Israel: a rogue state with many friends

If Israel were a person, they would combine the worst traits of Donald Trump, George W. Bush and a bloviating campus progressive: a pathological liar with a penchant for mass murder who weaponises the politics of identity to shut down political challenges.

Yet arguably worse than Israel is its friendship circle, which repeats every lie as truth and defends, excuses or enables every act of depravity on the part of its obnoxious pal.

In Gaza, more than 41,000 people are confirmed killed, more than 10,000 are missing and presumed dead, and nearly 100,000 have been injured. And now Lebanon is being hammered as well.

The crushing testimony of Dr Mohammed Mustafa in the latest issue of Red Flag, describing the mounting toll of malnutrition and hepatitis A on children, is yet another reminder of the barbarity Israel is inflicting in the territory.

One year into the genocidal offensive, the figures indicate clearly that the entire Gaza Strip is being made uninhabitable.

Most of the 2.2 million residents have now been herded into just 11 percent of the territory—roughly 39 square kilometres.

Ninety-six percent of the population—2.15 million people—are facing crisis levels of hunger or worse. Almost half a million are in what the World Food Programme defines as “catastrophic conditions”.

More than two-thirds of permanent crop fields have been significantly degraded or destroyed.

Two in every three buildings are damaged or destroyed.

Two-thirds of the road network has been damaged, and nearly 1,200 kilometres of roads have been destroyed.

Almost 93 percent of schools have been damaged, and 85 percent need “full reconstruction or major rehabilitation work” to be used again, according to a research group led by the UN and British charity Save the Children.

The United Nations and aid agencies have labelled the situation “beyond catastrophic”. In May, the International Criminal Court prosecutor applied for arrest warrants to try Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in August that blocking humanitarian aid is “justified and moral” even if it wipes out the entire population of Gaza.

Yet not only have Israel’s friends stood by this rogue state, not only have they continued to provide military and diplomatic support (US President Joe Biden denounced the request for arrest warrants as “outrageous”), but they have routinely smeared opponents of genocide as antisemites.

On one level, it’s an indication that Israel and its Western backers have lost the argument. If a position cannot prevail through reason, bring in the censors and try to silence the critics through force.

Yet it exposes more than a failure of the “Enlightenment values” routinely invoked as the reason for the West’s need to prepare for and wage war.

As Israel expands its offensive into Lebanon, predictably with zero threat of sanctions from its friends, the true nature of global capitalism has again been revealed: the “rules-based order” is a fig leaf under which economic competition for profits and state competition for territorial influence regularly spill over into conflicts with few rules—just the exercise of brute force until someone emerges victorious.

“It is no longer the liberty, unity, and state-independence of each nation that is the ideal of capitalism, but the subjugation of millions of members of foreign peoples to the rule of one’s own nation”, Otto Bauer wrote in his 1907 work The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy.

“Each nation is to arm itself to the teeth in order to be able to maintain its oppression of the subjugated peoples at all times and to keep foreign rivals away from its own sphere of exploitation.”

It is the age of criminals parading as saviours: permanent war, unpunished mass murder and permanent hypocrisy.

In the competition for power, Israel today is the pre-eminent rogue state. But it would be nothing without its friends.