The West could stop the civilian massacre in Rafah. It won’t

It’s always something of an indulgence to wonder what a politician is really thinking. But it’s hard to avoid with the latest round of very mild breast-beating and coughed warnings by Western powers to Israel about the civilian massacre in Rafah, at the southern end of Gaza, which has just commenced in earnest. Breast-beating? Breast-light-tapping is more like it. Breast-morse-code perhaps.  

Thus the United States and the United Nations have “intensified their warnings” to Israel about attacking Rafah when the 1-1.4 million people crammed into it have nowhere to go. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, determined to go one better/worse, has couched it in terms of Israel’s interests:

Israel now must exercise special care in relation to these civilians. Not doing so would have devastating consequences for those civilians and cause serious harm to Israel’s own interests. 

The same report suggests that US President Joe Biden no longer views Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu as a “productive partner”. And in Berlin, the Foreign Ministry, having provided months of moral licence to Israeli mass murder, now notes that:

Israel must clearly explain where and how these people (in Rafah) can find protection, find effective protection … people need to be better and more effectively protected and better and more effectively cared for.

Who says Germans can’t do comedy? 

The wonder at what the real motives of such statements are comes because it seems impossible to me that anyone could be fooled by such remarks — or that Labor and others could possibly believe that anyone could be fooled. 

That leads to the sense that they are somewhat disturbed by Israel’s refusal to let up, with half the Gaza population cornered in a death zone. But that of course is most likely the point of the exercise. To rehumanise DJ Albo and Penny and all, and remove some of the sense that they are clenching their jaws, consigning the Palestinians to hell, out of fear that the Jewish/Zionist peak bodies, lobbyists and players will fund a Labor right internal coup now, and/or swing serious money behind the Coalition in 2025.

Yet this whole thing relies on a fiction: Israel pretends it is independent now, free-standing, and can and will do what it likes, no matter what the hand-wringing hypocritical goyim say. And the West conspires in that pretence, so that it can give the impression of standing at the sidelines and urging caution and basic morals on the mad-dog state. 

The truth is, Israel has never been independent, and it isn’t now. The current fascistic swagger seen in its government and — via TikTok and Instagram — its occupying soldiers would stop immediately if by some fluke the world had got a US president willing to cut off military aid, and especially the supply of materiel. Other countries, including our own, would stop, or slow, the operation pretty quickly, simply by denying the supply of whatever parts and components Israel is relying on in its operations on multiple fronts. 

None of them will do this, because of the other side of the myth. Israel’s dependency is not that of a state wanting to be independent. It is of a state that still serves as a Middle East base for the West, a reliable backstop should America’s more recent Arab allies prove less reliable than they promised to be.

This has been handily proven by the collapse of the imminent Israel-Saudi Arabia agreement, which the October 7 Hamas raid was presumably designed to first put on hold, and then cancel altogether. This has now occurred, with the Saudis announcing that no further agreements will be pursued that do not include recognition of a Palestinian state. 

Israel’s leaders, soldiers, citizens and diaspora supporters like to draw on the myth of plucky little Israel/Zionism, standing alone against the world, counting the decades of US funding — hundreds of billions of dollars which allowed Israel to establish its hi-tech export sectors — as no more than a recent “helping hand”. 

The truth is that Zionism has always been a client movement, relying on the interests of larger powers to use it as a forward representative of their interests. Founded in the cafes of fin-de-dix-neuvieme-siecle Vienna, Zionism wandered in the wilderness until 1917, when the Balfour Declaration committed to a Zionist state in the Middle East, once the war was concluded and the Ottoman Empire was dismantled.

The British had in mind a client statelet, to match the client statelet of Lebanon that France would get. But the idea couldn’t be sold to Arab leaders, and so the British moved back and forth between backing the Jewish and Arab communities. 

By the late 1930s, radical Zionist groups had concluded that the British were the enemy, and sought to become clients of anyone else — pre-WWII France, then Vichy France, and then Nazi Germany — who would give them arms, to be purchased with money raised in the US, chiefly by the Jewish mafia (an actual mafia, not the New York Review of Books).

It was De Gaulle’s Free French who were willing to start a relationship. After they took over French Syria from the Vichy regime, they were already organising against their true enemy — the British — to carve up a post-WWII world. In this world, it was assumed, the European empires would continue for decades and decades, and the US would return to isolationism. 

When WWII did end, French arms flowed plentifully, and it was with these, and inflowing money, that the Zionist militias — no more than 5,000 strong initially — were able to rapidly build an army and grab territory to create statehood. They did so via the cruel and brutal terrorising of Arab civilians in 1948, including “Plan D”, the murder, torture and rape of tens of thousands, and the looting of hundreds of thousands, which put hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs on the road, many of them ending up on the Gaza Strip, where their descendants remain penned in to this day. 

The French continued their support of Israel in the post-WWII decade, as the empires tried to hang on to their possessions. They gave Israel the nuclear technology to create its Dimona reactor, which ultimately gave it its nuclear arms. But by 1956, with Nasser coming to power in Egypt, the US knew it had to get into the game. As France withdrew after the Suez fiasco, the US expanded. After the 1967 war, the US commitment became total, open-ended and wholly and explicitly identified.

The destruction of Gaza, and its latest chapter, with mass murder in Rafah, is simply the continuation of Plan D, its decades-delayed completion, in which the Palestinians are pushed over the line into the Sinai and Egyptian control, never to be allowed to return. The US could stop this, and other Western powers could withdraw from supporting it. All of which makes the concern dance of Wong et al all the more sickening.

What are your thoughts on Australia’s reaction to the Israel-Gaza war? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.