began against Ukraine in February 2022, it is wholly the opposite of the predictions by Western political leaderships that have egged on Ukraine to defy Moscow.
Thus, the same Western power bloc that maintains a genocidal Israeli State now must also subsidise a battered Ukrainian State and society. In fact, many Third World nations’ entire foreign debt could have been paid off with the Western funds granted to Ukraine so far.
President Joe Biden a few weeks ago, in a political speech in Washington, pointed out that “99 percent” of US military aid to Ukraine and Israel is actually ploughed back into the US economy creating both jobs and surplus value. It is the same for the big NATO military industrial complexes in Europe. Germany is proving the combat efficiency of its latest generation of the advanced Leopard main battle tank in the vast flat battlegrounds of the Ukrainian steppes.
Industry analysts observe that the open land warfare in Ukraine has given a new life to the concept of heavy tanks and even trench warfare. The military drone design and manufacturing industry has grown exponentially in rich and middle income countries on all sides of these two war zones, from Iran to Turkey to Nigeria to the more expensive products churned out by NATO economies. Sweden last week confirmed delivery of its revived jet fighter bomber to Hungary – an aircraft that many thought was now off-market. Hungary said on Friday it had signed a deal to buy four Saab JAS Gripen fighter jets from Sweden, as Budapest finally prepared to approve Stockholm’s bid to join NATO after nearly two years of delays.
But the world today is far too interconnected to simply look at wars from a perspective of economic or even the strategic vantage of individual nations or even power blocs. The death toll in Gaza is expected to top 30,000 over the next few days.
Even if over fifty States have taken Israel to the so-called World ‘Court’, such exercises in verbal and written argument are little more than semi-legal when that ‘Court’ is merely semi-judiciary. After all, the ICJ simply cannot deliver ‘justice’. Its conclusions are just advisory and cannot be enforced.
For example, years ago, the ICJ ruled that the partition wall built by Israel across the Occupied Palestinian West Bank enclave was illegal and was harmful to Palestinians in many ways. Israel is still expanding that wall.
What both these wars are showing up clearly is that the international system has to grow up. The world needs a genuine framework of equality in world governance and also a genuinely justifiable global legal system. That seems to be a long way away with so much destruction and mass violence exploding across the globe.
Certainly, the ongoing catastrophes have given the lie to all claims of any ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ being upheld by those who claim to be earnestly doing so.
