The Palestinian Nightmare Is About To Get Worse

Any peace agreement between Israel and Hamas that does not offer the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank a viable future is paving the way for the Palestinian holocaust in the next few years. That such a peace agreement is highly unlikely means saving the Palestinian people from annihilation as a people is now the responsibility of us all.

What has become crystal clear over the last month is that the US, the UK and other Western governments are unprepared to stand in the way of Israeli aggression towards Palestinians in the occupied territories. It would be nice to think that the western governments were shocked to realise the limit of their policy options, but it is probably less naive to assume that in practice the long term future of the Palestinians has already been sacrificed in the interests of strategy.

Israel is thoroughly intertwined with the Western powers, in a way that no other country in the world is, including the United States. Israel and its friends in the Jewish diaspora are highly involved with the politics of Western countries. The Israeli software industry is critical to the functioning of Western economies. Israeli military equipment companies provide critical components used by Western armed and security forces. Israel is a key part of Western military intelligence systems. Israel is a key part of the financial secrecy jurisdiction system and its financial institutions are closely integrated with the Western banking system. Israel has made itself such a useful friend, it is not an enemy any Western country is willing to make and they know it.

In this sense, the failure of Western governments to stand up for the Palestinians in Gaza as Israel commits what can only rightly be described as genocide, is just a reflection of the power reality in play. The easiest thing now is for the politicians in the US, the UK and in Europe to back whatever peace agreement Hamas and Israel are prepared to accept and just hope for a miracle. That miracle though is highly unlikely.

What is far more likely is that Israel will continue to leave the people of Gaza festering in impossible conditions, but will allow sufficient weapons into Gaza to enable some resistance next time they make a major provocation. This then will be the excuse to force the 1.8 million people of the Gaza strip into refugee camps in the Egyptian Sinai, followed by the total demolition of everything in the Gaza strip and its annexation into Israel. Any reaction in the West Bank will then be used as a justification to push the Palestinians there into Jordan, followed by the annexation of the West Bank. As a humanitarian gesture, sufficient Palestinians as Israel needs as cheap labour will be given Israeli citizenship on condition of complete servility.

When this happens, the West, with its relationships with Israel in their current form, will do absolutely nothing. Concurrently the Islamic State or its successor may have been used to redraw the map of the Middle East, opening the way to a carve up Jordan and the creation of Palestine on the East Bank. Lebanon may become part of Assyria with Iraq shrinking to its Shia south and Kurdistan expanding as an independent state. It is hard to guess the strategies being considered.

As tidy and as tempting as such a solution to current problems may be, what this actually contemplates is a humanitarian disaster, as awful and as dangerous as the grand plans of Nazi Germany. Millions of people have already been displaced and face an uncertain future. The future for the occupied territories described above adds millions more to the regional catastrophe.

At stake here is far more than the lives and welfare of the Palestinians; it is the integrity and values of our civilisation. If cynical expediency is our governing principle as we enter into the most dangerous period of human history, we can all expect to be crushed like ants by the tyranny of great power as we face existential constraints. Between us and that horror there is a thin line of mediocre politicians. If we can force them to stand up for Palestine, we might be able to hold back the growing tyranny. Should we lose this battle, it is uncertain where the forces of compassion will ever regroup.



  

In A Very Modern Genocide

In the standard model genocide, the perpetrators have the tendency to behave guilty, like mugging street gangs. They dress up like baddies and make outrageous statements in a kind of language only they can really understand. They know they are breaking the law, but do it anyway. In a sort of way there is something very honest about this. The people who supply them with weapons do it very secretively and try to pretend they are nothing to do with it. Often genocidal governments don't even bother to justify what they are doing, but deny anything is going on, or create some group of out of control bandits who do the killing for them. Israel sees all that as far too old fashioned.

Israel plans its genocide with the help of international law experts. The law says you should warn the civilians that they are in a place where you are going to kill people, so, no problem, warning phone calls and leaflets are provided. The law says self defence is ok, so you make sure the people you are going to kill have some ineffective weapons and are angry and desperate enough that they will try to use them. The law says force must be proportionate. Well this is a matter of opinion, so you need a busy public relations department that keeps telling everyone that any massacres and wholesale terror is proportionate and in self defence.

All spokesmen have to speak the same way as the people around the world that you are trying to convince. Where the business of the mass killing of children can seem indefensible, phrases that help to distract judgement are carefully prepared and repeated. Specifically it is vital to make out that the people you are killing and terrorising are actually the people terrorising and killing your people. This does not need to be true, just keep saying it is.  Here there is a clear advantage if your people look the same as the people around the world that you are trying to convince that you are the nice guys. Nice clean modern houses, streets, clothes, shops and so on will help western people identify with you. By contrast, western people will not identify with women wearing scarves, standing in rubble and crying to the heavens. They may be upset by the dead bodies of brown children, but they wont identify with them as strongly as with some minor damage to a neighbourhood that looks like somewhere people like them might live.

Buying friends in high places in western democracies is cheap and exceptionally good value for money. Western politicians have two big concerns: raising enough money to get voted in and once voted in being able to maintain the energy supplies necessary to keep their economies going. Here Israel and its friends can do the double wammy. The people in democracies don't like paying for politicians and if they do they tend to want something in return, like having their countries run for the benefit of their own people. This is a serious constraint on a politicians career and can seriously undermine access to lucrative directorships and consultancy work later in life. Israel and its network of friends offers the modern western politician a sound deal: "We arrange some nice big donations to party funds for all electable parties; all we ask is that you sell us weapons, oppose any sanctions against us, stick up for us in public, denounce our enemies and if you want to go the whole hog, give us some of your taxpayers money. In return we will sit in the Middle East as your contract security force, ensuring that those bolshy Arabs never turn off the oil."

Despite very effective PR, genocide is messy and calls for a "ceasefire" are inevitable. Its vital not to be seen to be in a hurry to get all your killing done in one go. Remember, direct killing is only one tool in the genocide tool kit. Terror, starvation, economic destruction, disease, withholding medical supplies, destruction of infrastructure and places of worship all help to undermine the viability of the people you are trying to destroy. To avoid being the bad guy, always attend 'peace talks'. Its not necessary to actually comply with ceasefires: normally some act of everyday viciousness will be enough to get some aggression in return and this will excuse a resumption of killing. If further killing seems likely to be counter-productive, back off for a few years, using other genocide strategies and then give it another go. 

And then there is the matter of the weapons supplies. For any mass killing operation, to be seen as the good guys its very important to have very modern killing equipment. This helps claims of "surgical" killing and perhaps more importantly it makes the killing system look like the killing system of a modern western democracy. Now of course some of this killing equipment must be imported. Don't be secretive; its important that suppliers share in the guilt of war crimes.. However, to protect suppliers from any future litigation, don't get upset if weapons are supplied with a disclaimer: "The contents of this box are supplied on the condition that they will not be used for any illegal purpose". This means that if by some outrageous act of international treachery, Israel's friends turn on them and decide that bullshit is bullshit and that Israel is in fact just a bunch of genocidal lunatics, the shit wont stick to them. Well who ever said genocide was easy.