Crude Thinking on Israel
After: George Burchett on Crude Thinking, and Patrick Lawrence on Gaza
George Burchett
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In terms of acting, the only viable solution to stopping the genocide that I can see is to mobilize to fight Israel.
One of the biggest limitations of ideas from many within the Western dissident community is that they consistently refrain from referring to anything other than the Nazi genocide as reference for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Because of that, they keep thinking that the only approach is all this is to do to Israel what happened to Nazi criminals who were prosecuted AFTER the Holocaust had happened. Which is of ZERO USE to those being killed. They keep resting their hopes on legal condemnations of Israel.
Fighting Israel doesn't come to their mind as a solution, and I don't know if they could ever bring themselves to push for it.
Genocide is at the heart and founding of United States, Australia, and Canada and more. This is very strong acknowledged by Uhuru (who I volunteer for under their newspaper The Burning Spear). These states were never prosecuted for their bloodbaths. These are vast, vast territories in which hundreds of Indigenous Nations were systematically and brutally attacked. And today these Indigenous Nations don't exist the way they do before settler-colonialism and genocide. Losing everything is a serious prospect.
They also forget the aspect of the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and liberated concentration camps. E.g. Prof Norman Finkelstein, both his parents were in concentration camps. His parents saw the Soviet Union as liberators, and he said that growing up, in his house you couldn't say a bad word about the Soviet Union.
You have to use force.
You cannot plead with genociders. You can't boycott them and hope that they'll stop. You have to fight them otherwise you just will not survive. This is about as crude as it gets.
Yes there could be regional war. But it would be better than this. There's nothing worse right now than other governments standing by with their troops idle while Israel slaughters Palestinians. If there was regional war, at least there would be someone fighting Israel.
As for where to build a movement to mobilise to fight Israel. Firstly, I don't know the Middle East well enough – if it were me, I would have started with asking with my neighbours to help. A long, long time ago. I read articles about why Middle Eastern governments don't help Palestine (even though their people want it and have protested in recent months for their govts to intervene). Various reasons like they're beholden to US interests over resources, etc.
I think that the BDS movement went in the wrong direction. (This brings me to the other limitation, which is the comparison to South Africa. As an Indigenous writer Chelsea Watego said at Melbourne Writer's Festival, South Africa was modelled on Queensland, Australia)
George Burchett is right in his article about Crude Thinking in how the Vietnamese dealt with invaders – they didn't mess around with trying to cancel France and the US and their companies and stop economic flow to them, etc. They just fought them.
The prospect of regional war, which lies at the feet of the U.S. anyway (including bombing of Cambodia), didn't stop the Vietnamese from fighting the French.
Secondly, socialist forces in the world today are nowhere near as potent as a few decades ago. If your neighbours won't help you, then you have to see if someone else is there, with the power and resources that you need. Well the Soviet Union was foremost with military capacity, and the Soviet Union's collapse was engineered by the US which lured it into Afghanistan with a coup in the 80s, and we have bore the brunt of US impunity in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc. since then
Thirdly, if there is no national state that will help you (which is super hard if there isn't since that's where all training and resources for military capacity are focused), you're stuck with either relying on militia groups (Yemen's Houthis, Lebanon's Hezbollah), or trying to get people from across the world with military experience to come (mercenaries). This is no easy feat.
Then there are these aspects:
- For Gazans, it's really, really, really late to be at the stage of barely starting any of these options,
- not to mention that to build the underlying Socialist movements that will support all these will take years of work,
- Not to mention that could we even build viable external military support for Palestine? (Headed by Palestinians of course)
Western dissidents like to imply that they are highly moral and doing something good for Gazans by speaking about the genocide. I don't pretend that I am saving anyone. I don't think we can save the Gazans being killed today. There is no apparatus today standing by ready to save them.
Fighting Israel is the only option, otherwise we will soon completely lose the rest of Palestine.
