The spilling of Palestinian blood in Gaza Strip as Israeli bombardment continues (now on its 8th day) demonstrates that this is a one-sided war.
Of course, George Bush blames it on the “terrorist organization” Hamas because, as everybody knows, he is a big fat stupid fly. Meanhwile, Obama's excuse for his silence is the “fact” that he is not yet president. As though one needs the highest position on earth to take a stand against human slaughter. President Gloria Arroyo must have heard of this yet another barbaric attack on human rights and is by now probably guessing how to milk big bucks from what she probably imagines as one of 2009's opening salvo.
The historian Khaled Hroub claims that the Hamas is hardly an organization that has a “strong hold” on Gaza Strip. Rather, it is a deeply rooted ideology among the Palestinians in and of the Gaza Strip. But what we can know for sure is this: That at stake in this attack on Gaza is Israel's interest of turning every space into a West Bank territory where household demolitions have become a normalized feature of everyday life. And the only reason why people from the West Bank have not for the past years been the subjects of Israeli air strikes is because they are “well behaved.” No screwy Hamas to complain nor to challenge Israeli occupation.
So far, we have heard three things from the Israeli Government: 1) that it demands permanent peace in Gaza; 2)that it did not start the fire; 3)that no significant invasion is under way.
But the ferocity of the strikes, the death toll (423 in the past 8 days and 10 more in the past hour), that thick cloud of white smoke that has drenched the northern part of Gaza made apparent yet hyperreal by television, the absolute terror of the Palestinians who barely survive as we speak should all lead us to the conclusion that Israel is not merely exercising its “right to defend itself.”
In one of his more forceful essays (Adrift in Similarity*), Edward Said speaks of an article that “was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about the “new phase” in world politics after the end of the cold war...(119:2004).” Samuel Huntington (and may he rest in peace despite himself) was banking on a very slick notion of “civilization identity and the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations, of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention” (Said, 2004:119). After an extended discussion that projects civilization and identity in the most static and essentialist way possible, Huntington argues that the “challenge for Western-policy makers...is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all others, Islam in particular (2004:120).”
The U.S-backed Israeli war on Palestine is none other but the politics of the so-called post-political era of global capitalism. This era is by no means post-political. It is writ with the most hostile of conflicts that are pushed to their extremes by war investors such as Bush and his ilk, and their wager for a thriving military industrial complex through military keynesianism. This context belies the slogan “war solves nothing” because it does save the imperialist economy from total breakdown by creating a particular enemy-terrorist groups-and by subsequently vowing to annihilate them in an atrocious parade of war artillery. Indeed, not only the terrible fraud that was Oslo and Arafat are to be lambasted during these times of stressful spectatorship.
Contrary to its claim as a war against terror,-- one that targets particular terrorist groups--this imperialist-led killing is patently racist and colonial. The sustained shelling in Gaza Strip even shows that it cannot target its true enemy, “the terrorists.” There is nothing surgical about the strikes that have affected the non-Jewish general population, 80% of whom are by now incapable of defending themselves; 250,000 of whom are left in the dark on account of busted electrical connection; and 500 people have just turned into refugees who mourn the death of their loved ones as they confront the terror of their own survival.
Tonight as I blog away, food shortage is all over Gaza Strip. And as I respectfully urge all of you to join the indignation protest on Tuesday at the Embassy of Israel in the district of acceptable greed called Makati, the Palestinians of the Strip have nowhere to go since Gaza has been sealed off on all three sides by the Israeli army. It's a state of war for the people of Gaza. Yet, it is not a war between two equal armies. This leaves us with no reason not to fight on their side.
*in From Oslo to Iraq And the Road Map (2004). New York: Pantheon Books.
