Colonial war, guerrilla war, and anti-war
[Shorter post today - just some thoughts to help make sense of the strategies at play and our room for maneuver after the protests this weekend.]
A month into the process we have a clearer sense of the strategy of Israel/US (and accessories) and the Palestinian Resistance (and allies).
Israel/US follow the colonial template. In colonial wars there is always some confrontation with the Indigenous fighters on the battlefield, but from the very first days of the United States, described in John Grenier’s book The First Way of War, through to the Israelis attacking Gaza today, the template is not the von Clauswitz’s “politics by other means” envisioned by political scientists and realists - of powers clashing on the battlefield to obtain a better settlement than they could without a war.
The colonial template is the destruction of the Indigenous peoples’ means of survival: destruction of their food supplies, of farmers’ fields, of fruit trees, of fishing boats, of shelters. It is not the destruction of the opposing army in the field but the massacre of noncombatants, especially children. Colonial warfare is genocidal. And by attempting to short-circuit the military struggle by directly attacking noncombatants and total war on society to try to compel the armed Indigenous forces to surrender, colonial warfare is terrorism.
The Palestinian Resistance (referred to as “Hamas”) is following the guerrilla war template. The guerrilla knows that the imperialist enemy has better equipment and greater firepower, that many more Indigenous people will die than the colonial power’s soldiers, but that imperialists, in their racism, value their lives much more than many multiples of Indigenous people and that colonial armies are therefore casualty-averse. That means that analysis of how, e.g., Israel has “cut the Strip in half”, “surrounded Gaza”, or showing maps – cannot tell the whole story of a guerrilla war. From the guerrilla perspective, these are the inevitable opening moves in the people’s war.
There is no way for the guerrillas to get into contact with the Israeli military unless the Israelis make such moves first. As for what these contacts have looked like, there are videos of Palestinian guerrillas attacking tanks from point-blank range.
So the Resistance depends on fighting on the ground to raise the cost of aggression beyond what is bearable for Israel’s comparatively privileged society (per capita income $53K, compared to Gaza’s pre-war $3K).
Israel depends on vaporizing non-combatants through direct bombing killing disproportionately children, specific attacks on agriculture, fishing, water, and electricity infrastructure to try to induce mass starvation and dehydration in the hope that the Resistance it is so broken by terror that it cannot continue.
For those of us who are anti-genocide, the race against time is on. We have nothing to do with the military struggle but the unarmed around the world have to do our best for the unarmed in Palestine.
The protests on November 4 showed that the anti-genocide bloc is the majority even in Western countries, despite all the smears and racist attempts to intimidate everyone - these coming from the leadership of all political parties and major media, and intensifying after the demonstrations of the scale of anti-genocide sentiment. “When,” comedian Amanda Seales wrote, “have you seen so many people in the streets for some wrong shit?”
If majority opinion alone could do the job, the ceasefire would have happened and the siege would be broken already. But whether they call themselves “democracies” or not, our political systems are designed specifically to deny the will of the majority.
Nonetheless, as the majorities, we still retain some ability to communicate with one another and we can still exert some influence over how this goes. Whatever we can do to stop the genocide, we have to do. On that, more soon.
Resource to follow the war - Updates on Electronic Intifada
My book about Gaza is called Siegebreakers
you rock, justin
The elites of the EU, of the Arab Nations, of nearly all Muslim Nations, are either directly owned by the USA and/or Wall Street, or like Syria, are placed in a headlock by the permanent state/deep state so that they can do little to nothing It must irk Assad's administration to the max to be pressured to help Hamas when Hamas not so long ago was leading the massacres in Syria on the direction of USA and Israel. Much the Same for Hezbollah, who had to fight against Hamas in Lebanon. Maybe the Arab Street is upset, but no one in the elites has any interest in helping a proxy of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is/was a USA asset. They already have enough trouble managing the USA's interference.