Arguments for a military solution to stop Israel’s genocidal war make no sense and ignore the role imperialism has long played in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, explains David Jamieson

As the second anniversary of the genocidal assault on Gaza approaches, the hypocrisies of the political situation are mounting. On one hand, Israeli’s international standing is deteriorating. A UN commission of inquiry has formally accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Western friends including the UK, France and Canada, though dogged in their continued relations with Israel, are threatening to recognise Palestine. The bombing of Qatar has shaken relations with Arab states, who met in Doha to denounce Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: ‘We are in a kind of isolation. We will have to adapt more and more to an economy with autarkic features.’

Yet on the other hand, the horrors continue. Israeli forces have launched a renewed offensive in Gaza City, amid wreckage and starvation. None of these state and transnational bodies, for all their rhetoric, have done much of anything to actually end the suffering of the people of Gaza, let alone stand up to Israel. The juxtaposition of words and deeds could not have been more explicit than at Keir Starmer’s recent meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who days later would be accused by the UN inquiry of inciting ‘the commission of genocide’.

This intensifying contradiction has been grasped by some in the broad Gaza solidarity movement. Partly driven by the urge to expose double standards, and partly by sheer desperation to end human misery and death, some are now calling for military intervention against the genocide. Thus the disastrous concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is mischievously evoked against the Gaza genocide.

The Irish President Michael Higgins has called for a Peace Enforcing Task Force. In the UK, the demand for intervention has been shared by figures such as the independent MP Adnan Hussein, among others. At the Trade Union Congress, Unison general secretary Christina McAnea declared ‘the time for diplomacy is over’, and cited Western military intervention over Kosovo as one model for action.

Understandable though the sentiment behind this idea may be, it is deeply misguided. It fails both as a plan for the practice of the Gaza solidarity movement, and as analysis of the history and political character of the Palestinian struggle.

An independent movement

The persistence of the Gaza solidarity movement over nearly two years is remarkable. It retains its capacity to turn out hundreds of thousands to the streets of London. In towns and cities across Britain, local protests have likewise maintained their strength, and largely decentralised initiatives such as the pots-and-pans protests, high-profile cultural actions and boycott zones continue to develop. The payoff for all this activity should not be underestimated. In the last two years, we have seen massive shifts in opinion on the question of Israel and Palestine, with consequences that will only become fully apparent in the longer term. This is partly down to the extent of the atrocities carried out in Gaza. However, given a disgracefully indulgent media and political elite, the movement has been absolutely essential in shifting the public mood.

Those who are veterans of the anti-war movements of recent decades know that this momentum has been hard to sustain. Protest movements traditionally experience lulls when their demands do not find a ready echo in policy-making circles. But the determination, this time, to keep going despite the early intransigence of the political class was itself a victory. It marks a change in the psychology of anti-war opinion among significant layers, indicating a new independence of attitude. The Gaza solidarity movement already assumes its moral and political superiority over decision makers, and so keeps its own council above that of the governing part of society.

It would be to undermine this hard-won spirit of self-determination to go cap in hand to the rulers of our society for solutions. Those who control the weapons and armies, and possess the legal right to deploy them, are the very architects of this horror. Why should the movement present them as the solution, after two long years in which they have allowed the Israeli state to act with impunity, and continued to arm and defend it?

Plead though we may, our rulers will not come to heel. It is one thing to call a halt: the end of arms sales, of trade or diplomatic relations. Such demands create clear demarcations between rulers and ruled, can be easily understood at a mass level, and force damaging retreats from official policy. It is quite another to attempt to direct foreign and military policy towards war. In many ways, imperialist states enjoy their freest action at the international level. To imagine that we can bridle the wild and violent horse of international militarism for positive ends is to sow illusions of the most hallucinatory kind.

Such a demand, even if heeded, would be subject to manipulation and unintended consequences. Attempts by Western state actors to manage the Israelis into some kind of new situation are inevitable, and steadily emerging. Indeed, in August, French President Emmanuel Macron promoted the idea of sending a UN-mandated mission to Gaza. Whatever the intention behind such calls, their echo in the solidarity movement will only add moral force to elite schemes. It must be understood that, whatever these plans eventually produce, they will not empower the Palestinians. They will be entirely in the interests of the Western powers and their regional allies.

If elite will existed for military intervention, it would be completely unnecessary. If the US commanded Israel to cease its attacks tomorrow, they would stop dead. This has been true on every day of the last two years of the genocide. The call for intervention therefore completely misunderstands the relationships of power in the world system. Israel is not a rogue actor defying the system, wielding inexplicable power over its sponsors. The demand for intervention is stepping into a breach created by under-theorisations of world imperialism in some parts of the Gaza solidarity movement.

The Palestinians and the state system

States have made many false promises to the Palestinians. As far back as 1917, the British Empire pledged the Palestinians national and political rights, even as it promised away their land to the Zionist movement. In the decades that followed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the US sponsored various supposed peace initiatives which have helped their Israeli ally to consolidate power and have left the Palestinians stateless and under attack.

The cynicism shown the Palestinians may be particularly cruel and dishonest, but it is of a piece with the general history of imperialist intrigue. The US, UK and France, among other external powers, have inflicted untold suffering in the Middle East region. They have thwarted democratic movements, sought to control markets and resources, sponsored authoritarian regimes and launched catastrophic wars. Growing numbers understand this makes the world a more dangerous place, and all for the benefit of the thin ruling layers at the top of industry and states. At the centre of this mayhem stands the Palestinian people, whose great crime is to continue to lay claim to the land granted to a key Western ally which has played a strategic role in this bloody drama.

A less well-known story is how regional Arab powers have connived in these betrayals and manipulations. Though presenting themselves as vigorous allies of the Palestinian cause, they have used it time and again to pursue their own strategic projects, and to appease popular sentiment at home, while abandoning the Palestinians in their times of greatest need. The Palestinian nationalist movement itself learned this painful lesson in tragic episodes such as ‘Black September’, the Jordanian civil war of 1970-71 when they were expelled from the country in a bloody crackdown.

We live again in such a time of need. Despite the escalating terror in Gaza, Arab-state words of condemnation have failed to translate into deeds. In fact, recent years have seen increasing engagement between many Arab states and Israel.

Equally false are hopes placed in the US’s peer competitors. For all the talk of multipolarity, and for all that China and Russia have sounded different notes from Israel’s Western allies in the last two years, no serious challenge has been made to the basic architecture of power in the region.

The Palestinians, as a stateless people viewed with contempt at the heights of the international system, can only count their friends among the millions around the world who have rallied to their cause. They include many across the West who see in Palestine not only a just cause in its own right, but a symbol of everything that is wrong with Western foreign policy. This anger has been even more sharply felt by tens of millions in neighbouring countries, who see their own social and political subjugation as bound up with the plight of the Palestinians. These allies, millions of whom have marched and acted around the world in a bid to stop the genocide, are growing in number and are a louder voice than ever. It is to these popular movements that we must continue to look for answers. We must continue to strengthen the movement in order to meet the increasing attacks on the people of Gaza. This requires clear-sightedness about the nature of actors in the international system, no matter how tempting illusions about special mechanisms of salvation might be.

As international competition between the great powers heats up, we will hear more calls for ‘humanitarian’ or ‘democratic’ militarism. Rather than demand the aid of Western states, we should be ramping-up the pressure on them. This includes deepening our commitment to anti-imperialism across the board. It means opposing not only Western policy in the Middle East, but also in Europe against Nato, and in the South Pacific, where the UK and US and Australia are squaring up against China. It means opposing further US aggression in Latin America, and US and European influence in Africa. This is how we sharpen the movement in solidarity with Gaza: not by calling for a reconciliation with our own state and its allies, but by defying them everywhere in more trenchant terms.