Yoav Haifawi
The war
across the Middle East is part of a desperate effort to preserve Western
superiority. All the fighting — whether in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or
Iran — is due to Zionism, and its role of enforcing the crushing force of the
West.
Violence has a paralyzing power.
What is the power of the word in the face of the planes that sow destruction
and death, and the flying ballistic missiles? When I see people around me
paralyzed or going crazy with fear in the face of the destruction that the
Iranian missiles have sown, I cannot help but think of the resilience of the
residents of Gaza, who go through seven circles of hell every day with no
relief in sight.
But the missiles and planes are
the continuation of politics by other means. Many words have been spoken, and
many agreements have been concluded to create and set in motion the instruments
of destruction and death. As far removed from reality as it may seem now, it is
important to speak out today in order to understand the roots of the war and
how we can resist and stop the looming disasters.
In Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon,
Syria, Yemen and Iran – it’s the same war
During the first year of the
“war,” the Israeli public overwhelmingly supported the genocide in Gaza, with
no significant reservations. But in recent months, we have seen doubts and
disillusionment on the part of large sections. Now, when we stand in protest
vigils demanding an end to the killing, the feeling is that most of the public
on the streets of Haifa supports us. More and more Israelis, including
established media outlets, former senior politicians, and generals, have begun
to speak out about the war crimes that Israel is committing. An Israeli and
international consensus has begun to form that the Israeli government
deliberately avoids striving to end the war, and is working to expand and
perpetuate it, for reasons of narrow political and personal interests or out of
messianic extremism.
But suddenly, when Israel
initiated the expansion of the war into an all-out attack on Iran, which will
inevitably bring further death and destruction in both Iran and Israel, we
began to see again the power of violence to take over the human psyche and paralyze
thought. Suddenly, the automatic Israeli consensus stiffened again, with the
media and the public celebrating the spilled Iranian blood. Even a sinking
Europe, which had begun to show remorse in its support of the genocide in Gaza,
became enthusiastic again, with Germany, France, and Britain literally begging
for their share of the pound of flesh and blood.
The root of the evil here, and
the source of all the current wars, is the role that Zionism has assumed as the
crushing force of imperialist control in the Middle East. This is the declared
strategy of the United States: to ensure Israel’s military superiority over any
regional coalition. To secure Israel’s place as a military power that can
strike at anyone who threatens American hegemony, the United States must keep
Israel in a state of constant conflict and constant danger.
This strategy paid off on a
colossal scale for the United States in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967,
when the crushing Israeli victory over three Arab states led, within a few
years, to the collapse of the dreams of independence and Arab socialism of the
Nasserists and the left wing of the Ba’ath Party, and the establishment of
reactionary and submissive dictatorships.
Since then, much water has flowed
through the region’s rivers, hundreds of millions of residents have been added,
there has been progress in education and the economy, and the equation that
relies on the fortress of Jewish Sparta to maintain imperialist supremacy in
the region is becoming less and less sustainable. The United States itself paid
a heavy price for its military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and emerged
from them without any real achievement. Israel failed twice in its wars over
Lebanon, in the Eighteen Years’ War (1982-2000) and in its brief adventure in
the summer of 2006.
Meanwhile, the wider regional
picture has also changed. Instead of pro-Western dictatorships in Turkey and
Iran, populist Islamist governments have risen in the two regional powers,
which are more responsive to public opinion in their countries and tend to
identify with Palestinian suffering and resistance and to denounce Israel’s
aggression.
For a long time, imperialist
politics in the region were based on the principle of “divide and rule.” The
main axis of nurtured conflict among the Muslim population was between Sunnis
and Shiites. The grand idea was, within the framework of the “Abraham Accords,”
to establish a defense alliance under Israeli-American auspices that would
protect the oil kings and emirs of the Arabian Peninsula from the “Iranian
threat” (and from their own people), in exchange for continued effective
American control over the region’s natural resources and economy.
Even as the Palestinians did not
receive massive support that would allow them to exercise their human and
national rights, the Palestinian struggle was and remains a central axis that
challenges the system of imperialist control in the region. The identification
with the Palestinians by both Sunnis and Shiites, and, more recently, the shock
of the unbridled violence perpetrated by Israel since October 7, and the
exposure of the racist Pavlovian instinct of all Western powers in supporting
the genocide in Gaza, all of which have changed and are still changing the map
of the region for the long term.
Meanwhile, Israel has become
embroiled in war on many fronts, struggling to achieve a decisive victory and
reap the fruits of its military superiority. In Six Days in 1967, Israel
militarily defeated three Arab countries and occupied vast areas. Now, for more
than 600 days, it has been unable to defeat Palestinian resistance to the
occupation of the Gaza Strip, which had been under a suffocating siege for many
years before the current genocidal war.
The only arena in which Israel
has achieved a military and political victory is its struggle against Hezbollah
in Lebanon, due to a combination of tactical failures on the part of Hezbollah
and the fact that, as a representative of the oppressed Shiite minority, it had
no full Lebanese legitimacy to intervene in the war. However, in Lebanon too,
Israel’s insistence on continuing to hold occupied territory within Lebanon,
with constant offensive military activity all over the country, keeps this
front in the context of a violent conflict that has not ended and with no end
in sight.
In Yemen, the government that
came to power in Sanaa on the waves of the Arab Spring, and survived an all-out
war by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Emirates, continues to try and pressure an
end to the attack on Gaza through a naval blockade and repeated attacks. Even
before the conflict with Israel, Yemen was the poorest country in the region
and is still torn by civil war. Despite its limited capabilities, repeated
attacks by a coalition of Western countries led by the United States and
Israeli attacks on economic infrastructure have failed to change Yemen’s
position.
The expansion of the war into
Syria after the fall of the Assad regime adds another layer to the logic of the
conflict. The new Syrian regime, which emerged after 14 years of revolution and
civil war at the cost of about a million lives and immense destruction,
declared from the moment it was established that it was committed to the 1974
armistice agreements and that it did not want conflicts with any neighboring
country. Despite this, and despite the military erosion of the multi-front war,
Israel decided to open another front against Syria, conquering additional
territories (in addition to the Syrian Golan Heights captured in 1967), bombing
all over Syria, and threatening the new regime. This completely exposed the
logic of the “villa in the jungle”: in order for the villa to remain a villa,
it must ensure that the jungle remains a jungle, and any attempt to build a
normal society and state in the region is an existential threat to it.
The attack on Iran took this
logic a step further. Israeli strategic superiority must be guaranteed not only
against four hundred million Arabs but also against all other countries of the
region. The Israeli method of killing Iranian scientists, which did not begin
with the latest attack, brutally presents the concept of how the colonialist
“local branch of Western culture” will be able to maintain its technological
superiority.
On the Nuclear Question
As a university student, I took a
course on “International Relations After World War II,” that is, the Cold War
between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. The lecturer always talked
about how Western leaders planned to confront “The Soviet Threat.” In
“Operation Unthinkable,” which was to begin as early as July 1945, Churchill
planned to mobilize the surrendered Wehrmacht troops to attack the Soviet Union
and drop (American) atomic bombs on Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kiev. In 1949, the
US planned a larger operation (“Operation Dropshot“) that involved the use of
300 atomic bombs and the destruction of 100 cities and towns in the Soviet
Union.
In 1949, the Soviet Union
conducted its first nuclear weapons test, which cooled America’s enthusiasm for
a direct confrontation with it. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962,
after the Soviet Union had proven that it could create a real nuclear threat to
the U.S., talks began between the parties, and the Cold War gradually moved
into the “détente” phase.
In my naivete, I asked the
lecturer: According to what you taught us, as long as nuclear weapons were only
in the hands of the West, we were on the verge of a nuclear war. Only when a
“balance of terror” was created did the tension subside. How does this fit in
with saying that the problem was “The Soviet Threat”? It seems the opposite is
true…
He replied that from the
perspective of the sequence of events, what I said made sense, but “no one in
political science would agree” with my conclusion…
As far as is known (“according to
foreign sources”), Israel possesses a large number of nuclear weapons, which
the Western powers helped it develop. To this day, they defend Israel’s “right”
to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in all international forums.
Israeli politicians and various experts have said that Israel has already
considered using nuclear weapons against Arab countries several times, in
moments of crisis. The climax came during the latest attack on Gaza, when
lunatic extremist politicians fantasized about using an atomic bomb to
annihilate Gaza as “revenge.” And, please, don’t tell me that the lunatic
extremist right is far from the center of decision-making in Israel. As long as
nuclear weapons are in the hands of one side in the region, there is a
temptation to use them, thus creating an existential threat to the residents of
the entire region. Clearly, the best situation is to have the entire region
free of nuclear weapons. But history has proven that a nuclear balance of terror
can also guarantee that nobody uses these weapons.
The West’s position on the
Iranian nuclear issue is, on a regional scale, a repetition of its position on
the denial of legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance. No matter how much
Israel occupies and oppresses Palestinians, robs their land, destroys their
homes, and kills them. Israel always “has the right to self-defense” and the
Palestinian who defends his rights is always the “terrorist”. The ultimate way
to ensure Israel’s “strategic superiority” in the region is to allow it, in a
“time of need,” to wipe out millions of the inhabitants of the region using
atomic weapons. This is the essence of the “Western Values” that they claim to
stand for.
The Gulf states, which grovel to
the rulers of the United States and Europe, thought they were buying their
favor, so that they would stop the massacre in Gaza. They also hoped to prevent
the war with Iran, which endangers the security of all the countries in the
region. Instead, surprise, surprise, it turns out that the money they gave to
the U.S. continues to fund the genocide against Palestinians and the bombings
of Lebanon and Syria. Furthermore, they are effectively paying the United
States for the privilege of being on the receiving end of a future nuclear
annihilation.
Where are we going from here?
As the saying goes: It is
difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
It is difficult to know what will
happen, but there are many things that are unlikely not to happen. At the
beginning of the current “war” in Gaza, the American administration’s
emissaries used to ask Netanyahu what were his plans for “the day after.” What
is your end game?
To this day, they have not
received an answer, and this is not by chance. Israel lives from war to war and
is unable to imagine a different reality, let alone take action to create it.
The historical logic was that Israel attacks in order to impose the American
“day after” on the Arabs. For this equation to hold, there should be an
American administration that is capable and willing to stop Israel’s aggression
and force concessions on it. In the meantime, the Americans have fallen in love
with Israel’s aggression. Even more importantly, the United States really has
nothing to offer the region these days.
We are living at the end of “the
American era.” Today, China is the main economic partner for trade and
development for the countries of the region, as well as elsewhere. The United
States still retains its military superiority, at the price of huge military
investment. To benefit from this superiority, it is inclined to militarize
international politics, as is evident in Ukraine and East Asia, just like in
our region. Israel’s military and political power is a reflection of American
superiority.
The U.S. military advantage is
eroding as it loses its economic and technological leadership. When it uses
military force to try to preserve or restore its world hegemony, it is not
advancing itself but trying to push others backward. Humanity is paying an
awful cost, but the U.S. decline is also accelerating.
The current war in the Middle
East is part of a desperate effort to preserve the remnants of colonialism and
Western superiority over the peoples of the Third World. The Palestinian people
are paying a terrible, unbearable price for this. But the future will not be
determined by the politicians of the West or the corrupt rulers of the region
who grovel to them, but by the peoples who will stand up for their right to
determine their own destiny.
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