A year in the Flood
The world since last October
It is twelve months since Palestinian freedom fighters, from where they were shut inside Gaza, launched Operation Al Aqsa Flood and - it is no exaggeration to say - subsequently changed the world.
The success of that guerrilla operation, seizing base after base, left the Israelis, in a vain effort to restore military prestige by distraction, launching the propaganda offensive that then began their horrendous genocide and subsequently destroyed any remaining prestige still attached to the colony in Palestine.
Nobody would any longer dare repeat the "40 beheaded babies" lie, as if plucked straight from the Torah, because it was such a scandalous lie, and by it some hundred thousand Palestinians in Gaza, and many more than 40 babies, have since been slaughtered. The claims of "mass rape", whatever that even means, and even more charged in its function of propaganda, is likewise now receding from use. The apparently almighty Israelis, who a year later have still not put down Hamas's military wing, Al-Qassam, inside Gaza, and stand even less chance against Lebanese resistance groups, principally Hezbollah, have relied upon their atrocity propaganda to distract from these military shortcomings. They have similarly relied upon their genocide policy out of the longstanding, racist and hellbent desire for a "Jewish majority" between the River and the Sea. They relied upon their Hannibal Directive, by which they bombed and killed many Israelis - civilian and military - rather than see them taken prisoner inside Gaza, where they would have enhanced the Palestinian negotiating position in exchange for so many thousands of Palestinians long held without crime or trial in Israeli dungeons.
The world has now seen Israeli methods up close. It has seen its brutality, it has seen its propaganda, and it has also seen its weakness, a status that is precisely the driver for its depraved and horrific killing of civilians, and so too of the healthcare workers who could potentially commit the crime of saving their lives. The lesson, as always, is that Israelis cannot fight wars and they certainly can't win them. The project, now more than ever, resembles only a Jewish-run military base in Palestine; one operated by and for the US, and with this reality stripped bare, all it has left is violence.
Of course so stark a reckoning has manifestations elsewhere. Westerners have been required to confront like never before the meaninglessness of their "democratic" systems, the corruption - moral and otherwise - of their elected representatives, the falsity of the western discourse on "human rights", the hypocrisy of the discourse on "international law" by which western economies, energy policy, and tax revenues were all diverted to facilitate a US war with Russia in Ukraine. Russia, guilty of a fraction of the barbarism of the Israelis, has been struck with sanction a hundredfold in magnitude.
Every certainty it would have been nice to believe in, every illusion that perhaps the western lies of western morality had in them the merest slip of truth, has proven false. Out of the disorientation westerners who aspire to be decent citizens of this world are now suffering there will come a valuable tearing-down and rebuilding of the decrepit systems that (mis)govern and worsen also western lives. The sadness and crime is that the price of our realisation is so many Palestinian and now Lebanese lives, with the Israelis also bombing hard in Yemen, Syria, and to an extent Iraq. The western war machine of - as Iran always puts it - US Great Satan and Israeli Little Satan, has never been more apparent. It goes without saying that to now vote for the Labour Party of the UK, or either party in the US, is to be complicit in genocide. Each of these political cults - it is now very clear - believe in the fast murder of Palestinians and the slow murder of all that we hold dear in our own countries. The threat that something worse awaits (Trump in the US) or that something worse was before (Tories in the UK) is merely a threat-cum-comforter that persuades us to hold close to our captor, a captor clearly capable anyway of all the horrors and moral bankruptcy the other is purported to hold a monopoly over.
There are other dimensions to all of this, naturally. Arabs and Muslims, particularly those of some social standing in western countries, have been made to confront - unavoidably - the lesser value that the systems they were told they were part of, and have contributed to, in the end places on them and their lives. It is hard to have anything that you hold dear, still less something that is part of you, marked and pursued with such violent determination for eradication. That all this is merely a product of the irrational, vicious beast that is colonialism, Christendom, "Judeo-Christian values", and so many other labels thrown at it, might rationally be some comfort, but the guilt of a familiar culprit doesn't alter the fact that western society has now consumed a horror, knowing its complicity in that horror, that no society can consume without beginning to fracture. The Israelis have torn up social contracts, and - at the end of the day - as a Jewish colony, working as junior partner to an empire rooted in right-wing Christendom, it isn't pleasant to speculate what happens when the inevitable falling out of these two temporary allies arrives, just as it has always eventually arrived in history. Still, this now is not a problem for any but the architects of the problem.
What we do know is that the world has changed and will change more. Russia cannot be criticised in the terms that it was. It is hard to depict China as some nefarious threat when US-backed Israeli terrorists push nefarious to new limits and share it for the world on social media. The EU looks every bit as much a global lame duck as does the Biden presidency.
In the field, despite originating in the blockaded refugee camp where they made many of their own weapons, Qassam cannot be put-down by the multibillion Israeli military. As always, there is nothing more powerful than a man defending his home, with that power all the greater where that man has been wronged and bereaved so much as have Palestinians. The fighting force of Hezbollah is all the more formidable, and the Israeli bombing of an entire Beirut residential block to kill its charismatic and widely-loved leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has only galvanised Lebanon in a calm fury that such callous evil could ever have been possible. The crime is all the greater given that Nasrallah was in the vicinity to discuss a ceasefire proposal it transpires the Israelis offered in only a deceitful trap.
To the south and Yemen keeps up its blockade of Red Sea cargo to the Israelis, honouring the international convention of a Responsibility to Protect in the face of crimes against humanity. The US were once said to be able to quickly subjugate and punish Yemen for this belief that it had the right to uphold Yemeni values in Yemeni foreign policy. So far, all we have seen is US naval vessels leaving the region or drones shot down. That all this happens while the US Carolinas are under floodwater, with no money to pay for rescue efforts, only makes things worse for the US in exposing the illegitimacy of not just its empire but its country back home. China and Russia, meanwhile, can take note of the comparative weakness of an expensive military against even low-cost military technology used intelligently. Gulf monarchies — principally the UAE and Saudi but so too all of the other US clients— are faced with a reckoning that they too can potentially be taken down by the determined resistance of populations they've never done anything to genuinely serve.
To some extent, none of this concerns the Israelis. An entity so lacking in legitimacy or cohesion looks always and only to the chaos of a wider war to prolong its time on earth. In any such confrontation, the second pole to the US-Israeli terror axis is ultimately, of course, Iran. Just as Palestine maintains its social cohesion in the face of such horrendous pressure thanks to a deep cultural understanding of their situation, and the attendant emphasis on education, so too has Iran withstood a half century of the most brutal US efforts to topple it thanks to investing in its own capacity to build and defend itself. Iranian science and technology has delivered the missile programme that recently, after endless restraint, shot back at the Israelis. It is presumed that such a show of force subtly indicates that Iran is now (as with the Israelis) an undeclared nuclear power; this being the ultimate insurance policy to backup such conventional missile operations. It is not really relevant, but it is worth saying, given the cheapness of US propaganda, how heavily represented Iranian women are in the fields of education and research that delivered these technological successes; a simple riposte to the But Do They Wear Bikinis? feminism of the west, and evidence of a society far more coherent and ready to meaningfully defend itself should others bring the war to it.
The last year, among all of the above, has also demonstrated the total unreliability of western media to narrate any of this in ways that keep us informed or able to navigate our world. This haemorrhage of trust in public information systems will have consequences further down the line. Among the racism, it is generally obscured that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah - both political parties that, by necessity, also have military wings - are on the front lines fighting also for western democracy. If the Israeli goal is to complete subjugation through genocide, then anything that stops them in this goal becomes intrinsically and positively linked to anyone with either a shared value against genocide, or simply a shared interest in not living under a system that has full subjugation and full genocide as the degree that it is willing and able to extend unto.
At root, westerners will need to unlearn the world they were told they lived, and relearn the one they actually do live. The process will not be easy, but it will be enriching for all who desire a world where they are not complicit in such horrors as we continue to see in Palestine. For now, I say again, the price of that realisation, and the attendant fracture in US and European global totalitarianism, was paid first by a few hundred Palestinian freedom fighters breaking out of Gaza, and ever since in Palestinian blood. Honour their sacrifice, support them in all that you can or are able to. Their freedom, like all freedom, connects back to ours, and if we were shut inside such a horror, we too would want to know that the world had not forsaken us.
It is hard, but we must keep our hearts and our clarity; others endure so much more than we are asked to.
As Palestinians today fear even more brutal reprisals, owing to the cult-like status the Israelis have given what they call just “October 7”, I am giving what I can to a few Palestinians in Gaza. Primarily this is the musician Samih Madhoun, who is raising funds for his extended family. If you are able to then I would encourage similar to help Palestinians continue to live, which is in itself a resistance to both genocide and apartheid.