World Socialist Web Site – January 19, 2024

Israel continues Gaza onslaught and strikes on southern Lebanon

By Jordan Shilton

Israel’s savage bombardment of Gaza continued Thursday as a series of strikes on residential buildings in the southernmost city of Rafah and elsewhere throughout the enclave killed dozens of civilians. Gaza’s Health Ministry reported 170 deaths and well over 300 injuries in 24 hours between Wednesday and Thursday.

The single bloodiest strike was on a three-floor residential building in Rafah, killing 16 people. One of the families living at the site had relocated three times since Israel’s genocidal onslaught began on October 7, according to Al-Jazeera. In addition to the air strikes, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) reported that ground troops are operating further south in the Gaza Strip than ever since the genocide began.

The humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate, with reports Thursday that hepatitis C is spreading among children in Rafah. The city’s population, which was 300,000 prior to Israel’s onslaught, has exploded four-fold to 1.2 million. Tens of thousands of people are crammed into tents and under makeshift plastic sheeting amid heavy rain and the winter cold.

At a press briefing Thursday, UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese accused Israel of “a number of things that are highly illegal, highly unlawful.” She commented, “What has happened is over 100 days of relentless bombing—the first two weeks using 6,000 bombs per week, bombs of 2,000 pounds, in highly crowded areas.”

Most Palestinians are now dying not only from the bombs, but “because there is not sufficient infrastructure to cure them from the wounds.” She added, “The number of kids who get amputated every day is shocking, one or two limbs. During the first two months of this (war) 1,000 kids were amputated without anaesthesia. It is a monstrosity.”

According to Sean Casey, a health emergency officer for the World Health Organisation, Gaza’s health care network is “collapsing.” After a five-week investigation throughout the enclave, he noted at a Wednesday press conference that only 15 of Gaza’s pre-war 36 hospitals are functioning to some extent. Many of these facilities, however, have become extended refugee camps with a handful of medical staff struggling to treat injuries with few supplies.

Describing the scene at Al-Ahli Hospital in northern Gaza, which was bombed by Israel in October, killing hundreds, he said, “I saw patients who were lying on church pews, basically waiting to die, in a hospital that had no fuel, no power, no water, very little in the way of medical supplies and only a handful of staff remaining to take care of them.”

Similar accounts came from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) staff working at the Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where conditions have rapidly deteriorated in the recent period. “There are populations sheltering in the hospital because they don’t feel safe anywhere else. And when that population no longer feels safe in the hospital, it’s an indicator for us that the situation for the hospital is becoming untenable,” said MSF’s Amber Alayyan.

“You’ve got patients who are being operated on the floor,” she continued. “You’ve got patients who are sleeping on the floor. You have staff who are sleeping on the floor because they prefer to sleep in the hospital than to take the risk of going back and forth to their homes, which may or may not still exist.”

On Wednesday, the IDF blew up the main campus of Israa University south of Gaza City, the last remaining university in the enclave. A report released by Hamas Thursday stated that Israel has destroyed 390 educational institutions since October 7. It described this barbarism as an example of “the genocide and ethnic cleansing” of Gaza.

The unconditional backing given by US imperialism to the fascistic Netanyahu government ensures that Israel can carry out these war crimes and many others with impunity. The 2,000-pound bombs denounced by Albanese in her remarks have been supplied without interruption by Washington since the outset of Israel’s onslaught. American imperialism has also systematically prepared for a wider regional war aimed at Iran, which it is now realising through the bombardment of Houthi targets in Yemen in alliance with Britain.

Late Thursday, the Biden administration reported a fifth round of strikes on the Iranian-backed movement, which has launched missiles against commercial shipping in the Red Sea in support of the Palestinians. The real reason for Washington and London’s war is to consolidate American imperialist hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East against its rivals.

The European imperialist powers, led by Germany, are preparing their own naval operation to the region to join the conflict. The war in the Middle East is one front in a rapidly developing redivision of the world between the imperialist powers, who are determined to seize markets, raw materials, and geopolitical influence from their competitors, above all China and Russia.

Emboldened by the support from the imperialist powers, Netanyahu’s fascistic government is ever more openly declaring its genocidal intentions. At a press conference Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made one of his most explicit statements to date in favour of Israel’s permanent responsibility for security over Gaza and the West Bank, and opposition to a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu said that a “vital condition” for any post-war arrangement was Israel maintaining “security control” over all territory west of the Jordan River, which includes Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank. Netanyahu stated, “Whoever is talking about the ‘day after Netanyahu’ is essentially talking about the establishment of a Palestinian state with the Palestinian Authority.”

In remarks earlier in the day at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog underscored how Israel’s genocide in Gaza is part of an imperialist-backed regional war against Tehran. Herzog railed against an  “empire of evil” emanating from Iran that needs to be confronted by a “strong coalition” of states. The Gaza population is “entrenched in a network of terror,” continued Herzog, which is funded by Iran. This rhetoric chimed with Netanyahu’s statements at his press conference vowing to pursue the war until a “decisive victory.”

The IDF has stepped up its strikes against Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, including the use of white phosphorus shells in a strike Thursday, according to Lebanese authorities. In the West Bank, daily raids have claimed over 350 lives since October 7. In a raid in Tulkarem Thursday, Israeli forces killed eight people.

Fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir declared in a speech to border police in the West Bank that they should shoot “terrorists” even if they don’t pose a threat, i.e., kill Palestinians en masse. In an attempt to save face, he later released a revised statement claiming that he was referring to “armed terrorists.”

A report from the Committee to Protect Journalists included Israel on its list of Worst Jailers of Journalists in the world for the first time, due to its detention of Palestinian journalists without trial during the Gaza onslaught. The 17 journalists in Israeli jails in December was on a par with Iran, the report noted. The number of detentions has since risen to 19. In Gaza itself, over 100 journalists and media workers have been killed in Israeli air strikes. In the latest example, WaelFannouneh, manager of the Al-Quds Today television network, died in an Israeli air strike in Gaza City Thursday.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/19/svrn-j19.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

Countercurrent – January 19, 2024

Gaza Horrors: 1000 Amputations with No Anesthesia

by Dr Marwan Asmar

Over 1000 children in Gaza have had their limbs amputated without anaesthesia. It’s a doctor’s nightmare with little medical supplies. 

The number has just been released by UNICEF, the UN children’s agency and points to the devastating situation of children in Gaza.

A doctor amputated his son’s limb without anaesthesia. The pain was so sever the son couldn’t take it and died. More than 75 per cent of those killed – over 60,000 – in Gaza are women and children.

Then there is the case of the doctor who amputated the limb of his niece on the kitchen table by a knife. It was a below-the-knee operation done without anaesthesia. It’s horrendous coming out of a true horror story with over 10,000 children dead by Israeli gunfire since 7 October.

Then there is the case of the doctor who amputated his 16-year-old’s daughter’s foot without anaesthesia. “What have we done to deserve this, please God have mercy on us…” he says choking. 

The kids in cement

The Israeli horrors continue. An unbelievable image of two kids in cement after a house caved in on them as a result of the “friendly” air strikes. 

Hamas kids that are a threat to Israel! 

His future is lost. Will there be no end to white shrouds? How much longer the world needs to wake up to child killers and prosecute this madness.

And then there is the little girl who cries on the top of her mother wishing her to come out of her recently dug grave.

The massacres continue. We await for those to stop but will they? This is genocide that will not end and is remembered as one of the historical horrors of mankind.

Dr Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman, Jordan

https://countercurrents.org/2024/01/gaza-horrors-1000-amputations-with-no-anesthesia/

Countercurrent – January 19, 2024

Israel desecrates cemetery in Khan Younis

by Dr Marwan Asmar

The Israeli army continues to chase civilians in Gaza even after they die and buried deep into the ground ready to make their maker. The process is no-stop with no pause.

Their latest mayhem has been the bulldozing of a cemetery at the back of the Naser Hospital in Khan Younis. After the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers they bulldozed the cemetery with no compunction and dug up many graves, further mutilating the different bodies who were laid to rest.

The media and social media have covered the latest destruction at length with images and videos but the Israelis are usually careless about such things.

 “Why desecrate a cemetery and dig up the graves,” one Gazan man asks. “What did the dead do to the Israelis” he continues incredulously.

The cemetery is in the Austrian neighborhood west of the city and is adjacent to the Jordan Field Hospital that was hit during the Israeli abusive action of its many graveyards. 

e Israeli actions show their systematic desecration for prior to the bulldozers Israeli warplanes struck and missiles the military. They paved the way for the bulldozers which started digging up the different graves. It’s pure vandalism as shown on TV satellite stations.

Eye witness reports say some of the graves were recent and suggest the Israelis took some of the bodies’ parts. This is not a first time affair they maintain. In this war on Gaza, the Israeli army has made it a point of digging up and desecrating Muslim cemeteries as a sign of vengeance as the only logical explanation. 

In December 2023 it dug up six cemeteries all at once. 

And then a statement released by the Gaza Government media office in early January 2024 suggested 1100 graves were dug up by Israeli bulldozers in the Tufah neighborhood in central Gaza through what is described as heinous acts and part of Israel’s military campaign of destruction of Gaza which killed so far over 24,000 people.

Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Jordan

https://countercurrents.org/2024/01/israel-desecrates-cemetery-in-khan-younis/

Common Dreams - January 19, 2024

In Gaza, the West Is Enabling the Most Transparent Genocide in Human History

By Richard Falk

Recall Samuel Huntington’s controversial, yet influential, 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” which ends with the provocative phrase, “The West against the rest.” Although the article seemed far-fetched 30 years ago, it now seems prophetic in its discernment of a post-Cold War pattern of inter-civilizational rivalry. It is rather pronounced in relation to the heightened Israel/Palestine conflict initiated by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli territory with the killing and abusing of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers, as well as the seizure of some 200 hostages.

Clearly this attack has been accompanied by some suspicious circumstances such as Israel’s foreknowledge, slow reaction time to the penetration of its borders, and, perhaps most problematic, the quickness with which Israeli adopted a genocidal approach with a clear ethnic cleansing message. At the very least the Hamas attack, itself including serious war crimes, served almost too conveniently as the needed pretext for the 100 days of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence, sadistic atrocities, and the enactment of a scenario that looked toward making Gaza unlivable and its Palestinian residents dispossessed and unwanted.

Despite the transparency of the Israeli tactics, partly attributable to ongoing TV coverage of the devastating and heartbreaking Palestinian ordeal, what was notable was the way external state actors aligned with the antagonists. The Global West (white settler colonial states and former European colonial powers) lined up with Israel, while the most active pro-Palestinian governments and movements were initially exclusively Muslim, with support coming more broadly from the Global South. This racialization of alignments seems to take precedence over efforts to regulate violence of this intensity by the norms and procedures of international law, often mediated through the United Nations.

This pattern is quite extraordinary because the states supporting Israel, above all the United States, have claimed the high moral and legal ground for themselves and have long lectured the states of the Global South about the importance of the rule of law, human rights, and respect for international law. This is instead of urging compliance with international law and morality by both sides in the face of the most transparent genocide in all of human history. In the numerous pre-Gaza genocides, the existential horrors that occurred were largely known after the fact and through statistics and abstractions, occasionally vivified by the tales told by survivors. The events, although historically reconstructed, were not as immediately real as these events in Gaza with the daily reports from journalists on the scene for more than three months.

Liberal democracies failed not only by their refusal to make active efforts to prevent genocide, which is a central obligation of the Genocide Convention, but more brazenly by openly facilitating continuation of the genocidal onslaught. Israel’s frontline supporters have contributed weapons and munitions, as well as providing intelligence and assurance of active engagement by ground forces if requested, as well as providing diplomatic support at the U.N. and elsewhere throughout this crisis.

These performative elements that describe Israel’s recourse to genocide are undeniable, while the complicity crimes enabling Israel to continue with genocide remain indistinct, being situated in the shadowland of genocide. For instance, the complicity crimes are noted but remain on the periphery of South Africa’s laudable application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that includes a request for Provisional Measures crafted to stop the genocide pending a decision on the substance of the charges of genocide. The evidence of genocide is overwhelmingly documented in the 84-page South African submission, but the failure to address the organic link to the crimes of complicity is a weakness that could be reflected in what the court decides.

Even if the ICJ does impose these Provisional Measures, including ordering Israel to desist from further violence in Gaza, it may not achieve the desired result, at least not before the substantive decision is reached some three to five years from now. It seems unlikely that Israel will obey Provisional Measures. It has a record of consistently defying international law. It is likely that a favorable decision on these preliminary matters will give rise to a crisis of implementation.

The law is persuasively present, but the political will to enforce is lacking or even resistant, as here in certain parts of the Global West.

The degree to which the U.S. has supplied weaponry with U.S. taxpayer money would be an important supplement to rethinking the U.S. relationship to Israel that is so important and which is underway among the American people—even in the Washington think tanks that the foreign policy elites fund and rely upon. Proposing an arms embargo would be accepted as a timely and appropriate initiative in many sectors of U.S. public opinion. I hope that such proposals may be brought before the General Assembly and perhaps the Security Council. Even if not formally endorsed, such initiatives would have considerable symbolic and possibly even substantive impacts on further delegitimizing Israel’s behavior.

A third specific initiative worth carefully considering would be timely establishment of a People’s Tribunal on the Question of Genocide initiated by global persons of conscience. Such tribunals were established in relation to many issues that the formal governance structures failed to address in satisfactory ways. Important examples are the Russell Tribunal convened in 1965-66 to assess legal responsibilities of the U.S. in the Vietnam War and the Iraq War Tribunal of 2005 in response to the U.S. and U.K. attack and occupation of Iraq commencing in 2003.

Such a tribunal on Gaza could clarify and document what happened on and subsequently to October 7. By taking testimony of witnesses, it could provide an opportunity for the people of the world to speak and to feel represented in ways that governments and international procedures are unable to given their entanglement with geopolitical hegemony in relation to international criminal law and structures of global governance.

The South African World Court Case, Pariah State, and Popular Mobilization

The South African initiative is important as a welcome effort to enlist international law and procedures for its assessment and authority in a context of severe alleged criminality. If the ICJ, the highest tribunal on a supranational level, responds favorably to South Africa’s highly reasonable and morally imperative request for Provisional Measures to stop the ongoing Gaza onslaught, it will increase pressure on Israel and its supporters to comply. And if Israel refuses to do so, it will escalate pro-Palestinian solidarity efforts throughout the world and cast Israel into the darkest regions of pariah statehood.

In such an atmosphere, nonviolent activism and pressure for the imposition of an arms embargo and trade boycotts as well as sports, culture, and touristic boycotts will become more viable policy options. This approach by way of civil society activism proved very effective in the Euro-American peace efforts during the Vietnam War and in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, and elsewhere.

Israel is becoming a pariah state due to its behavior and defiance exhibited toward legal and moral norms. It has made itself notorious by its outrageously forthright acknowledgement of genocidal intent with respect to Palestinian civilians whom they are under a special obligation to protect as the occupying power.

Being a pariah country or rogue state makes Israel politically and economically vulnerable as never before. At this moment, a mobilized civil society can contribute to producing a new balance of forces in the world that has the potential to neutralize Western post-colonial imperial geopolitics.

It is also relevant to take note of the startling fact that the anti-colonial wars of the last century were in the end won by the weaker side militarily. This is an important lesson, as is the realization that anti-colonial struggle does not end with the attainment of political independence. It needs to continue to achieve control of national security and economic resources as the recent anti-French coups in former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa illustrate.

In the 21st century weapons alone rarely control political outcomes. The U.S. should have learned this decades ago in Vietnam, having controlled the battlefield and dominated the military dimensions of the war, and yet having failed to achieve control over its political outcome.

The U.S. is disabled from learning lessons from such defeats. Such learning would weaken the leverage of the military-industrial-government complex, including the private sector arms industry. This would subvert the domestic balance in the U.S. and substantially discredit the global geopolitical role being played by the U.S. throughout the entire world.

So, it is a dilemma. We know what we should be doing to make amends, yet well-entrenched special interests preclude such rational adjustments, and the military malfunctions and accompanying geopolitical alignments persist, ignoring costly failures along the way.

We know what should be done, but do not have the political clout to get it done. But global public opinion is shifting, and demonstrations globally are building opposition to continuing the war.

Iran

There is a huge U.S./Israel propaganda effort to tie Iran to everything that is regarded as anti-West or anti-Israeli. It has intensified during this crisis, starting with the October 7 attack by Iran’s supposed proxy Hamas. You notice even the most influential mainstream print media as TheNew York Times routinely refers to what Hezbollah or the Houthis do as “Iran-backed.” Such actors are reduced misleadingly to being proxies of Iran.

This way of denying agency to pro-Palestinian actors and attributing behavior to Iran is a matter of state propaganda trying to promote belligerent attitudes toward Iran to the effect that Iran is our major enemy in the region, while Israel is our loyal friend. At the same time, it suppresses the reality that If Iran is backing countries and political movements, it obscures what the U.S. is doing more overtly and multiple times over.

It is largely unknown what Iran has been doing in the region to protect its interests. Without doubt, Iran has strong sympathies with the Palestinian struggle. Those sympathies coincide with its own political self interest in not being attacked and minimizing the U.S. role in the region. Additionally, Iran has lots of problems arising from opposition forces within its own society.

But I think dangerous state propaganda is building up this hostility toward Iran. It is highly misleading to regard Iran as the real enemy standing behind all anti-Israeli actions in the region. It is important to understand as accurately as possible the complexity and unknown elements present in this crisis situation that contains dangers of wider war in the region and beyond. As far as is publicly known, Iran has had an extremely limited degree of involvement in the direct shaping of the war and Israel’s all-out attack on the civilian population of Gaza.

Hamas and a Second Nakba

While I was special rapporteur for the U.N. on Israeli violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, I had the opportunity to meet and talk in detail with several of the Hamas leaders who are living either in Doha or Cairo and also in Gaza. In the period between 2010 and 2014, Hamas was publicly and by back channels pushing for a 50-year cease-fire with Israel. It was conditioned on Israel carrying out the unanimous 1967 Security Council mandate in SC Res 242 to withdraw its forces to the pre-war boundaries of “the green line.” Hamas had also sought a long-range cease-fire with Israel after its 2006 electoral victory for up to 50 years.

Neither Israel nor the U.S. would respond to those diplomatic initiatives. Hamas, Machel particularly who was perhaps the most intellectual of the Hamas leaders, told me that he warned Washington of the tragic consequences for both peoples if the conflict was allowed to go on without a cease-fire, which was confirmed by independent sources.

Where can Palestinians go as the population suffers from famine and continued bombing? What is Israel’s goal?

I see the so-called commitment to thinning the Palestinian presence in Gaza and to a functional second Nakba. This is a criminal policy. I don’t know that it has to have a formal name. It is not a policy designed to achieve anything but the decapitation of the Palestinian population. Israel seeks to move Gazans to the Egyptian Sinai, and the Egyptians have already indicated that they don’t welcome this.

This is not a policy. This is some kind of a threat of elimination. The Israeli campaign after October 7 was not directed toward Hamas’ terrorism nearly as much as it was directed toward the forced evacuation of the Palestinians from Gaza and for the related dispossession of Palestine in the West Bank.

If Israel really wanted to deal with its security in an effective way, much more efficient and effective methods would have been relied upon. There was no reason to treat the entire civilian population of Gaza as if it were implicated in the Hamas attack, and there was certainly no justification for the genocidal response. The Israeli motivations seem more related to completing the Zionist Project than to restoring territorial security. All indications are that Israel used the October 7 attack as a pretext for the preexisting master plan to get rid of the Palestinians whose presence blocks the establishment of Greater Israel with sovereign control over the West Bank and at least portions of Gaza.

For a proper perspective we should remember that before October 7, the Netanyahu coalition government that took power at the start of 2023 was known as the most extreme government ever to govern the country since its establishment in 1948. The new Netanyahu government in Israel immediately gave a green light to settler violence in the Occupied West Bank and appointed overtly racist religious leaders to administer the parts of Palestine still occupied.

This was part of the end game of the whole Zionist project of claiming territorial sovereignty over the whole of the so-called promised land, enabling Greater Israel to come into existence.

The Need for a Different Context

We need to establish a different context than the one that exists now. That means a different outlook on the part of the Western supporters of Israel. And a different internal Israeli sense of their own interests, their own future. And it’s only when substantive pressure is brought to bear on an elite that has gone to these lengths that it can shake commitments to this orientation.

The lengths that the Israeli government has gone to are characteristic of settler colonial states. All of them, including the U.S. and Canada, have acted violently to neutralize or exterminate the resident Indigenous people. That is what this genocidal interlude is all about. It is an effort to realize the goals of maximal versions of Zionism, which can only succeed by eliminating the Palestinians as rightful claimants. It should not be forgotten that in the weeks before the Hamas attack, including at the U.N., Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was waving a map of “the new Middle East” that had erased the existence of Palestine.

Undoubtedly, one of Hamas’ motivations was to negate the view that Palestine had given up its right to self-determination, and that Palestine could be erased. Recall the old delusional pre-Balfour Zionist slogan: “A people without land for a land without people.” Such utterances of this early Zionist utopian phase literally erased the Palestinians who for generations lived in Palestine as an entitled Indigenous population. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, this settler colonial vision became a political project with the blessings of the leading European colonial power.

Given post-colonial realities, the Israeli project is historically discordant and extreme. It exposes the reality of Israel’s policies and the inevitable resistance response to Israel as a supremacist state. Israeli state propaganda and management of the public discourse has obscured the maximalist agenda of Zionism over the years, and we are yet to know whether this was a deliberate tactic or just reflected the phases of Israel’s development.

This may turn out to be a moment of clarity with respect not only to Gaza, but to the overall prospects for sustainable peace and justice between these two embattled peoples.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine and is currently co-convener of SHAPE (Save Humanity and Planet Earth).

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/west-enabling-genocide-gaza

World Socialist Web Site – January 19, 2024

US imperialism setting Middle East ablaze

By Keith Jones

Nuclear-armed Pakistan carried out air-launched rocket and drone-missile strikes on at least seven separate locations inside neighbouring Iran on Thursday, targeting what it said were bases of Balochi secessionist insurgents.

Iran, which vehemently condemned the strikes as a violation of its state sovereignty, said they had killed nine foreign nationals, including four children. The Baloch Liberation Army—which has waged a decades-long cross-border insurgency in Pakistani Balochistan, the country’s poorest, sparsely-populated westernmost province—confirmed that its forces had come under attack.

Although Pakistan did not say so explicitly, Thursday’s strikes were in part retaliation for an attack Iran had mounted some 48 hours before inside Pakistan.

According to Iran, its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) used missile and drone strikes to hit camps of the Jaish al-Adl, a Balochi armed secessionist group that has carried out attacks in Iran’s predominantly Balochi southeast. Following that action, Tehran emphasized it did not want to disrupt “brotherly” relations with Pakistan. But in a message clearly intended for Washington and Israel, Iran said that it reserves the right to take all necessary measures to defend itself.

The tit-for tat attacks between Iran and Pakistan add further combustion in a region already set ablaze by US imperialism and its allies, which are using Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians of Gaza to prepare and provoke a wider war with Iran.

On Wednesday and Thursday evenings, the US carried out its fourth and fifth waves of missile strikes on Yemen in a week, hitting what it claimed were Iranian-backed Houthi positions in disparate areas across the country. Speaking to reporters earlier Thursday, US President Joe Biden had vowed the US-British campaign of air strikes against the Houthis would continue.

With the support of broad sections of the Yemeni people, Houthi fighters have disrupted Red Sea shipping to press for an end to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.

Also on Wednesday, the Biden administration labeled the Houthis a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist group,” opening the door to the imposition of sweeping sanctions. Aid groups immediately responded with warnings that the designation threatens to greatly intensify Yemen’s humanitarian crisis. As a result of the almost decade-long war the Saudi regime has waged on Yemen with US arms and logistical support, more than half of the country’s population—over 18 million people—need food and other assistance.

The European Union, meanwhile, is in the advanced planning stage for its own naval operation in the Red Sea that would support the US/British attacks on Yemen, while asserting its own role as a regional policeman. The German government is leading the charge in launching the mission, which it will support by dispatching a frigate to the region in early February, according to a report in the Welt am Sontag newspaper. Underscoring German imperialism’s major military expansion into the Middle East, Berlin is readying a shipment of 10,000 artillery shells to back Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Emboldened by the to-the-hilt support Israel is receiving from the North American and European imperialist powers, Israel’s fascist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu baldly reasserted his goal of a Greater Israel in perpetuity Thursday, saying his government would never agree to ceding sovereignty over any part of the West Bank.

For his part, Israeli President Isaac Herzog told the Davos summit of the world’s corporate and political elite that a “very strong coalition” was needed to confront the “empire of evil emanating from Iran” and their “proxies all over the region.” Under conditions where Israel is poised to launch an all-out invasion of Lebanon, having mounted repeated incursions and missile strikes over the past three months, Herzog railed against “attacks” by Hezbollah, “armed up to its neck by Iran, financed by Iran.”

Day after day, the Western media churns out lies about Biden seeking to “restrain” Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians, although his administration is arming it to the teeth and, at his orders, the US military is providing the Israel Defence Forces with direct targeting assistance. No less fraudulent are their claims that Biden and his henchman and consigliere, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are working to prevent a wider war in the Middle East.

From the outset of the Gaza war—when Washington dispatched two aircraft carrier groups, soon to be joined by nuclear-powered and likely nuclear-armed submarines—the US has pursued a policy of escalating military pressure on Iran and its allies. In conjunction with Israel, it has sought to “degrade” the firepower of Iran’s allies and the IRGC across the region, including with repeated strikes in Iraq and Syria, and now a rapidly expanding air war against Yemen.

These actions are preparatory to a head-on clash with Iran that could come at any time. Not only has the Pentagon planned for such war for decades, but, from the standpoint of US imperialism, its strategic aims have never been more vital than today, when the US is in a de facto war with Russia and plotting for war with China. Its goal in targeting Iran is to secure unbridled dominance over the world’s principal oil-exporting region, a region uniquely positioned to project geopolitical power across Eurasia, Africa and the entire Indian Ocean region.

The fact that Moscow and Beijing have forged closer ties with Iran, in response to the US strategic offensives that target all of them, has only increased Washington’s determination to confront Iran.

Biden and Blinken have themselves drawn the connection between the Gaza war, the war in Ukraine and the developing US-China confrontation. The reality is that these are different arenas in a rapidly developing global conflict, as US imperialism desperately seeks to offset the decline in its relative economic power and establish global hegemony though war, plunder and the revival of colonial subjugation. For the same essential reasons, the British and EU powers follow in Washington’s train, while trying to establish the basis, including military strength, to aggressively assert their own interests.

The tit-for-tat Iran-Pakistan missile strikes, as well as the strikes Turkey carried out earlier this week against Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq and Syria, underscore that the escalating imperialist war in the Middle East is intersecting with various regional conflicts, adding to them all a further explosive dynamic. These conflicts are themselves historically rooted in imperialist oppression, including the arbitrary borders imposed on the people of the Middle East at the conclusion of the first and second world wars.

Both Pakistan and Iran have sought to cast their respective strikes as wholly targeted against foreign-based insurgents. But such explanations can only go so far.

Pakistan’s military, the most important player in its political establishment, would no doubt have been concerned about the impact that a failure to respond to Iran’s violation of it borders would have on its strategic rivalry with India and on its domestic standing. In 2019, India and Pakistan came perilously close to war when Pakistan responded to an Indian cross-border attack with one of its own.

According to press reports, Iran was nonetheless surprised that Pakistan retaliated. There is every reason to believe that Washington, whose relations with Pakistan are largely mediated through its military, would have given encouragement and advance approval.

In their latest statements both Tehran and Islamabad have signaled they want to patch up relations, while China has offered to mediate.

Be that as it may, the dynamic across the Middle East is one of rapid escalation toward a regional conflagration led by Washington, its imperialist allies and their principal regional client, Israel.

Workers in the United States, Europe and around the world must unequivocally oppose and mobilize in opposition to the attacks on Yemen and the escalating campaign of imperialist aggression against Iran, both historically oppressed countries.

Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime, like the capitalist restorationist regimes in Russia and China, led respectively by Putin and Xi, is organically incapable of offering any progressive answer to the drive of the imperialist powers to reassert their hegemony through a bloody repartition of the world.

This offensive—whose domestic component is a drive to dramatically intensify the exploitation of the working class to finance imperialist war and sweeping attacks on democratic rights—is taking the form of a war against the workers and toilers of the world.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained in its statement at the beginning of the year, the answer to capitalist barbarism—to the “normalization” of genocide, nuclear war, fascist reaction and unparalleled levels of social inequality—must be “the normalization of socialism in the political outlook of the working class.”

There is mass opposition to the genocide in Gaza alongside the global upsurge of the working class against the unrelenting assault on its living standards and social and democratic rights. This must be infused with a revolutionary socialist perspective aimed at developing a unified struggle to put an end to capitalism and establish workers’ power.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/19/fycm-j19.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
 

 

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HEADLINES

 The Journal of America Team:

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